Amazon has signed a deal with Bharti Airtel to sell Amazon Web Services (AWS) to small and medium businesses in India through Airtel Cloud. The new partnership will help Amazon enhance its dominance in India using the network that serves over 2,500 large companies, a million-plus emerging business and more than 300 million subscribers.
“The partnership will evolve further in the coming time. It’s early-stage for both partners. Airtel will act as a channel partner for AWS to tap startups and SMBs,” Economic Times earlier quoted an insider on the deal.
The strategic alliance will help position Airtel to compete against Microsoft-Reliance Jio for the public cloud market, which BCG expects to hit $8 billion in 2023.
Further, the new agreement will build upon a 2015 deal, allowing the two companies to develop new services. The partnership will also help customers migrate to Airtel cloud.
Speaking on the deal, Puneet Chandok, President of AWS in India and South Asia says “AWS brings over 175 services to the table. We pretty much support any workload on the cloud. We have the largest and most vibrant community of customers.”
According to a TechCrunch article, Airtel is looking to expand its businesses beyond telecom services, hence the deal. The partnership will help achieve the diversification and might extend to other alliances in the Internet of Things (IoT) India’s next frontier for enterprise business.
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