Amazon Web Services India’s interim country head Vaishali Kasture quits

Amazon Web Services (AWS) India and South Asia’s interim country head for commercial business Vaishali Kasture has resigned from her role, seven months after taking over from former president of commercial business Puneet Chandok, sources in the know told Moneycontrol.

Two country heads of AWS India have quit less than a year after the global cloud service provider announced ambitious plans to invest $12.7 billion in building cloud infrastructure in India by 2030 and contribute over $23 billion to the country’s GDP by 2030. Interestingly, Chandok resigned only a few weeks after the company hosted AWS Summit in Mumbai, where these investment plans were announced.

Kasture’s tenure at AWS spanned nearly five years. Before becoming the interim country head, she served as the head of top enterprise, mid-market, and global businesses in India and South Asia.

Emailed queries sent to AWS India didn’t elicit any response at the time of publishing. Any comments from the company will be updated to reflect in the article. Moneycontrol couldn’t immediately ascertain who is taking over the top role in AWS India.

Expansion in India
Amidst a global slowdown in cloud adoption during 2023, driven by customers reducing technology budgets in a challenging macroeconomic environment, India has emerged as a key focus market for cloud service providers. This is due to India’s early stage on the digitization journey, particularly for its numerous small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Not only AWS, but also its rivals—including Microsoft, Google, and IBM—are betting big on the India opportunity.

Google has already expanded its cloud services in India with a $1 billion investment in new data centres. Microsoft too will be setting up its largest India data centre region in Hyderabad with an investment of over Rs 15,000 crore over 15 years.

Going by the growth of cloud technology in the country, even Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronic and IT, had said that he he expects the country to become the largest market for servers in the world.

According to technology research firm IDC’s estimates, the overall India public cloud services market is expected to reach $13 billion by 2026, as organisations realise the power of cloud to help them transform digitally.

Generative AI to drive growth
As bookings growth moved to the negative territory in 2023, AWS is betting that this will change in 2024 with a slew of new product launches announced this week focused on enabling enterprises with new generative AI-based applications and integrations, according to a recent note by technology advisory firm ISG.

“The year-over-year financial comparisons get easier next year. But there’s a bigger reason as well: artificial intelligence. All three hyperscalers are doubling down on AI – specifically generative AI – as the next big growth frontier,” the note said.

In May 2023, during the AWS Summit in Mumbai, Chandok highlighted three innovations around generative AI that AWS is working on. These include Amazon Bedrock, Amazon CodeWhisperer and building cost-effective infrastructure.

Most recently, in November, AWS launched Q, a generative AI assistant that “will solve problems, generate content and take actions on behind-the-firewall data for both IT and non-IT users.”

Q, however, was in the midst of a crisis last week, when it was found to be “hallucinating” and leaking confidential data, according to media reports. Reuters