Govt plans incentive scheme for cloud startups

The Central government is planning an incentive scheme to help domestic cloud-technology companies and startups tackle the domination of Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, according to Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar.

This comes even as the three global giants are battling with single-digit growth in annual contract values, led by a decline in cloud spending of technology companies across key markets including the US and Europe.

Meanwhile, industry analysts have highlighted that demand for cloud continued to be resilient in emerging markets including India and Asian countries coming from new-age technology firms in these regions.

“We don’t like the fact that currently between Azure, Amazon and Google, the cloud in India is dominated by these three companies,” Chandrasekhar said in a Twitter Space on March 16.

“We would like consumers to have more choice and we would like enterprises to have more choice… there is certainly going to be an incentive programme we are going to come up with where we encourage more domestic cloud innovators to create public clouds,” he added.

This incentive scheme will be different from another Rs 15,000-crore plan that is under formulation to promote the setting up of data centres in the country.

Chandrasekhar also said that the government will launch a tender to onboard the services of a private player for its cloud technology needs.

India’s overall public cloud services market is projected to hit $13 billion by 2026, expanding at a CAGR of 23.1 percent in 2021-26, according to research firm IDC. The market’s revenue totalled $2.8 billion for the first half of 2022. Moneycontrol