We are on our way to digitize 10 million SMEs in India by 2025

Businesses built on cloud computing and technology will come out of the coronavirus pandemic crisis stronger, said Puneet Chandok, president of commercial Business, AWS India and South Asia at AISPL (Amazon Internet Services). Chandok, in an interview with Peerzada Abrar, said AWS (Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing arm of the e-commerce giant), plays a key role in the digitisation of small businesses and enterprises India.

How do you see the impact of the pandemic on the whole industry, including e-commerce?
Irrespective of the sector, the size of business; whether you are an enterprise, SMB (small and medium business), startup or a digital business, there is a clear realization that the pandemic was like a dress rehearsal for the new world that we have entered now. This world is more volatile. You need agility to scale up or scale down in terms of your business and also technology. This is where the cloud comes in. Businesses that are built on cloud and technology are going to come out of this crisis stronger. Technology and the cloud are no longer the options.

They are critical and core to a business and no longer at the periphery. We have seen this wave of customers, who are either migrating their core workloads or are thinking about modernizing their applications in a risk-free way so that they can get the most benefits out of the cloud. We are truly seeing the perfect storm of digitization in India today when it comes to technology. We are working really hard to help customers with digital businesses, SMBs and startups to really leverage technology.

What role is AWS playing in helping small businesses leverage technology?
We are focused on four key pillars for SMBs in India – innovation, skilling, digitization at scale, and then exports and enabling startups within the SMB ecosystem in India. Amazon had announced that we are on our way to Jeff Bezos’ pledge to digitize 10 million SMEs in India by 2025. The announcement was done in 2020 and we are well on our way to making that happen. So far, we have digitised 4 million SMEs in India and there is still a lot more to do.

We are proud that we have gotten so far and on our path toward the pledge. We (AWS) are playing the role across all of these commitments that we have made. We have launched ‘SMB Vidyalaya’ and are expanding Amazon Digital Suite. There are ISV (independent software vendor) partners who are helping us build these solutions (Amazon Digital Suite) and are powered by AWS. These include Razorpay, FreshWorks, Zoho, Vyapar, ClearTax and Tally.

What are the opportunities that you are seeing in India and the investments that you plan to make?
India is amongst the most exciting markets in the world today for technology companies to serve. There are over 75 million SMBs, a large set of enterprises, and digital businesses that (make) the third largest startup ecosystem in the world. We are really committed to India and building for India. Our mission in India is to empower builders and businesses to build a better India. We keep thinking and focusing on becoming a force to move the country forward. We are truly investing in India for the next two to three decades. We launched our Mumbai region in 2016 and expanded in 2019. We have our next region in India in Hyderabad that goes live later this year. We are investing in India to drive the economic development of the country. The second (part of focus) is thinking about citizen impact at scale.

How do we leverage AWS, Amazon, and the entire ecosystem to deliver impact at scale to move the country forward? Regarding creating jobs in India, Amazon has cumulatively created more than 1.16 million direct and indirect jobs, enabling nearly $5 billion in cumulative exports. This is a big part of impact at scale. If I look at the growth that we have had in India, it is secular across segments. These include enterprises, digital businesses, public sector institutions, educational institutions and non-profit organizations.

India is coming up with Open Network Digital Commerce (ONDC) for e-commerce. How do you view such a platform?
For the customers in India, our intent is to simplify technology and make it more accessible, and affordable, provide them with the right support and make it easy, simple, and intuitive for them. This is the reason for innovation with Amazon Digital Suite, SMB Vidyalaya, and the bundles of use cases. All of these are driven in that direction, to make it simple and affordable. That is where technology is headed in India.

Given the scale of the opportunity in India, we have a lot more work to do to simplify technology, democratize it, and make it easy for customers. That is why initiatives like going ONDC are exciting. We would love to explore opportunities to help contribute if that helps enable more SMBs in India and more customers in India to adopt the technology. We will do our best to support that. Business Standard