Amazon to provide Indian cloud services over Tata infrastructure?

24.03.2012
Amazon could be preparing to launch cloud services in India, after it emerged that the company has been buying up infrastructure from telecommunications provider Tata Communications in its home markets.

Speaking to Techworld at the Tata Global Media and Analyst Summit in Dubai this week, the company's chief technology officer (CTO) John Hayduk said that competition from big cloud providers like Amazon and Rackspace in emerging markets is "not there yet," but is expected to ramp up over the next 12 months.

"Some of those service providers like Amazon, they buy co-lo [co-location] and network from us, so we've seen purchases in our own facilities that are of the size," said Hayduk. "There's only one answer to what they're going to do with that space."

Amazon was contacted for comment, but said it does not comment on rumour or speculation.

Tata Communications is currently one of the top two cloud players across India and Singapore, offering a combination of co-location, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS), IT managed services and content delivery network.

Cloud adoption in these markets is not nearly as aggressive as in developed countries. However, Hayduk said that five years down the line, service providers that do not have a compute and storage offering to sell alongside the network could be significantly disadvantaged, and that is why Tata has decided to invest in public cloud.