Some companies whose products are now available to buyers in India through the AWS Marketplace include Cisco, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, eMudhra, Freshworks, Gupshup.ai, IBM, Kore.ai, Palo Alto Networks, Redington, Salesforce, Sarvam, Sonata Software, and VideoCX.io.
In an interview with The Hindu, Praveen Sridhar, Head of Partner Business at AWS India and South Asia, spoke about the company’s India strategy for AWS Marketplace and its commitment to supporting tech companies as well as sellers in the region.
What is AWS’s approach to the Indian market, and how does it compare with the U.S. market?
India’s [AWS] Marketplace launch is something that we have been working on for a while, and we truly believe this is going to be a gamechanger for both our Indian enterprises and our Indian software and SAAS and AI companies.
Marketplace for India will allow Indian buyers, which are our enterprises, SFPs, corporate customers, and our sellers who have the technology products or even their consulting products or their specific customer application products, to be transacted through seamlessly in INR-based transactions.
It gives a lot of ability for global technology companies to enter India and start doing INR-based transactions, and it also gives [this] ability for our innovators in India who are building all these amazing solutions to get listed on Marketplace. They needed [in the past] some sort of a U.S entity or a non-Indian entity and had to transact in dollars.
So, in a way, this is a holistic approach which helps our customers, it helps our global partners, and it helps our Indian innovators and partners to reach a global audience as well.
Worldwide, we have over 30,000 product listings on our marketplace across 70 different categories. We want to actually recreate that kind of an engagement over here in India. We already approached a lot of our partners on this subject, and we have close to about 37 partners who have listed their solutions on the AWS Marketplace.
What would the fee or commission structure look like for a seller listing products on AWS Marketplace in India?
We maintain a fairly transparent structure, and we maintain the norms of it at a global level. . .we understand and appreciate that marketplaces are different, and our listing fee also has to be fair and transparent on that, so it’s going to be on our public portals as well.
It’s going to be listed soon, but we are going to maintain parity around how we actually work across different marketplaces, be it across North America or India or elsewhere.
Could you shed some light on Agentic AI and how AWS Marketplace ties into this?
You would have heard the news about us coming out with our Agent Marketplace as well. This was in the news during July when we actually had our New York Summit, so we are going to be continuing to work with our partners who are building agent solutions.
For example, Gupshup, which is actually a very large user engagement and customer engagement platform company based out in India—they have listed their agentic AI solutions on India Marketplace, so this actually enables both voice and chat experiences across various channels, including WhatsApp and RCS and others, and they will use the AWS Marketplace in India for companies which are already using other parts of their stack, to also go ahead and use their agentic AI solution.
You might have heard about Sarvam; they are building extremely good AI products for the Indian geography, and their conversational agents platform called Samvaad is now going to be available on the AWS Marketplace as well. They aim to reach a billion-plus population through their models and through the local Indic language models that they have, and this collaboration that we have with them hopefully gives them the ability to go ahead and make their vision a success.
In case of an outage, like the AWS outage that happened recently, what kind of support can clients and users expect?
Cloud is definitely a shared responsibility model. When we say a shared responsibility model, there is going to be the infrastructure, there’s going to be the locational security, and the power, and the network, and so on and so forth, which is the infrastructure of the cloud—basically, the security and resilience of the cloud. The physical infrastructure is something that we as AWS focus significantly on.
But when it comes to folks building the application on top, and they have to take care of their data keys and other things, we basically go ahead and give them the guidance of how they need to do it.
There is definitely a responsibility of the user who is using that cloud infrastructure to also ensure that they have taken care of certain security measures, like their key management and their resiliency management, and ensuring that it actually has failover systems built in, and so on.
You might be talking about what happens when a large event, or what we call a large-scale event on AWS, were to occur. AWS continues to be, to date, one of the most resilient clouds out there. We take our resilience guarantees very seriously, and we work towards it.
And at any point of time when a large event happens, both the service team and the support teams work together in not just keeping the customers informed, but also on working towards a solution.
If there is a specific outage that happens on the service provider side of it, we notify the service provider, and we ask them to look into what could have caused that solution, and if it has got anything to do with AWS infrastructure. We get our service teams engaged as well to help them.