MUMBAI: Striving to be Earth’s most consumer-centric company, Amazon.com is a place where customers can virtually discover anything they want to buy online. To prove their consumer-centeredness, the online retail giant in 2006 launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services, more commonly known as cloud computing.
Even as a web service, Amazon is as well received and popular as its e-tailer form with clients ranging from MNCs to online agencies and news broadcasters.
Talking about the base strategy of the company at Broadcast India conference, Amazon Internet Services’ solution architect Amit Sharma said “Focus on content development, leave the infrastructure management to us.”
The company’s global clientele includes; Netflix, IMDB, Discovery Communications, Samsung, NASA while Hungama, NDTV, DigiCable, India Today Group, Sony among others joined them from India.
According to Sharma, the company has around 8000 customers in India. “AWS Cloud is a preferred choice by the media industry,” he adds.
With the rise of the online medium, everything from music to movies and TV shows have shifted online. The old hardware storage has been replaced almost completely by internet, tapes have been replaced by servers and the companies have gone digital. With these paradigm changes happening in the online world, AWS provides a platform for better web services to the company, Sharma opines.
The company mainly handles issues getting all the content online to provide easy access.
“Netflix runs almost 100 per cent of its online videos on AWS. In order to transfer the entire library of Netflix to AWS, we used around 1200 servers,” Sharma reveals.
Similarly AWS provides solutions to problems including; reducing IT cost for new applications, for user profiling, websites and website hosting, business applications, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, data archive, high performance computing, mobile services, digital marketing, game development and digital media.
Book My Show, uses AWS to analyse users that visit the site while Hungama was looking to reduced 33 per cent monthly costs using AWS.
The company provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that has helped a number of enterprises, government and startup customers businesses in 190 countries around the world. AWS offers over 30 different services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).
Available to customers from data center locations in the US, Brazil, Europe, Japan, Singapore and Australia, the company is planning to expand further and open a data centre in India.
Recently, software giant Microsoft had said it will set up three data centres in India, offering commercial cloud services, to tap what it estimates is a $2 trillion opportunity. These data centres are expected to be set up by the end of 2015.
