APJ - The Growth Engine for the World with Rahul Sharma, Regional Managing Director, Worldwide Public Sector-APJ, AWS

On the sidelines of the AWS Summit 2023, Washington DC, Shipra Sinha, Lead Analyst- Industry Intelligence Group (IIG), CyberMedia Research (CMR) sat down with Rahul Sharma, Regional Managing Director, Worldwide Public Sector – Asia Pacific and Japan, AWS 

Rahul Sharma, Regional Managing Director, Worldwide Public Sector – Asia Pacific and Japan, AWS spoke about how APJ is being called the Growth Engine for the World. He highlighted the significant investments AWS has made within APJ to ensure that they can align with the priorities of the government. AWS has invested in about 12 regions across Asia Pacific and Japan. A $6Bn investment in Malaysia, $5Bn investment in Thailand and $12.7Bn investment in India which was announced recently. AWS has also invested ¥1350Bn in Japan. Rahul mentioned that these are the kinds of investments are needed because AWS believes in the growth of these markets.

The second thing that he spoke about is their partner network. The APN is something really important and ensuring that the partners get access to the best capabilities becomes really important.

Speaking about the importance of sustainability, AWS is well on its way to be 100% non-renewable by 2025. They have a number of different renewable energy projects across the world. Over 400 projects and 15 of them within the APJ region which are generating 1200 megawatts of capacity. They have also announced Water Plus that they will be water positive which means they will contribute more water than they consume in the communities where they operate their infrastructure by 2030.

1. How do you see the post-pandemic digital acceleration impacting public sector globally?

Across the globe, we've seen significant acceleration of capabilities and adoption of the cloud. There was no choice and there was no other reason. Having access to capabilities that can quickly accelerate adoption for citizens is something that every government across the board adopted. 

Healthcare was specifically something that has gone through significant transformation. Education went through significant transformation. So more broadly, the impact within the segments that are typically controlled by public institutions, health care and education are the first affected and they needed to transform fairly significantly.

Government services, citizen services and the ability to have access to the right capabilities, that's something that came in next and there's no going back. Once you've seen the efficiency of and the speed at which you can work with on the cloud, it's very difficult to go back. We saw this entire conversation especially in the growth markets. The regions like Asia Pacific where there's a lot of growth economies, we see the conversation pivot from why cloud to why not cloud.

The example of CoWIN, we developed that application in a matter of weeks. It's one of the crown jewels of the digital India. It's a national platform. It's not easy to deliver 2.2Bn vaccinations and you can realize the robustness that was needed, the security that was needed. What the cloud does is it brings across these capabilities as native capabilities. Security is job number one for us at AWS and with the cloud, governments get access to the capabilities that some of our largest customers across the world need.

So, with access to this technology, governments were able to really accelerate their transformative journey. Specifically, the kind of work that government of Singapore has done, healthcare in Korea, the way that things have moved forward. Even in Australia and in Japan, across the board we saw a number of engagements across governments.

2. What are some notable use cases of cloud computing that you have observed among businesses? Furthermore, which industry verticals have demonstrated a higher level of adoption in leveraging cloud technology?

Speaking from the point of view of government and public sector, the best use cases are across the domains that are most visible which is healthcare, education, skilling, research around agriculture. Those are typically the areas where there's a lot of citizens facing interaction that's happening and it requires the true capabilities of cloud.

The GovWallet in Singapore is a great example. The government of Singapore worked with us to create the GovWallet in nine months and they did approximately $90Mn of transactions and it’s so seamless.

3. How do you perceive the competitive landscape in the public sector market, considering your competitors?

The most important thing for governments is to get to outcomes quickly. The example of CoWIN, if you can do a CoWIN and the kind of security, stability, resiliency and citizen outcome that you got with that, it's very difficult to replicate. Once you engage at that level and then everybody else is looking at that as a representative example, we just focus on that.

We don't obsess on competition as Amazon, we obsess on getting outcomes to our customers. In the case of public sector our customers are truly the citizens and we work alongside with governments to make that possible. So, we're completely focused on that.

4. When it comes to APJ, what are some of the growth pockets and emerging opportunity hotspots for AWS?

So APJ, I think across the board is a very diverse market. We've seen that Singapore and Australia are two markets where there's a lot of ongoing engagements with governments. We see a new sort of level of engagement in Japan. Japan also is coming through very strongly in terms of the opportunity and the way that Japanese government is thinking about cloud adoption. So that's a lot of interest that we have been working in Japan.

India is a great opportunity for us as well. We've done a lot of work there. Even in the Southeast Asia market across Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam we're seeing strong growth come through. It's a really diverse region, where there are differences in the maturity of the customer but the common theme is this entire need to accelerate citizen outcomes and really take a generation leap on technology as far as government is concerned. That's the exciting part within APJ. 

As per as public records, this region is going to drive the GDP growth for the world and that’s the opportunity. In terms of just the wherewithal that these governments have,3Bn citizens we are talking about in this region and that's a huge landscape to make an impact. So, we have the wherewithal, we've got the capability, we have got the growth. Across the board, we're seeing this growth in Asia Pacific, Japan and Korea as well is really strong.

5. Talk to us about some new AWS initiatives in APJ or the developing markets.

Working with Riken on research in Japan (RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS)), there's so much that you can do just with genomics. The announcement that happened around omics and healthcare, the kind of capabilities that have been announced in healthcare, every day there are new possibilities.

HealthLake is a data lake that is for health. We've got this in the Mumbai region as one of the first sort of deployments across the world because of the kind of opportunity that we have within India on health and the impact that it can make around prediction of diseases. If you have sort of health observatory that is used on diabetes, malaria, so many different diseases that you can actually work with, that's the kind of possibilities, the kind of things that we're doing and when you overlay on top of that the capabilities of our partners, it really becomes exciting.

6.How is the adoption of cloud technology by government authorities in APJ contributing to the improvement of citizen-facing services?

We see acceleration across the world. Australia, Singapore are some more mature examples of cloud adoption. Everything in Singapore is getting to seamless services across citizens. Even in India, the government of India's digital transformation, the Digital India initiative is a significant initiative that's been running for some time which is focused on citizen services. 

US versus Singapore and India, there is such a difference in terms of capabilities because certain governments have had the ability to take a generation leap like Singapore and India. So, that's where I firmly believe that because of the innovation that's happening in APJ, some of these can actually become benchmarks for the world especially on citizen services.

The vaccination certificate is a fully digital vaccination certificate whether its Singapore or India. The Indian government is actually transforming CoWIN to be the universal immunization platform for India which means that every vaccination that needs to be delivered can be done on this platform. The platform is already there, the infrastructure is already there on the ground. 

7.What are the primary challenges encountered in public sector deployments in APJ?

The primary challenge for us is the availability of skills. The ambition is there, the opportunities are there but there's a lot more to be done on the skills part. We have been doing a lot of work on skilling across the APJ region. We've had this announcement, AWS would skill 29Mn learners across by 2025 and we are well on the way.

In India we did about 4Mn, in Indonesia we worked on TALENTA, we worked in Thailand on skills. So, we are working with multiple governments across APJ on just making sure that we can get more and more skills penetrated into the workforce.

We did a study last year, what we had found that there's a lot of interest and a lot of eagerness for adoption of skills and that to me remains the biggest challenge in adoption of cloud. Everything else we can solve quickly.

To summarize, government led digital transformation is a big force within APJ. Governments like India and Singapore are looking to be world players within this space. They have aspirations and they are well on the way and AWS has been a significant partner of them in this journey to bring innovation, bring capabilities across to them to help them succeed.