Paytm Launches Made in India Cloud, What This Means for Amazon, Microsoft

Indian e-commerce payment system and digital wallet company Paytm is now setting foot into the cloud business. The company today announced its artificial intelligence and mobility driven cloud computing platform ‘Paytm AI Cloud for India’. The company’s target audience is developers, startups and enterprises.

“This Made-in-India AI-powered cloud offers a suite of business-centric apps for organisations that need high-quality solutions for cloud computing, ready-to-use services to automate their workflow, easy to integrate payments, messaging and customer engagement without the hassle of managing hardware and software,” says Paytm in a blog post. The AI-driven cloud computing platform also offers in-built CRM, campaign management and easy to integrate payment solutions. Paytm has tied up with Alibaba to enable this cloud infrastructure, and will apparently also soon offer enterprise-messaging solutions in partnership with DingTalk.

Also Read: New Cloud Computing Policy Could Spell Trouble for Amazon, Others

The catch, however, is that Paytm AI Cloud will process and store all customer data on servers located only in India, while reiterating their commitment towards conforming to the highest security and privacy standards. This could offer stiff competition to companies like Amazon and Microsoft as a new cloud computing policy is being expected to be filed by the end of the month or latest by September 15. The policy, Drafted by Kris Gopalakrishnan, aims at spurring data localization in order to make it easier for law enforcement agencies to access the data they require easily.

Cloud computing allows companies to use storage at lower operational costs as programs and data are stored in external data centers and not on desktops or servers of the companies in question. Many businesses store information on Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure, some of which may be located outside the country. Hence if this policy comes into place, the companies need to migrate their data to India, which means that they would have to rapidly establish data centres and get permits and licenses, which would increase the cost of running the data centres.

Hence, when the drafted policy on cloud computing in question does actually come into place, companies may prefer to store their data on platforms like Paytm that already have their servers located in India and are compliant with terms mentioned in the policy. Therefore, how Amazon and Microsoft will retain their customer base after the entry of Paytm Cloud can only be seen as the events unfold.