AWS Launches Amazon Digital Suite for SMBs in India
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of the Amazon Digital Suite, a curated set of software solutions aimed at enabling India’s small and medium businesses (SMBs) to easily digitize their operations and bring their businesses online.
“The Amazon Digital Suite brings the best of what AWS and Amazon offer as an affordable, simple-to-use, and value-driven package,” Puneet Chandok, President – Commercial Sales, AISPL, AWS India and South Asia said at the Amazon Smbhav 2021 held virtually this year.
“We want to ensure the power of the cloud is within the reach of SMBs, and we have built a solution that is simple to understand and deploy, and accessible to new customers. With the Amazon Digital Suite, SMBs can overcome the challenges of technology adoption, digitize their operations, innovate in their business, accelerate their growth, and help India prosper.”
The suite provides a broad selection of business software focused on SMBs from seven AWS Partner Network (APN) Technology Partners. These include, payment and credit solutions from Razorpay; customer support and CRM solutions from Freshworks; human resources and payroll management solutions from greytHR; tax compliance and invoicing solutions from ClearTax; accounting and productivity solutions from Zoho; e-commerce and retail order management solutions from Vinculum; and digital ledger and online cataloging solutions from OkCredit.
According to the tech major, prices of the products that are part of the Amazon Digital Suite available on Amazon.in begin at as low as Rs 20, and all Amazon Digital Suite software can be purchased individually with discounts of up to 75% off the suggested retail prices. The offering is designed to be easy to use, with customers being able to implement it in a few simple steps.
“Digital payments in India are at an interesting and exciting inflection point. The launch of the Amazon Digital Suite will be a game changer; it will empower millions of SMBs of any size, and make it possible for them to reach new customers around the world,” said Vedanarayanan Vedantham, Head – SME Business, Razorpay.
According to IDC, SMB spend on public cloud services is expected to contribute more than 29% of the USD 7.9 billion public cloud services market in India in 2024. However, SMBs face significant challenges in acquiring new customers, adhering to changing tax compliance requirements, gaining insights from customer data, and addressing a widening digital skills and knowledge gap.
“Transforming their business and becoming agile and resilient are among the top priorities for SMBs in India. But SMBs are often challenged by factors like budget limitations, lack of skills, and the inability to leverage data and insights for faster innovation,” said Rishu Sharma, Principal Analyst, Cloud and Artificial Intelligence, IDC India.
“SMBs in India are planning to increase their investments in cloud, driven by the need for faster speed to market, application performance and access to data. Close to 40% of SMBs plan to significantly increase their cloud spend, and a cloud provider that can support these businesses through this journey will become the right partner of choice,” she added.
The launch of the Amazon Digital Suite builds on Amazon’s commitment to digitize 10 million Indian SMBs by 2025, announced in January 2020, according to the company.
The launch of Amazon Digital Suite also comes a day after the online retail giant launched a $250 million venture fund to invest in Indian startups working on digitizing micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) and those innovating in agriculture and healthcare sectors of the country. The first investment from the fund is invoice discounting platform M1xchange, in which Amazon has led a $10 million financing.
The firm has also made a new pledge to onboard a million offline stores onto its platform by 2025 through its ‘Local Shops on Amazon’ initiative.
