Cost Optimisation Is Closely Aligned With Our Customer-obsessed Culture: AWS' Kumara Raghavan

In a recent conversation with BW Businessworld, Kumara Raghavan, Head, Startups at Amazon Web Services India (AWS India), gives deep insights into how startups are using AWS cloud technologies to innovate and scale their operations. 

He shares how AWS has been supporting startups across various stages of their growth journey and how its solutions have helped them to optimise their costs and efficiency.

Excerpts:

Tell us about your experience and some important announcements made at re:Invent 2022?

AWS re:invent 2022 was phenomenal, filled with so much energy with 50,000-plus customers and partners present, and 300,000 people joined online. We had several customers, enterprises and startups, from India at the event. It shows how the cloud powers innovation and transformation, and is making a difference across sectors. 

Our customers are excited about the new launches and announcements made at re:Invent. Startups are keenly looking at optimising cost and that is an ongoing journey. What is also giving them inspiration is how some of these new technologies that have been announced are going to bring a lot of efficiency for their use cases. 

Among some notable takeaways from the event, we announced how Amazon Aurora can now support zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift. It takes away the whole undifferentiated, heavy lifting of building a pipeline and maintaining it, which is a lot of work. This helps our customers to bring in more efficiency and free up resources. 

Another service announced, which many startups were excited about, was AWS Clean Rooms, which allows organisations to share their data without sharing the underlying information, and then do the analysis based on right set of permissions and controls. I have heard from our customers that this will help them to cut down on the time and resources that would otherwise have to be deployed. It is another way how, through innovation, we help to bring down costs for our customers. We work backwards from our customers’ needs and it's an ongoing journey, it's never going to stop.  

How exactly are startups using AWS' cloud technologies to innovate and scale their operations?

Startups are using AWS technologies to innovate, experiment, grow and scale. Let me share how we are working with startups from different sectors. One of the biggest number of investments went into the fintech space in the past few years, where we saw a lot of innovations across variety of use cases. The India stack and UPI has opened up many opportunities for the fintech startups, bolstering the fintech acceleration. This has helped to drive financial inclusion in the country.

For instance, CreditVidya, promotes financial inclusion by digitising salary payments for many of their customers who have never had a bank account. They’ve reached over 70 million users, and they’ve changed the notion of access to financial services for so many.

Another customer that has benefitted from AWS services is Dehaat, an agritech platform with a mission to solve the challenges faced by farmers. DeHaat’s team adopted Amazon SageMaker, which enabled them to seamlessly create, train, and deploy machine learning models on the cloud. This helped them to provide farmers access to services for crop mapping, crop health assessment, farm segmentation, agriculture land cover classification, disease identification and remedial suggestions, post-harvest grains quality assessment, among others. 

By tracking data at different points in supply chain and utilising models enabled by AWS services, DeHaat has been able to provide cost savings of up to 15 per cent to farmers. With the crop-mapping AI model in place, DeHaat provides over 90 per cent accuracy in predicting the acreage to help farmers save on operational cost for post-harvest logistics planning.

When it comes to their growth, how are they balancing that, maintaining that balance between their growth as well as ensuring cost optimisation?

 It doesn't matter whether it's good times or lean times, at AWS, we always focus on optimising costs for our customers. When we work with startups, we ask them to look at specific metrics that are relevant for them. If a startup is in the D2C business, it makes sense to look at what is the cost per transaction or per user that they want, and then work towards lowering that, and that's an ongoing exercise. 

For example, Atlan launched their multi-tenant SaaS platform on AWS Cloud using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances in conjunction with Amazon EKS for stateless applications. Atlan was able to scale their deployment seamlessly across 100+ customers globally leveraging AWS Global Infrastructure, and at the same time managed to reduce its computing costs by 50–70 per cent leveraging Amazon EKS on spot instances, as compared to on-demand instances. 

We offer extensive cost optimisation services to our customers – in fact, our team members are tasked with reducing a startup customer’s cloud bill. This may seem counterintuitive, but is closely aligned with our customer-obsessed culture. Since our inception, AWS has actually reduced its prices 119 times.

Can you also elaborate more on how startups are using automation to scale their efficiency?

Startups are using automation to bring in efficiencies. Let me share the example of our customer Amnic. They use AWS’s managed services like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to enable startups to take advantage of all the performance, scale, reliability, and availability of AWS infrastructure. 

With AWS as their technology backbone, Amnic’s solutions enable startups to focus on building their product and growing business, without investing in and deploying resources to build and scale their infrastructure stack on the cloud. This has helped Amnic’s customers to enhance developer productivity by up to 25 per cent and reduce costs by up to 20 per cent. This also shows how many of our customers are able to add their own layers of efficiencies in how cloud is being deployed and adopted. 

In your assessment, how are startups becoming more mature and how the ecosystems have evolved to help startups reduce the time across various stages of their growth journey?

We have been supporting startups from the inception, since 2006. Organisations like Slack, Airbnb and Freshworks, began their journey on cloud and went on to transform their industries. The way we work with startups is that we want to be with them through all their lifecycle phases. At the earliest stages, our AWS Activate program provides startups with a host of benefits, including AWS credits, technical support and training, and business mentorship. 

Amazon has provided more than USD 2 billion in AWS credits since 2020 to help early-stage startups launch their businesses and accelerate their growth. 

Once the product market fit is achieved and they want to go to the next stage, where they want to scale beyond, we help startups through programs that are fine tuned to focus on scaling. For that we use the power of the ecosystem. For example, recently, we took 23 early-stage SaaS startups to the US for a mentorship program, which was designed to provide them insights on topics such as product market fit, go-to-market strategies, team building, marketing opportunities, among others. We brought those startups to the US to help them make connections and network with US-based SaaS leaders, to build, scale and succeed in the US market. 

And the third phase is, we support our startup customers as they go global. A good example of how that’s looked right here in India – we’ve worked with cloud-based marketing automation startup MoEngage to support their expansion from India and into the ASEAN region by connecting them with more than 230 Chief Marking Officers of enterprise clients from six countries, resulting in seven new deals. We support geographic scale through AWS’s global infrastructure, comprising 30 geographic regions and 96 Availability Zones, which means we’re able to support a startup to launch into new parts of the world in a matter of minutes.

Given how 2022 was in terms of macro-economic indicators, inflation, recessionary fears, investing winter etc., How do you see cloud spending for startups in the coming year ahead?

Cloud brings the ability to lower the cost of curiosity for startups, which means that startups can experiment at a greater pace, fail fast with low financial impact, and recover easily. The penalty for failure is almost taken away, which essentially ensures that startups are able to innovate and improve their customers’ journey. 

If we look at medium to long-term, there are many tailwinds for the startup ecosystem in India. We have regulatory tailwinds, and we saw how the India stack transformed the country, and brought about financial inclusion, where fintech startups made a lot of difference. Similarly, we have the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission and ONDC, which opens up a lot of opportunities for startups. 

The second tailwind that we have seen is the maturing of the ecosystem. As compared to five years ago, many second time, and third time founders, who have had successful exits, and have strong teams, are building new startups. When they come in, they're able to compress the growth stages of a startup’s life cycle, as it’s much faster for them to get to a product market fit, get the first customer, get to a level of skill and then go global. And the third is, that by using the power of the cloud, startups are able to innovate, and can easily scale up or bring down their cloud usage as needed. It enables them to optimise costs, without impacting their growth.

(The writer was hosted by AWS at Re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas, United States)