Why India has become a key battleground for Amazon and Microsoft

Last week, Bharti Airtel announced it was entering into a strategic partnership with Amazon to deliver cloud computing solutions to enterprises, enabled by the latter’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) suite. The Airtel-AWS partnership comes a year after Reliance Jio entered into a similar arrangement with Microsoft, to provide its clients cloud solutions enabled by Microsoft’s Azure.

The two global leaders in cloud services are present in India by themselves. Each is now also aligned to the two leaders in Indian telecom, making India the latest front in the battle between the two American technology majors. At stake is India’s burgeoning cloud-computing market, expected to be worth $8 billion by 2023, according to estimates from the Boston Consulting Group.

It’s a tussle of contrasts. While Amazon was an early mover in the cloud space, Microsoft has been a late bloomer. To catch up, Microsoft has been quite innovative with its Indian strategy.