 So hello everyone and welcome to our very important session of the day which is somewhere we're going to talk about the future of cloud and certainly you know technology has been the mainstay of our country in the last two years, more so than it was before where and everybody has jumped onto the digital bandwagon in order to be having a business or perhaps sustaining themselves at this point of time to grow themselves bigger later. So Puneet has joined us from Amazon web services and indeed he is the president for India and South Asia and as the country MD he leads the entire portfolio of AWS services. And certainly you know cloud is something we have been adopting in big bunches in this last one one and a half year probably this is the biggest ever cloud adoption I have seen by businesses. And during this period of time much more than I've ever seen the enthusiasm to be on the cloud prior to this so I think Puneet is going to really share about us the future of business and particularly understanding the cloud more closely as he works with the entire ecosystem of businesses right from startups to companies and needs to corporates helping them in the better digital and cloud adoption. Thank you very much for joining us Puneet it's wonderful to have you here with us and we look forward to your wonderful insights in the next few minutes and then we'll move on and take some questions from our audience over to you. Absolutely thrilled to be here at the entrepreneur and tech innovation summit 2021 and when I heard about the topic which is technology and cloud as a force to drive innovation, it reminded me of story. So I thought I'll start by telling you the story and I'm sure you had two days of very intellectual debates on innovation and so I'll lighten this up and start with one of my favorite stories. And the story comes from one of the classic books called the sun also rises. And this is a book from Ernest Hemingway right here behind me. And in the book there's a character, a character called Mike and Mike is asked a question in a conversation and the question is, how did you go bankrupt. How did you go bankrupt Mike, Mike thinks about it for a bit and says two ways, gradually and then suddenly, gradually and then suddenly. I love the story is because there isn't a better way for me at least to describe how innovation really lurks around the nibbles and nibbles around the edges of an industry of business a profession before arriving suddenly and shaking up long established players and beliefs. We've seen this over and over again we saw this with blackberry we saw this with the US steel industry with we're seeing this happen to car manufacturers now it's happening around us all the time. Enough of understanding their stories, but what I'll do with the next 1015 minutes is try and answer three questions for you. Question number one if innovation has been around us for the longest time from the days of Ernest Hemingway. What is different this time and why should you and I pay attention. What is the role of cloud and technology. How can cloud and technology become a force to drive innovation. And number three I'll address it. I'll end with some some advice and some ideas for businesses and leaders, as you think about technology and cloud to drive innovation. So let's start with the first part of the conversation. I'll give you three reasons for why innovation and technology are different this time. And why you and I should should pay attention. Reason number one, we're now starting to see what we call democratization of technology driven by the cloud. Any of us today sitting in a Starbucks or a cyber cafe in any city in India can access as much compute storage analytics as large corporations and millions of dollars of budget you could do till a few years ago. We've all been talking about democratic democratization of technology for the longest time, but it is here now for real. Imagine the unlock for India 1.3 billion Indian minds can access this technology flawlessly and that's what that's what our mission in India is. Reason number two for paying attention this time to speed. I truly believe speed is becoming the new cost. And I used to see digital and technology ideas in my previous life as posted notes on in CXO offices and, but I saw a limited urgency around these ideas, we then move to this phase of running a series of pilots around technology and digital which was great. Digital pilots were successful, but we saw a limited impact on the ground. That's starting to change now. The value proposition of technology and cloud and digital is never been clear. And this pandemic was a bit of a dress rehearsal for the new world that we're all entering. And it is now made digital and technology a question of survival. It's not just a nice thing to do for CEOs and CXOs. It is, it is a question of survival of your business. And I'm now starting to see speed and urgency around technology that I've never seen before. The conversations have become very, very real. Digital roadmaps that used to run in quarters and years are now being built and deployed in weeks. One of my customers recently said we are now starting to behave like the business that we always wanted to be. Right, so that's the that's the beauty of speed that you're seeing. And reason number three why we should pay attention this time to technology and innovation. And this is where it gets personal for you and me. The age of the average is over. Let me say this again, the age of the average is over, and the age of the average for talent is over. And that's the reason this matters for you and I and they're now entering what some people have started to call the great decoupling which basically means in simple words, technology is starting to race ahead. But many of our organizations and skills are lagging behind the technology is moving at a fast pace, but our skills and organizations are yet to catch up with cloud. If you really look at the last few years what we saw was a move to a world of globally distributed applications and APIs right and API became the gateway to information geography didn't really matter. We built applications from anywhere in the world. I'm now starting to see a similar distribution and talent businesses today have universal access to talent. And most businesses are already becoming virtual businesses or they will become virtual businesses in the next few years, which basically means they can literally build a business from anywhere in the world. They can hire virtually, they can collaborate, they can sell virtually, they can deliver and support, they can obviously innovate virtually. Being in Bangalore and Gurgaon used to be an advantage over being in a more expensive part of the world, but now with work being broken into smaller chunks and the ability to do this virtually across the globe. It's probably not no longer an advantage to be in a Bangalore or a Gurgaon. And talent if you really kind of look at the evolution of talent in India for the last few years right talent have almost become a commodity that you could buy and bulk and combine all of that talent to reach the needed levels of performance. But that's no longer true. I mean I used to have terms like I'm going to hire 100 engineers I need to hire X number of people to get this done. That's no longer true. I'll give you another metaphor to bring this to life. I'm a big music fan. I'm sure all of you enjoy music. If you hear a succession of mediocre singers will that ever add up to an outstanding musical performance. A series of mediocre performances will never add up to outstanding performance pick whatever whatever your favorite music or track is. Even now when I when I listen to the recording of Eagles performing live hotel California gives me the chills and no amount of mediocre music playing on loop throughout the day can make me feel ever like that. And that's exactly what's happening to talent. You and I are not competing with everybody in the world. And they will be a premium to be a professional who can drive innovation in this new world. So those are the three reasons why why I want you to think about technology and innovation differently this time and pay attention. Let's shift gears and talk about the second part of the conversation which is what is the role of technology in cloud and how is technology and cloud becoming a force to drive innovation. First things first let's define innovation because this term gets used and abused all the time. Innovation to me is executing an idea. It's executing an idea which addresses a specific challenge and delivers value for your customers, which will eventually drive value for you and your business. I want to emphasize the word executing because it's not just about thinking. It's what making things happen. Creativity is thinking of new things. But that's not what we're talking about today. Innovation is doing new things. The path of path to innovation is no longer a mystery. Contrary to popular belief innovation is no longer a free flowing work of magic that manifests itself organically. Innovation today is an intentional process. It takes work, it takes structure, it takes technology, it takes a platform. And that's where cloud comes in. Cloud and quite honestly if I look at my my career, I haven't seen a bigger enabler of innovation than cloud in my life. And the question that I get asked often very very often by people is how does Amazon really innovate at the scale of this clip and in my mind and I'll give you my simple take on this innovation requires three things. First curiosity and ideas. Second the ability to try a lot of experiments. And third, which is the most important, not having to live with the collateral damage or failure. And what cloud does is does it allows you to do all of these three on steroids. I'll give you a few examples to bring this to life. If you look at curiosity and ideas. More data is created every hour today than an entire year just 20 years ago, we're creating more data today every hour than an entire year 20 years ago. And what clouds helping you do is it's allowing you to string together all of this data which is coming at you from different sources and a different volume and different variety. It allows you to string all of that together and make sense of it, which allows for creativity and ideas to come up organically. Again, if I was to put this in different words cloud today is helping us dramatically reduce the cost of curiosity with data on the cloud. Number two ability to try experiments in the old world if you have to try and experiment something new for your customer what would you do and let's take an example of building a new app for your customers. You will typically spend a few months weeks if not months procuring servers and licenses, and you have a lot of money that will be needed to even get started. But that's not the real issue. What if this experiment with this app doesn't work your customers don't like it. What are you really going to do with it. What are you going to do with the infrastructure that you build and the technical debt that you built to build this app. And that's where again cloud and AWS make it much easier. They make it much faster and much cheaper for you to try things, you can spin up servers and build apps and minutes. And guess what, if they don't work if your customers don't like it they want you to iterate into something else, you can spin them down equally fast and not live with the collateral damage or failure. So the cost of failure is significantly lower with cloud and that drives innovation. Right and basically what we're trying to do is we're trying to make it easier for businesses to give their people their teams, their, their ecosystem, the permission to fail and fail well, which means you're learning from these failures constantly and I trading based on what your customers really need. At Amazon we believe failure and invention are inseparable twins. In fact I'm going to quote Jeff Bezos our founder, and he said one area where I think we're especially distinctive with Amazon is failure. I believe we're the best place in the world to fail. And we've had plenty of practice. So if you, if you think about innovation in that way which is the ability to come up with ideas, the ability to try experiments and the ability to not live with the cost of failure. That's, that's what cloud helps you do. Okay, so let's move to the last part of the conversation. My advice and some ideas and three goals to action that I want to leave you with, as you think about technology and cloud and, and that as a driver for innovation. Number one, have the will to invent and reinvent. I mean as businesses as leaders as professionals, we all have to acknowledge that we can't fight gravity. I can promise you today that there's somebody out there who's working on delighting your customers at twice the speed and half the price. There's somebody out there who's trying to do that for your customers. I think around what I said about the, the age of average for talent being over, you and I both need to reinvent both on behalf of ourselves as professionals and as businesses. My second advice is called to action for all of you. Speed is a choice. Speed is not preordained. The ability to move fast is a muscle that you need to exercise regularly and keep it ready for action. I spoke about speed being the new cost and the speed that we've seen in the past few months driven by the pandemic. I just want to make sure that we don't snap back to the old ways, right, we got to keep the metabolic rate on ideas and digital execution really high. And number three, the last piece of advice. If you want to double the pace of innovation through technology, double the rate of your experiments, double the number of experiments you're running and give yourself in your teams the permission to fail. If you're on on the cloud, if you're using the right technology and if you're good at course correcting being wrong, maybe less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure both for you and for your business. Believe me this permission to fail based on based on how you use technology and cloud can be really energizing. So I started with Ernest Hemingway, and I'll end with him. Don't be the character Mike. Don't be the character who gets disrupted first gradually and then suddenly. Don't wait to get disrupted, either gradually or suddenly start innovating today, be the disruptor and move today with that. Thank you. Very happy to take reactions, questions, comments and have a discussion about this. What the advice you gave their beneath about experimenting and not going to slow it's so it's so valuable. And I don't think a lot of businesses actually think like that, you know, because everybody wants to adopt slowly and surely but sometimes that doesn't help by itself so I think that was a wonderful piece of advice. You know we have a question around that. So, the gentleman is saying that you know, today, while he wants to adopt cloud and digitization but they're not able to find the right tech people to help them out so where do you think the problem is I mean how can they get the right people to do it so I know there's an overall big talent crunch out there in the market so what are your thoughts on it. No, it's a great question right and we're seeing this in India today all the time and I'll give you some statistics to bring this to life. Today if you look at the workforce in India roughly 12% of our workforce with who is is digitally skilled. And if you if you wind the cloud, the clock forward over the next four to five years we leave nine extra digital skills that we have in India today, we need nine extra digital skills right so it's obvious to all of us that there is a huge gap in India and we all as AWS for example, a big part of our mission is to train people at scale in India, and we're working really hard at it, but going back to the specific problem from this gentleman, I will just say a couple of things right one. And when I look at customers and people who've kind of made the journey to cloud more effectively than others, obviously the easier way to do is to go and hire talent it's no longer easy I know. There's no intuitive reaction but people who've done this well are the ones who really retrained their people. And that I think it's just an I've seen large corporations in India and small businesses in India thinking about retraining and scaling in a very meaningful way, which really energizes the organization. And this is not rocket science, this is quite honestly not rocket science. Of course this is technology, and there is a ton of material and we're doing as AWS and several technology companies are doing a lot of content and training around this most of this is free. So let's say get started today start training yourself and your team. It's not going to take a long time, and then over time you can bring in more skills as you need more and more niche skills, but there's enough and more if you have a good team in place. There's enough and more you can do with scaling and get started. Why is advice there. So another question is, do you see hesitation amongst entrepreneurs and letting out or giving out organizational information to someone new or to an unknown service provider when it comes to cloud adoption. It's not true anymore, but I think this is a very clear understanding that if you really think about cloud today right I mean it's, it's far more secure than than running your infrastructure in your own data center or wherever you're running it. Because we obviously do this at a scale, which is much larger we're obviously very security is job zero for us right so that's the first thing that we all do. And it's just it's really run in a very professional and at scale and in the right environment. The data, the way this works in the cloud is all our customers pretty much own all the data that they have. And we don't really accesses we don't have access to it we don't. It's completely owned customers have the ability to encrypt the data they have the ability to move the data they can decrypt the data. What we do is we provide a lot of tools for you to really make sure that the data is securely handled and managed and provide a lot of best practices ideas guidance technical help. The ownership of the data is completely with the customers and, and by the way if you really see what's happening at scale in India today it is the India's largest and most well deployed cloud platform. And we have hundreds of thousands of customers in India today who are on the cloud and moving to the cloud right so I think people have now kind of understood the proposition very clearly and the security part is very clear. Another one is that besides compliance issues what are the challenges that organizations are facing in implementing hybrid cloud solutions. I think, I think one thing you have to realize that my point of view on this right in the fullest of time we will see most applications run on the cloud because the cost proposition and the ability to run this at a scale at the speed the agility that I spoke about is very clear. But as we get to that future to I think there will be a time when customers think about running applications some applications in their data centers are closer to wherever they are. A lot of applications and infrastructure on the cloud and then also a few applications on the edge, right and you'll see a lot of innovation in that space right so that's where the hybrid cloud question I guess is coming from. I think we're trying to make it easier for customers right so all the work that we're doing the VMware for example which really helps us really think about virtual machines either if they're running in the data center or they're running on the cloud give you give the customers a seamless interface, the ability to manage the entire environment, apply the right security and compliance standards irrespective of where you're running your infrastructure and your applications outpost is an offering that we launched in India last year. Again the intent is to help customers run AWS level security operational performance and services within their premises right so there's a lot of innovation happening in the space across both compliance as a gentleman mentioned, and also just kind of running the seamlessly as you think about moving your application to the cloud. Sure. There's another one. What in your experience do you see just a second. Do you see that the teams are clear on the goals and desired outcomes of their cloud migration. I think I have a interesting point of view I mean if I look at this if I look at businesses and customers and people have done migrated to the cloud in a really good way and really fast. I think they've done two or three things differently one I think, as I said they're not fighting gravity so they're not really questioning themselves on the journey. They're not dipping their toes in the water they're really thinking about this in a deep meaningful way at scale. I'll give you an example of access bank right which is one of the largest banks in India they're moving 70% of the workloads and AWS and cloud in the next two years, and they're building the next set of customer interfaces and application on the cloud. But I think what people are doing is they're setting top down aggressive goals. Right because and going back to this piece around speed is a choice right speed is not preordained. And if you don't want to dip your toes in the water and if you really want to move this in a meaningful way then you have to set a aggressive top down goal for yourself for your teams for your business for your customers, and then move really fast right and then once you kind of set a top down goal, then that allows you to bring the entire organization together bring the service providers together and really march towards that goal. I'll just tell you I think the challenge here it was not technology I mean AWS today we can pretty much run any application anywhere in the world on the cloud. The challenges leadership challenges the fear of the unknown the challenges the ability to move fast challenges more cultural and leadership driven than technology driven and I'm seeing business in India now move really fast. I've actually read a data point on some McKinsey report which says that of all the digital adoption that starts taking place on the transformation about 3% of only 3% of the companies actually go the whole way, which is like about 100% towards cloud migration how do you think we can overcome a situation like that I mean you know it I mean it's important to go the entire way otherwise it's not going to benefit you to the list right. I'm glad you mentioned the McKinsey research but I spent 11 years at McKinsey before coming on to AWS I know that he said pretty well and and I think what I will say that I think that's starting to change, I think that's statistic if you look at the statistic in the next by the way, if you think about the pandemic and what's happened it was obviously a massive human tragedy but it was also a dress rehearsal for for businesses and technology in India and all of the world right which is, we're now moving to a world that's going to be more and more uncertain and unpredictable. That's one thing we know for sure we don't know how it'll ship up but it'll be unpredictable right in that world with you need technology in cloud because that brings in I mean cloud reacts well to uncertainty. For example, if pizzas are not being delivered and caps are not running on the streets you should not be paying for technology right you. And that's where cloud really comes in which allows you to have agility it allows you to move to a cost structure which is very, which is not capex driven which is more objects driven it allows you to scale up and scale down, depending on which business which interface which customer journey is working and which is not. I think the writings on the wall I think there's a clear realization that you need technology to come out of this crisis stronger. And I'm seeing meaningful progress right so the three percent statistic with the will move dramatically I hope as much faster than than than they've seen in the past few years. Absolutely, you're right that I think we'll take one final question. Do you think that the future of cloud is vertical. That's shot and sweet but I think it's interesting question I think and if I was to interpret this and I hope I interpret the question right and I apologize if I get it wrong. But I think where this person is trying to get to the same listen as you think about cloud right and cloud eventually is infrastructure as a service, which basically allows you to build applications and whatever whatever customer problems you're trying to solve on the cloud in a very cost agile and speed and flexibility manner right everything that I spoke about. I think over time and I think I agree with this the suggestion right which is at the end of the day as I talk to customers and CEOs in India right I mean I need to lead the conversation by solving some of the biggest problems. Right and which is where the vertical domain context comes in right so I'm talking to a bank or an insurance firm I need to talk about the customer journey and how can they onboard millions of customers really fast and give them get them to open accounts in less than a minute and give them an interface which is truly flawless. Right so I think that's where I think that's where we all headed which is how do we really use the power of technology to cloud all our services that I spoke about and really helps solve problems for customers which really move the needle on business. But it's not technology for the sake of technology. It's technology to solve the toughest problems for your customers and really give them a better experience so I think this person is right that's that's where we eventually headed. Sure, no I think that's that's fantastic and many thanks so much for being patiently taking all these questions that so that we're pouring in but you know we really want to thank you for taking time and being here with us and talking to us about the future of cloud and cloud adoption and I quite like your point about democratizing technology through cloud and I think that's that's the keyword over here and that's that's what it's going to take now whether we do it how quickly or delayed we do it or how how you know how well or how unwell in a way we do it is really up to us but I think it's there's no getting around it we have to do it in as a business as a individual we need all need to get used to this transformation and I think the sooner the better. So thank you very much for sharing this.