3 mins read

AWS Announces Amazon Digital Suite to Enable Digital Transformation for Small and Medium Businesses in India

NITI Aayog, AWS, and Intel Collaborate to Accelerate Digital Innovation in India
NITI Aayog, AWS, and Intel Collaborate to Accelerate Digital Innovation in India

Today, 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. Running on AWS, the suite provides a broad selection of business software focused on SMBs from seven AWS Partner Network (APN) Technology Partners in areas such as accounting, customer support, and human resources. This unique offering is available for purchase exclusively on Amazon.in. The launch of the Amazon Digital Suite builds on Amazon’s commitment to digitize 10 million Indian SMBs by 2025, announced in January 2020.

The Amazon Digital Suite comprises payment and credit solutions from Razorpay; customer support and customer relationship management (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. Exclusive benefits to customers purchasing any Amazon Digital Suite product from Amazon.in include no long-term lock-in or usage commitments, and dedicated priority support to make the technology adoption experience easy and seamless. Prices of the products that are part of the Amazon Digital Suite available on Amazon.in begin at as low as INR 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.

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, according to IDC.[1] 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. 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,” said Rishu Sharma, Principal Analyst, Cloud and Artificial Intelligence, IDC India.

“The Amazon Digital Suite brings the best of what AWS and Amazon offer as an affordable, simple-to-use, and value-driven package,” said Puneet Chandok, President – Commercial Sales, AISPL, AWS India and South Asia. He added, “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.”

Vedanarayanan Vedantham, Head – SME Business, Razorpay, said, “Digital payments in India are at an interesting and exciting inflection point. Small businesses, now more than ever, are waking up to the possibilities offered by digital, and need help assembling this puzzle. Over the last six years, Razorpay has been working with small businesses, understanding their challenges, and making access to digital payments easier with new products. Today, we are excited to take this mission of serving the underserved SMBs further through this collaboration with AWS. 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.”

“The Amazon Digital Suite enabled our electronics e-commerce marketplace to scale and expand outreach to more customers in India. It allowed us to reduce our costs by almost 70%, and the after-sales support provided in deploying the software was exceptional. We now manage all our Amazon Digital Suite products and billing from a single dashboard and that is extremely helpful too,” said Ankush Aggarwal, CEO and Founder, DukanDwar.

The Amazon Digital Suite is available for purchase on Amazon.in and Amazon.in/business for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) customers respectively. B2B customers purchasing products from the suite using their Amazon Business Account will receive exclusive offers and a GST invoice for input tax credit. Customers purchasing the Amazon Digital Suite during Amazon Smbhav 2021 from April 15-23 will be eligible for discounts of up to 30% in the Amazon Digital Suite store.