AWS loses second India head within months; Vaishali Kasture quits

Vaishali Kasture has resigned as Country Head, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Commercial Business India & South Asia after just seven months in the position, according to two sources familiar with the matter who informed TechCircle.   

The reason for her departure is unknown and Amazon has not yet released an official statement on Kasture's resignation. Also, at the time of publishing, emailed queries sent to AWS India had not received a response.  

Kasture, who joined Amazon roughly five years ago, was appointed interim leader of commercial business for AWS India and South Asia in June after, Puneet Chandok, left the company that month. Chandok, who worked with AWS for over four years, leading the company's India and South Asia business, later joined Microsoft India as the corporate vice president for India and South Asia, succeeding Anant Maheshwari.  

Before becoming the interim country head, Kasture served as the head of enterprise, mid-market, and global businesses in India and South Asia during her nearly five-year tenure at AWS.

That said, both country heads of AWS India have left less than a year after the company announced ambitious plans to invest $12.7 billion or over ₹1 lakh crore in building cloud infrastructure in India by 2030 and contribute over $23 billion to the country's GDP by that time. AWS revealed these plans in May of this year stating that the investment is expected to create 131,700 full-time jobs in domains like engineering and telecommunications. This follows the cloud company’s investment of $3.7 billion (₹30,900 crore) between 2016 and 2022, bringing its total investment in India to $16.4 billion.  

Notably, in about a decade of its operation, AWS India has emerged as one of the top cloud players in the country. In FY23, AWS India recorded net sales of (₹12,781.8 crore, about 43% higher than ₹8,956 crore recorded in FY22, as per VCCEdge data.   

In an interview published in TechCircle in September, Kasture expressed optimism about the growth prospects and momentum of AWS in India. She said that AWS was working with customers at different stages of digital maturity and understanding. The company was providing digital training to help them understand how to calculate the cost of cloud and deploy cloud best practices. She also highlighted that AWS had trained over 40 crore individuals in the country through various education and training programs.  

Further, on 14 September, AWS India announced that it received a nod from the Ministry of Electronic and Information Technology (MeitY) for cloud service provider (CSP) empanelment using the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region. After Asia-Pacific Mumbai region in 2017, this is the second AWS Region in India to be empanelled by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).   

In October 2022, the company also launched an AWS Local Zone in Delhi, the first outside the US (alongside Taipei), followed by Kolkata in December. The company has plans to launch two more local zones in Chennai and Bengaluru. 

AWS competes with the likes of Google and Microsoft in the Indian market. While Google has two cloud regions, Microsoft has three in India.  AWS India counts institutes and companies like Axis Bank, HDFC Life, and Acko among its customers.