Exclusive: Former AWS country head Vaishali Kasture joins Microsoft, to lead SMC business in India and Asia

Vaishali Kasture

Vaishali Kasture, who stepped down as the interim country head of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in December last year, will be joining Microsoft as its SMC (small, medium & corporate) lead for India and South Asia.

She will be the second top executive to depart from AWS to Microsoft in the last year, as the companies compete to get a larger share of the cloud business in India. Her predecessor at AWS, Puneet Chandok, took over as Microsoft India and South Asia head in September last year.

Chandok made the announcement internally on September 2 in an email, which Moneycontrol has seen. “I am delighted to welcome Vaishali Kasture as the SMC lead for India and South Asia. SMC is at the heart of India's digital transformation journey and Vaishali joins us at a pivotal moment as we build Al for everyone and copilot India & South Asia's Al transformation”, the email read.

Chandok further said that Kasture brings a wealth of experience across Corporate and Investment Banking, Credit, Outsourcing and Technology, having recently led the AWS India Business where she set up the ISV (independent software vendors) segment, and led the Digital Native and Enterprise segments.

Kasture took to LinkedIn to confirm the development an hour after Moneycontrol broke the story.

"I cannot think of a better time to take up the role as GM for the SMC business in India and South Asia. At a time when corporates and SMBs are harnessing the power of technology for everything from Cloud to AI, data to security, enriching every workflow with Gen AI as the go to tool for productivity uplift, Microsoft is singularly positioned as a full-service technology company focussing on end-to-end technology stack," she said.

Kasture quoted the company's CEO Satya Nadella saying Microsoft is like the United Nations of Software. Helping people and organisations to do more, to achieve more.

"And what better place to help execute on this vision than India, the fastest growing large economy in the world with the second largest developer ecosystem and the deepest talent pool," she said.

The India bet

Amidst a global slowdown in cloud adoption during 2023, driven by customers reducing technology budgets in a challenging macroeconomic environment, India has emerged as a key focus market for cloud service providers. This is due to India's early stage on the digitization journey, particularly for its numerous small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Not only AWS, but also its rivals—including Microsoft, Google, and IBM—are betting big on the India opportunity.

Google has already expanded its cloud services in India with a $1 billion investment in new data centres. Microsoft too will be setting up its largest India data centre region in Hyderabad with an investment of over Rs 15,000 crore over 15 years.

Going by the growth of cloud technology in the country, even Rajeev Chandrasekhar, former Minister of State for Electronic and IT, had said that he expects the country to become the largest market for servers in the world.

According to technology research firm IDC’s estimates, the overall India public cloud services market is expected to reach $24.2 billion by 2028, as organisations realise the power of cloud to help them transform digitally.

Microsoft’s India bet

“India is not just incredible, it’s unstoppable. It is our time to shine. AI is a massive platform shift, it’s a defining technology shift for a lifetime. The impact it will have on our lives are incredible and finally, you’ll get to use co-pilot integrated with your emails, Word doc and more,” Chandok said in January this year, days before Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella visited India.

Chandok highlighted three major strengths of the India market. According to him, with nearly "100 new startups coming up in India every day," it brings a huge ‘demand’ for companies like Microsoft as all of them will require technology and AI to run operations.

The second strength is India’s AI expertise which drives supply. “Every 6th AI researcher, AI builder, AI developer is coming from India,” Chandok said. Thirdly, this will have an impact on the world’s GDP as “roughly 16 percent of the global GDP is expected to be driven by India this year,” he said.