AWS partners with Niti Aayog to bring its first Cloud Innovation Centre in India

Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday announced a partnership with NITI Aayog to launch its Cloud Innovation Centre or the CIC in India. The NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies Cloud Innovation Center is the first AWS CIC in India, the 12th around the world, and the first AWS CIC that will address societal challenges at a national level.

To give you a quick brief, AWS' CIC acts as a central location that hosts innovation challenges that are sourced from the community to publish results in open source such that they not only solve the real-world problems but also provide the contributors a real-world experience.

It aims to help organisations solving these real-world problems to minimise technology-related costs to the constituents, which includes government agencies, academia and non-profit organisations, expand their technological alternatives in a bid-to help the public sector to accelerate their mission, drive economic and workforce development, and accelerate repeatable public sector cloud successes to improve digital experiences for citizens.

The company said that the NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies CIC addresses a core mission to identify and deploy leading edge technologies to drive continuous innovation in delivering citizen services.

The center will work to identify and prioritize projects as well as collaborate with local leaders, including subject matter experts at the state and district level, to solve critical societal challenges. Local enterprises, startups, researchers, and universities in India will experiment and build prototypes on AWS Cloud, and contribute along with the global CIC community dedicated to accelerating societal innovation.

“Through the CIC program, we have the opportunity to experiment with the latest technology, and access world-class innovation expertise that will help us advance citizen services, and better understand how frontier technologies can address the unique needs of our country,” Anna Roy, Senior Adviser, NITI Aayog said on the occasion.

“Our Cloud Innovation Centers (CIC) program is designed to be a catalyst for innovation in public sector, by bringing together technology experts to address challenges. We are excited to collaborate with NITI Aayog, and support its public sector mission in India,” said Max Peterson, Vice President, International Sales, Worldwide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services.