RIL AGM: Mukesh Ambani gets serious about cloud services

Why read this story?

Editor's note: If you didn’t realize, in his annual general meeting speech, Mukesh Ambani has revealed for the first time that Reliance is set to take on Amazon, Microsoft and Google with its cloud services business. If Amazon offered Amazon Web Services as an extension of its e-commerce business, and Microsoft ensnared its software product users to adopt its cloud, Ambani wants to offer cloud computing and storage services to those who have subscribed to its telecom and data services.  What does this mean for the telecoms business? For nearly two decades, Ambani has tried to monetize the telecoms business beyond consumer telecoms and data services. He has tried to foist an entertainment play, plug-in e-commerce shopping services (linked to Reliance Retail) and a host of other motley experiments, but none of it really made any significant impact. In 2020, the effort to monetize telecoms beyond the consumer play was the thesis that Ambani envisioned when he sold a stake in Jio Platforms, the holding company of the telecoms arm Reliance Jio, to global investors. Two years later, there isn’t a credible …