Amazon Web Services’ Asean boss Conor McNamara opened the company’s annual summit by lauding the cloud provider’s progress and investment into infrastructure and training in the region.
The company opened its second region in Jakarta, Indonesia at the end of last year, in what McNamara said was “a milestone moment for our business here in Asean”.
The company’s first region, which is based in Singapore, was first launched back in 2010.
It also has “edge locations in the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand and most recently Indonesia”, and “outposts” - which allow “customers to run AWS infrastructure and services on-premises for a truly consistent hybrid experience” - in six Asean countries, he said.
However, it’s AWS’ plans to launch three new local zones in the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam - smaller data centres announced in February - that McNamara said would open a range of new opportunities for customers.
“These are designed to run workloads that require single-digit millisecond latency, like video rendering and graphics-intensive virtual desktop applications,” McNamara said.
The company’s Jakarta commitment included an investment of at least US$5 billion in Indonesia over the next 15 years, together with an “ongoing commitment to upskilling ‘builders’ across Indonesia.”
“To date, we have trained over 200,000 Indonesians and have committed to training hundreds of thousands more between now and 2025,” McNamara said.
McNamara also said that the company is “keenly aware of the need to localise our services to best serve the needs of Asean customers.”
He said the launch of Amazon Connect - a hosted contact centre solution - in Thailand, “with local numbers that allows businesses to deliver a better customer experience while achieving up to 80 percent reduction on outbound telephone rates”, was a good example of localisation.
In addition, he said the company continued to add local language support to AWS AI services such as Translate and Transcribe.
McNamara said that customer feedback continued to raise the importance of having on-the-ground resources in the region.
“The thing I hear time and time again from customers is that the size and calibre of our local team is a key part of the AWS value proposition,” he said.
“That’s why we are investing in multi-dimensional teams including solution architects, support, training and certification, security and compliance specialists, and of course AWS Professional Services resources in each of our Asean countries.
“We want to be with [customers] on every step of [their] transformation journey and our local teams are a big part of that commitment.”
McNamara added that AWS had also focused on developing its partner ecosystem in Asean to support its growth ambitions.
He said the efforts had seen a number of global partners scale up their presence in the region, and an “increase in our overall Asean partner capabilities, driven by a 58 percent year-on-year increase in partner certifications.”
