Amazon Web Services (AWS) touched on its intentions to expand internationally, signalling Australia as key market interest.
Company heads including its Asia Pacific managing director, Shane Owenby and Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels were in Sydney for its Cloud Tour on July 14.
During the event, the company wouldn’t add more fuel to mounting speculation surrounding plans on a local datacentre.
According to a report in The Australian, AWS is potentially looking at having two local datacentre facilities, with power consumption as the primary factor.
AWS already has an Australian office to support its cloud computing business and Owenby mentioned it was in hiring mode. The company currently has an account manager position vacant in either Sydney or Melbourne. Responsibilities include driving revenue, adoption, and market penetration across the territory.
He highlighted international expansion was a key part of its strategy and it was tuning into feedback from Australian customers.
Vogels said it was anticipating tremendous growth within AWS.
“It is a really scalable system, we take about 200,000 storage transactions per second and as you can imagine, there’s some heavy technology behind these numbers,” Vogels said. “We’re continuously innovating and adding pieces to our environment mainly from customer feedback.”
Vogels stated hundreds of thousands of companies globally, including some in Australia, were already using AWS, which also included government agencies.
“Governments often have additional criteria, but in the US the CIO of the Federal Government has taken a cloud-first strategy meaning that all agencies in the US need to have three to four applications running within 12 months, but also for every new application being built, cloud should be considered as the first platform,” Vogels said.
He also touched on the importance of having a no-vendor lock-in strategy with customers, which will be a driving force behind a new wave of IT.
“Our data model is that customers should be able to pick any software, operating systems or programming language without being locked into it,” he said.
