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Cloud services and hosting provider Hostopia Australia plans to double down on its Amazon Web Services (AWS) partnership as it moves into professional services.
Driven through its engineering services provider brand Anchor, Hostopia will now offer new capabilities such as development and application modernisation.
Alongside this, Hostopia will offer long-term support via its current managed services offering, assisting with customer billing and providing faster delivery.
It is hoped the move will give the Sydney-based provider more of a presence when it comes to services like data lakes.
To boost the division, Hostopia has hired former Contino talent Gerald Bachlmayr, who brings six AWS certifications and 20 years of technical experience, as chief architect.
Bachlmayr comes to the role after more than two years at Contino, most recently as its technical principal consultant and AWS Partner Network ambassador.
Bachlmayr said he had noticed a movement towards digital transformation and simplification following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As a result, he claimed, there is a huge demand for professional service providers and the public cloud.
Read more: Anchor launches Cloud hosting services via AWS
“It's been like that for years, but it's not getting up the stack," he explained. "So, people realise the real business value is not in a traditional lift and shift. It's really in transforming applications so that you can speed up your delivery,” he said. “It's a really big business opportunity for us.”
“It's really a holistic picture of being there as the trusted advisor and guiding our customers throughout the whole transformation — helping them in their whole digital transformation journey.”
The new AWS push comes after the provider saw a 19 per cent growth in new AWS customers for the three months to September off the back of investments into the cloud giant. It's also been developing its AWS certifications and capabilities — two of which include AWS Immersion Day and Amazon EC2 for Microsoft Windows competencies, which were achieved in the last few months of 2020.
However, the origins of Hostopia’s AWS drive began with the appointment of Darryn McCoskery as general manager back in February last year.
Hostopia claims the general manager joined the business with plans to take the provider’s brand Anchor and make it a key AWS partner in Australia for cloud services.
However, with Bachlmayr now on board, Hostopia plans to deepen this relationship with AWS even further.
“We are, at the moment, an advanced partner, and we want to reach the premier partnership level. So that means we need to do more certifications," Bachlmayr said. “We have done 50 plus so far, which is pretty good, but we need to work strongly around our competencies.”
Two examples of these certifications include DevOps and software-as-a-service (SaaS). Bachlmayr would like to see the provider build up its expertise in these areas, which he claims has the potential to provide customers with greater foresight.
“It's really stretching ourselves in those strategic areas to build a stronger partnership with AWS so we can tap into all the good education [from them]. It's also about getting non-disclosure material a bit earlier so that you can help and steer our customers the right way and we see what's coming,” he said.
