AWS accelerates investments in ASEAN

May 08, 2023 | 08:00
(0) user say
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is making a long stretch in ASEAN with a growing number of partner community and customers, as well as investment, showing its strong position and cloud-driven transformation trends in the region.

The AWS ASEAN Summit 2023 in Singapore on May 4 attracted over 4,800 people attended in-person and 3,300 people on the livestream. This reflects increasing interest and attention among regional businesses in cloud transition, and stronger confidence of customers and partners in AWS.

AWS accelerates investments in ASEAN
The AWS ASEAN Summit 2023 in Singapore on May 4 attracted thousands of attendees

During the event, AWS made new partner announcements, and investment plans in ASEAN to boost its footprint in the region in the future.

News

The company eCloudvalley Digital Technology (ECV), a global cloud solutions provider with a strong presence in ASEAN, and an Amazon Web Services Premier Tier Services Partner, announced a multi-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS on May 4.

ECV is a cloud-native partner that has gone all-in on AWS and will leverage the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud to expand to Australia and United Arab Emirates to help their customers accelerate digital transformation.

On the same day, AWS also announced that PTT Global Chemical Co., Ltd. (PTTGC), Thailand’s largest fully integrated petrochemical and refinery business, has selected AWS as the preferred cloud provider for its data platform. PTTGC’s teams use this platform to collaborate and securely share data worldwide to prototype new products, including a solution that calculates the shelf life of raw materials in just days rather than months.

“AWS enables us to use our data to rapidly develop new solutions that help our customers thrive,” said Nattapol Jongjatoonkiat, head of digital transformation at PTT Global Chemical.

“Using AWS, our cloud data platform is highly agile and scalable, allowing us to save costs and lower energy consumption while reducing our time-to-market from months to days. Machine learning enables us to easily reduce raw-material waste and make our operations more sustainable.”

Charoen Pokphand Foods Co., Ltd. (CP Foods), a Thai agri-industrial and food conglomerate, is a digitally transforming, powered by AWS. Working through AXONS, a CP Foods agri-tech company, AWS was selected as its cloud service provider.

AXONS will migrate CP Foods’ SAP environment in Thailand to AWS and implement a modern SAP S/4HANA platform to improve operations. By migrating business-critical SAP workloads on AWS, CP Food strives to become a data-driven business with the agility to enhance the customer experience, unlock supply chain efficiencies, and innovate new business models.

"CP Foods’ SAP migration to AWS is helping the company and its retailers improve their operations across the region,” said Sunsern Samaisut, managing director and executive at AXONS.

“With the agility and scalability of AWS, we can develop new products and services for CP Foods faster and increase customer satisfaction. Free access to advanced cloud capabilities like data analytics means family-owned stores can run their businesses more efficiently and profitably, better serving Thailand’s population with the foods they love.”

Elsewhere, Siam Cement Group (SCG), a business conglomerate in ASEAN, innovating cement building materials, chemicals, and packaging, has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider to accelerate its digital transformation.

“AWS is supporting our digital transformation as we strive to become more innovative and efficient,” said Yuttana Jiamtragan, vice president – Corporate Administration, SCG.

“By moving our SAP workloads to the cloud and by tapping into advanced AWS’s IoT capabilities, we have become more agile and innovative, while reducing IT costs. We are excited about the potential of the cloud and look forward to further leveraging AWS's capabilities to reduce cost and enhance our operations.”

Halodoc, Indonesia’s largest digital HealthTech company, has surpassed more than 20 million monthly active users (MAUs), and continues to work with AWS to scale its operations, provide digital skills to staff, and reduce IT costs. Running its entire infrastructure on the world’s leading cloud since its launch in 2016, Halodoc uses the breadth and depth of AWS capabilities, including machine learning, security, and databases to deliver improved health services to users across Indonesia.

“Leveraging AWS, we are continuing to innovate rapidly on the cloud as we pass the milestone of helping more than 20 million users improve their health,” said Lenish Namath, VP of Cloud Infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, and Security, Halodoc.

“AWS has helped us build an accessible and cost-effective solution that Indonesians across the country can use easily and securely to improve their health. With the latest technologies and world-leading infrastructure offerings from AWS, we will continue to strive to serve people even in the remote corners of Indonesia.”

New investments

According to Eric Conrad, regional managing director, ASEAN, Worldwide Public Sector, AWS recently announced plans for a new infrastructure region in Malaysia, the AWS Asia Pacific (Malaysia) region.

As part of this launch, the company plans to invest more than $6 billion in Malaysia by 2037. This builds on the momentum of another infrastructure region which it is planning to launch in Thailand, the AWS Asia Pacific (Bangkok) Region. As part of this launch, it plans to invest more than $5 billion in Thailand over 15 years.

AWS accelerates investments in ASEAN
Eric Conrad, regional managing director, ASEAN, Worldwide Public Sector, AWS

“To date, we’ve invested over $6.5 billion in local infrastructure and jobs across Singapore, and have helped to train over two hundred thousand individuals in the country with cloud skills since 2017. We also committed to an investment of $5 billion over 15 years in Indonesia as part of our AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region launch last year, which is expected to create 24,700 jobs and add an estimated $10.9 billion to the Indonesian economy,” he said.

In December 2022, AWS has launched its first AWS Local Zone in Bangkok, and also pre-announced two others in the Philippines and Vietnam. These are part of a larger commitment to launch 10 new Local Zones across the region, to help local customers reduce latency of critical workloads, improve the performance of their applications, process data faster, and drive productivity gains.

For edge locations, AWS launched two AWS Edge Locations in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in August 2022, an investment that will enable businesses of all sizes and across all industries in Vietnam to experience secure, high data transfer rates and improve application-level protection.

AWS annually organises the AWS ASEAN Summit, creating a playground for participants to learn more about cloud-driven transformation in the region and how to make success.

The 2023 summit focused on how to unleash the power of analytics, modern application development, go digital, go green with a secured cloud architecture, unlock the true value of data, cybersecurity transformation, a new approach to cloud security, cloud adoption in the public sector.

Since 2006, AWS has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. It has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and AI, Internet of Things and management from 99 Availability Zones within 31 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Canada, Israel, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Thailand

Millions of customers – including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and government agencies – trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs.

VPBank signs with AWS to improve customer experience VPBank signs with AWS to improve customer experience

VPBank on April 4 announced the signing of agreements with Amazon Web Services, selecting it as its preferred cloud provider to build digital banking experiences for its customers.

AWS dreaming big for Vietnam’s cloud aspirations AWS dreaming big for Vietnam’s cloud aspirations

Amazon Web Services is expanding in Vietnam to tap into growing demands for cloud computing. Conor McNamara, managing director for ASEAN at AWS, talked to VIR’s Bich Thuy about the future of the market.

Cloud technology thriving in Vietnam Cloud technology thriving in Vietnam

Cloud computing is changing the way businesses perform in Vietnam, and proving increasingly important for future growth. Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, spoke with VIR’s Bich Thuy about how future tech trends will impact digital transformation in the country.

By Bich Thuy

What the stars mean:

★ Poor ★ ★ Promising ★★★ Good ★★★★ Very good ★★★★★ Exceptional