AWS leveraging increasing interest in cloud adoption

Conor McNamara, Managing Director at AWS Southeast Asia

On May 19, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that creator of alternative food delivery app Robinhood has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider to increase agility, innovation, and efficiency.

The Robinhood app from developers Purple Ventures has leveraged the breadth and depth of AWS’ unmatched portfolio of cloud services including containers (Amazon EKS), databases (Amazon Aurora MySQL), and computers and machine learning (Amazon SageMaker), making it the first in Thailand that does not levy application or gross profit fees on small food vendors, a sector that is struggling financially during the pandemic.

Srihanath Lamsam, managing director of Purple Ventures said, “AWS enables us to scale our technology infrastructure as we grow, which supports our plans to onboard more delivery riders and restaurants in Bangkok and to expand to other cities to support even more small food vendors across the country.”

The tie-up was revealed at the AWS Summit Online ASEAN 2021 – the biggest technology event in Southeast Asia. On the same day, UnionBank of the Philippines announced a partnership with AWS to migrate its IT infrastructure from on-premises to the world’s leading cloud by next year, thus creating new digital banking experiences accessible from mobile phones. Banks across Southeast Asia are adopting the cloud to exceed their customers’ expectations, pursue new opportunities opened by evolving regulations, and address challenges presented by the ongoing pandemic. These firms ultimately recognise the cloud as a business and technology enabler.

Conor McNamara, Managing Director ASEAN, AWS said, “We saw a notable acceleration in the pace of adoption, and broadening of the customer bases, as well as an acceleration in the overall rate of customers starting their journey on AWS.”

In this trend, XL Axiata – one of Indonesia’s largest telco operators – along with Petronas, Zalora, Moderna, ICS Compute, and hundreds of others are also gaining success with AWS. ICS Compute in Indonesia took on 50 new projects by co-selling with AWS that contributed 90 per cent of the partner’s overall business in 2020.

XL Axiata meanwhile changed its strategy to reimage business modes, reimage operations, and reimage ways of working, team synergy, simplicity, and exceptional performance. Yessie Yosetya, chief of Information and Digital Officer at XL Axiata said, “To deploy this strategy we are embracing the cloud transformation journey. Partnering with AWS will enable XL Axiata to continue innovating for sustainable business growth.”

To give builders of tomorrow the flexibility they need to build and run any workload, anywhere, with the benefits of the cloud, AWS continues to develop new products and services to provide the possible broadest and deepest portfolio to meet partners and customers’ demands in ASEAN. Many Amazon products are available to support customers such as Forecast, Kendra, DevOps Guru, Lockout, Connect, HealthLake, and more. More than 100,000 customers currently use AWS for machine learning.

Conor added that his group is going to launch the upcoming AWS Region in Jakarta as it looks to better services, and the needs of its fast-growing community of Indonesian customers. AWS is keen on localisation of its service offerings by providing local language support for services such as translate and transcribe for Thai, Vietnamese, Malay, and Bahasa speakers.

AWS has also diverse partner community in ASEAN that can support partners the best. Presently, 90 per cent of Fortune 100 companies and the majority of Fortune 500 companies are utilising AWS Partner Network solutions and services. Moreover, it currently has 20 partner competences in ASEAN across a range of specialisations. AWS has been actively investing in ASEAN since 2009, when it opened the first office in Singapore, and since then has established offices in seven cities across six countries. Last year, outposts were launched across several ASEAN countries, thus allowing its customers to run AWS infrastructure and services on premises for a truly consistent hybrid experience.

Besides startups, AWS has played an important role in the success of many ASEAN unicorns, including Razer and Zilingo. Small- and medium-sized businesses and public sector groups are other targets for AWS.

Such businesses form the backbone of the ASEAN economy, employing more than 80 per cent of the regional workforce and contributing to over half of regional GDP. “We are committed to digitalising one million SMBs in the region over the next three years,” Conor elaborated. “We will partner with both our consulting and technology partners to provide easy-to-use and packaged solutions that can help accelerate this mass digitalisation agenda.”

He added that AWS is still at a relatively early stage in the investment curve for the region. “We have plans to continue to invest across all of these dimensions in the months and years to come,” Conor said.