AWS to expand emerging tech services in Vietnam

Dean Samuels, lead architect of Amazon Web Services

Focusing in the Southeast Asia market at AWS for about a decade, have you seen any new movements in technology applications in Vietnam and in the region?

Technology is really allowing customers across the broad range of industries and segments to innovate and develop new services and new customer experiences. 5G is really going to be that connective tissue that binds all of it together.

Looking across the region and also specifically in Vietnam, there are a few key areas where we’re seeing technology adoption. If you have a look at the trends and the adoption of technology, it is the Internet of Things, machine learning, and edge computing – and one common theme across all three of those areas is 5G.

For example, smart city development applies to Vietnam, but also to a wider region, in the area of manufacturing and specifically smart factories, and also automation as well.

We’re starting to see that in a lot of e-commerce customers across the region are using machine learning technology to do forecasting personalisation that gives them the ability to forecast and manage inventory, and then also being able to provide very specific, more concise campaigns and marketing material to very specific customers based on their own personal habits or purchases.

Edge computing is the other accelerator that is definitely going to be applied to Vietnam in terms of technology adoption for innovation. It may have a significant impact where there is certain data sovereignty or data locality, concerns or requirements where set-up content may need to be residing within Vietnam’s borders.

How can AWS help customers in Vietnam and others in the region to bring today’s emerging technologies to the mainstream?

We have introduced several new services in the region, and will be available in Vietnam later. We are actively working with our Vietnamese customers in terms of the interest of these technologies. One is them is called Amazon Outposts, which delivers a truly consistent hybrid experience by offering the same hardware infrastructure, services, application programming interface, management, and operations on premises as in the cloud. Another service is called Amazon Wavelength. We are openly discussing this with customers and partners here to see their needs. The idea behind it is that telecommunication providers could actually host their own AWS infrastructure, running various AWS services in their 5G network.

In the health industry especially, when you look at telehealth, being able to provide health services online or over the internet by combining it with things like wavelengths and also 5G significantly improves the patient and health professional experience. Another example is autonomous vehicles, which now various companies in Asia-Pacific and also Vietnam are actually looking at by leveraging services like Amazon Wavelength and 5G to allow for a more efficient and effective autonomous vehicle ecosystem.

With 5G, the increase in connectivity will require a shift to ensure cybersecurity defence. How can AWS help them protect the data in a safe manner, and what are AWS’s next steps in Vietnam to increase its coverage?

Security is our top priority, whether it is related to 5G or other technologies as well. Vietnam is now actually one of the leaders in trialling 5G last year and looking at rolling it out in a commercial capacity this year. However, this must be balanced with ensuring the security solutions are in place to protect the data flowing through the network. We have the shared responsibility model, with which AWS will be responsible for protecting the infrastructure that runs all of the services offered in the AWS Cloud. This infrastructure is composed of the hardware, software, networking, personnel, and facilities.

We have actually had a presence in Vietnam since 2017. So we’ve got a range of contacts across our sales, marketing, solutions architecture, and other areas. For example, we work with Circle K in terms of rolling out a particular warehouse management system to support 400 stores across Vietnam. And then also working in other areas, for example, on the startup space as well as in the media and entertainment, VTV is also one of them.

We plan to increase our presence in Vietnam, and hope that customers in Vietnam will start to look to those technologies mentioned earlier to further innovate for their own users or customer bases. We’re working very closely with people on the ground from AWS in Vietnam, as well as with our partner ecosystem that we’ve established in here, as well.

In addition to that, we’re working very closely with academic institutions across the region as well as in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology and FPT Software/University are examples, in terms of providing curriculum and material through various programmes. We have such programmes as the AWS Academy, and the AWS Educate programmes, which allows for students to actually be able to become more familiar with cloud-based technologies like AWS, so that the next generation of engineers or developers or admitted it administrators that are coming through, have the necessary skills to design, manage, and develop applications.