Businesses across ASEAN head to AWS cloud for optimal growth

Conor McNamara - Managing director for ASEAN, AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offering, announced a suite of new service announcements showcasing its continued commitment to innovation at the re:Invent 2021 event held on Nov 29-Dec 3.

They include three new database capabilities that make it easier and more cost-efficient for customers to scale and run the right databases for their job. It also announced six new Amazon SageMaker capabilities for its industry-leading machine learning (ML) service that make it even more cost-effective; two new initiatives that make ML more accessible; and the latest innovations in ML services and training programmes.

AWS has announced the general availability of AWS Outposts in Vietnam. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that gives customers access to the AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools in virtually any data centre or co-location facility for a consistent hybrid experience. With AWS Outposts, customers can run AWS compute, storage, database, and other services locally and access the full range of services available in any AWS Region to build, manage, and scale their on-premises applications.

In the keynote speech for re:Invent 2021, CEO Adam Selipsky said the company is running as hard now as it was back in 2006. “In the 15 years since we launched AWS, the cloud has become not just another tech revolution, but an enabler of a fundamental shift in the way that businesses actually function. There’s no industry that hasn’t been touched and no business that can’t be radically disrupted.”

The cloud is enabling small- and medium-sized enterprises to go global, driving financial inclusion, and enhancing citizen service delivery. In addition, the higher demand for collaboration technologies and business continuity brought forward in the last two years has seen sustained growth.

AWS has seen exceptional growth in certain sectors in this time, with Vietnamese-based video conferencing provider TranS seeing user numbers jump from 1,000 to over 450,000 since the pandemic emerged, with AWS supporting this spike in customer onboarding and usage in a seamless manner.

Conor McNamara, managing director for ASEAN at AWS, told VIR, “Unsurprisingly, we have also seen similar trends in telemedicine where organisations like Dr. Anywhere, Dr. Raksa, and Halodoc have been able to both expand their service offerings while scaling seamlessly and cost-effectively on the AWS Cloud.”

In ASEAN, organisations have leveraged AWS to quickly pivot their business models to support the changing needs of their end customers and establish new sources of revenue. One example is StoreHub in Malaysia, which saw its brick-and-mortar food and beverage clients struggling to stay afloat. To help these customers meet changing consumer habits, StoreHub launched food app Beep Delivery in just three days on AWS. Within the first week, StoreHub onboarded 105 restaurants onto the new platform.

Businesses have also leveraged the AWS Cloud to enhance the resiliency of their businesses and cost savings, especially those in the hospitality, airline, and tourism industries.

According to McNamara, the ASEAN region, including Vietnam, is riding a wave of innovation that relies heavily on a digital workforce equipped to meet the rising demand for cloud computing.

“We believe that skills will unlock economic growth and cloud acceleration – and our AWS Partners are instrumental in the next step of this journey,” he noted, citing TechX, one of AWS’s Training Partners in Vietnam, as an example. TechX designs and builds customised training courses to educate customers about the cloud as well as how to use AWS cloud-based tools for their business operations.

Another trend expected in ASEAN’s vibrant and burgeoning startup scene is the growing number of born-in-the-cloud startups in the region. Industry insiders added that they are seeing more financial institutions across the bloc use cloud technology to tap into underserved markets to drive financial inclusion, education, and security.

According to a report by Research and Markets, Vietnam’s cloud service sector will enjoy an annual growth rate of 18.8 per cent over the next five years. This is due to the growing need for security and safety of official data of various organisations and corporations across the country.

Santanu Dutt - Director of Technology, ASEAN, AWS Our global footprint is now 25 regions wide with availability zones across six continents. We have already pre-announced nine additional regions, including the Jakarta region in Indonesia. Now, in addition, at Re:invent 2021, CEO Adams talked about his 30 new additional local zones, and local zones. Recently, we announced the general availability of AWS Outposts in Vietnam. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that gives customers access to the AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools in virtually any data centre or co-location facility for a consistent hybrid experience. We have worked towards making Outposts available across most of our Southeast Asia markets.

Peter Moore - Regional managing director, Asia-Pacific, Japan, Worldwide Public Sector, AWS Due to the very high mobile penetration in AEAN countries, citizens, patients, and students are going to demand that online cloud-based mobile apps become the default for interaction supporting citizen, student/teacher, and patient-centric use cases. In 2022, developers will also begin to make sustainability-conscious decisions about the systems and applications they are building. They will seek new approaches to cloud architectures that are optimised for the needs of the planet as well as the needs of end users, according to another one of Werner Vogels’ predictions.