AWS nets Malaysia in its web

The buzz was palpable. On 26 April 2016, a crowd of about three thousand thronged the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit held at One World Hotel. Booths set up by AWS collaborators, partners and customers peppered the entrance to the hall venue. The summit saw Dr. Werner Vogels (VP & CTO, AWS), Nick Walton (Head of ASEAN, AWS) and Shane Owenby (AWS Apac MD) all fly in for the occasion.

The summit served as a launchpad of sorts to announce the setting up of AWS’s new KL office and the introduction of its new country MD, Mr. Laurence Si. Si was head honcho at VMware just before. Malaysian customers seem to have bought in. They include instantly recognisable names such as Maybank, AmInvest, edotco Group, Fraser & Neave Holdings Bhd, Fusionex, Grab, iflix, Kim Teck Cheong and KFit, among others. Owenby said, “Choosing to locate the AWS Malaysia office in Kuala Lumpur speaks to the rapidly growing customer base, the local talent here and the investment we are making to accelerate cloud adoption across Malaysia”.

AWS Summit Malaysia 2016 – Audience at the One World Hotel ballroom

To put it in perspective, the AWS platform today includes over 70 cloud services, since its launch in 2006. Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Incognito, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Aurora, are but to name a few. They basically range from compute, storage, database, analytics, gaming development, application services to deployment services which enterprises use to power a wide variety of workloads.

AWS services are available in 12 Regions around the globe and 33 Availability Zones, in the U.S, Brazil, Europe, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Australia and parts of China. Another 5 regions are coming online in 2016, namely Canada, China, India, Ohio and the U.K. Numbers publicly announced in Q4 2015 are: AWS revenue grew 69.5% year-on-year to US$2.4 billion with 28.5% operating margin. This makes AWS a nearly US$10 billion run rate business.

Here are some other “shout-outs” by AWS: It has more than a million active customers in 190 countries, including nearly 2000 government agencies and 5000 education institutions. Its global network now consists of 54 points of presence worldwide. AWS Partner Network (APN) includes tens of thousands of consulting/system integrator/ISV partners, which has seen growth of over 50% in the last 12 months. AWS has also reduced prices 51 times since its 2006 launch. Furthermore, AWS boasts a capacity that tops all the cloud providers out there, combined.

Closer to home, organisations in Malaysia are already using AWS’ s pay-as-you-go suite of cloud infrastructure services to speed time to market without upfront capital expenditure (capex). Malaysian customers are adopting AWS to run core enterprise applications, perform data analytics, live streaming of video, build e-commerce platforms, launch new businesses, host websites, deliver global social and mobile applications, and extend on-premise environments.

As a finance man, edotco Group CFO, Mr. Thivanka Rangala is only too happy not to be hit with another capex cost in his books. No wonder, as edotco is in the telecommunication infrastructure sector, with a footprint of over 3,600 sites nationwide offering a complete range of site portfolios from Ground Based Sites, Rooftop Towers, In-Building Solutions (IBS), Cellular-on-Wheel (COW) to Custom Built sites.

Mr. Arzumy MD, CTO at KFit decided to move to AWS cloud for rapid scale-up across eight countries in the region. His mantra is “focus on innovation, not on infra”. KFit is Asia’s leading mobile fitness-sharing platform. Mr. Subash Palaniappan, Head of IDEA Design at Maybank hopes to study the banks’ massive customer profiles with refined analytics made possible and supported by AWS services. Using AWS, iflix was able to deploy its services rapidly across Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand in a short span of time, acquiring over one million paying customers within several months of launch. Ash Crick, CTO of iflix said, “we are excited that AWS Malaysia has a local office with local staff to enable even closer support as we deepen our use of the AWS cloud services.”