Cloud pioneer now offers its suite of web services from new Singapore datacenters to serve customers desiring an Asia Pacific presence
SEATTLE—April 29, 2010—(NASDAQ: AMZN)—Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., today announced the launch of its first Asia Pacific Region. Asia Pacific-based businesses or global businesses with customers based in Asia can now leverage the AWS suite of infrastructure web services to build their businesses and run their applications in the cloud. Prior to today, the AWS platform has been available from datacenters in the U.S. and Europe. The first AWS Asia Pacific Region (located in Singapore) is now open and any business or software developer can sign up and get started today at http://aws.amazon.com.
Before AWS launched in 2006, businesses would take on the massive capital investment of building their own infrastructure or contract with a vendor for a fixed amount of datacenter capacity that they might or might not use. This choice meant either paying for wasted capacity or having to worry that the amount of capacity they forecasted was insufficient to keep pace with their growth. Businesses spent time and money managing their own datacenter or a co-location facility, which meant time not spent on growing their actual business or differentiating their offering for customers. When it launched in 2006, AWS offered
a completely new way to run virtually any business that used technology—incur no up-front expenses or long-term commitments, turn capital expense into variable operating expense, pay only for what you use, add or shed resources as quickly as you wish, free up scarce engineering resources from the undifferentiated heavy lifting of running your own infrastructure—all without sacrificing operational performance, reliability, or security.
“One of the most frequent and resounding requests over the last year has been for AWS to launch an Asia Pacific presence. We’ve heard it from Asia Pacific companies already using AWS in our US datacenters; we’ve heard it from our U.S. and European customers wanting to better serve Asia Pacific end-users; and we’ve heard it loud and clear from Asia Pacific businesses who preferred to wait to leverage the AWS infrastructure platform until we had a datacenter presence in Asia,” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President of Amazon Web Services. “We look forward to helping Asia Pacific companies accelerate their time to market and spend their scarce engineering resources on what differentiates their business rather than on infrastructure.”
Companies ranging in size from start-ups to large enterprises in over 190 countries around the world are using AWS today. For example, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is using AWS for its e4 Mars Rover Application, which acts as a platform to massively parallelize the analysis of telemetry and images from the Mars Rovers; global pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly is using AWS to provide computational pipelines to scientists across the globe for a number of tasks, ranging from sequence database searching to protein structure prediction and virtual screening. In addition to a broad and global customer base, AWS has a vast partner community that offers customers many different options and flexibility for using AWS. Partners such as Red Hat, Oracle, Sun, MySQL, IBM, salesforce.com and RightScale along with consultancies such as CapGemini, Deloitte, Accenture, Tata Consultancy Services and Patni Computer Systems are helping companies all over the world take their businesses to the AWS cloud.
“Capgemini is delighted by the launch of the Singapore region. This is yet another uplift in the capability of AWS and provides our global client base with more choice and flexibility. Our clients now have four regions to choose from, which allows them to deploy applications closer to user populations and ultimately provide an enhanced user experience,” said Simon Plant, Product Lead of Cloud Computing, Capgemini.
Many businesses and developers in Singapore are already using AWS. One of Asia’s leading securities brokers Kim Eng is using AWS to host its trading application for the iPhone that will be launching soon. “By leveraging AWS’ physical infrastructure in Asia, we are able to minimize latency for our KE Trade iPhone mobile trading app and the speed of our app will not be compromised if there are any sudden spikes in end user traffic. Going forward, Kim Eng intends to use AWS cloud computing infrastructure to help enhance our development capability and product innovation, and to reinforce our position as a leading stockbroker in Asia,” said Ong Seng Gee, Executive Director, Kim Eng Securities.
Singapore-based startup company iTwin, creator of the iTwin consumer device which provides plug and play remote file access, recently started using Amazon EC2. “To enable encrypted remote file access, it is necessary to relay data traffic through highly scalable, globally available servers. Amazon EC2 provides us an easy to deploy, reliable and highly scalable cloud-based service, thus significantly reducing our upfront capital expenditure,” said Lux Anantharaman, Founder and CEO, iTwin. “After evaluating multiple cloud service providers, we realized AWS is the only one which is globally available and which satisfies our deployment needs. AWS is extremely simple to configure and use, provides a comprehensive suite of web services which are unmatched by any other provider, and the billing system is convenient. Last but not least, our engineers love AWS.”
Singapore-based ASKnLearn provides internet-based Learning Management System and multimedia content to over 180 schools and institutions in Singapore. “Using S3 and EC2 allows us to scale our services rapidly in a cost effective manner and enables us to meet sudden spike in demand for our services. We plan to start using the new Singapore region right away and enhance our offerings by using AWS in delivering bandwidth-demanding rich media services such as video streaming and live conferencing,” said Victor Yuk, General Manager, ASKnLearn.
Elixir Technology is a Singapore-based company that provides an integrated business intelligence suite for Data Extraction-Transformation-Loading, Reporting, Dashboard, Scheduling, and OLAP for both technical and business users. Later this year Elixir will launch its “Business Intelligence on Cloud” offering on AWS, offering its customers elastic multi-server scalability, secured multi-tenancy control, and flexible utility licensing. “Cloud computing is the ideal operating model where both capex and opex of IT systems can be fully optimized. AWS is the clear choice in terms of its proven track record, open architecture, and flexible pricing model. With Elixir’s BI on Cloud coupled with AWS, we are ready to scale to the new heights along with all our partners and customers,” said Lau Shih Hor, CEO of Elixir Technology.
DS3 provides web security solutions for enterprises and financial institutions in Asia Pacific. More than 20 banks in Asia are already using the DS3 Authentication Server to secure their web portals. “By offering the DS3 Authentication Server using the new AWS infrastructure in Singapore, DS3 will be able to offer cost-effective and highly available strong authentication services to any organization wanting to secure their user access and transactions,” said Tan Teik Guan, CEO of DS3.
Developers and businesses can access AWS services from the new “Singapore” Availability Zones beginning today, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS). More details on each of these services and specific pricing for each is available at http://aws.amazon.com/products/.
“The decision by Amazon Web Services to locate its first Asia Pacific cloud-based infrastructure platform in Singapore highlights our strengths as a global and regional high-end IT services hub. We look forward to the new collaborative opportunities afforded by the presence of AWS, which will certainly add to the vibrancy of the infocomm ecosystem in Singapore,” said Ronnie Tay, Chief Executive of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore.
About Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth’s Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon’s own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Kindle and Kindle DX are the revolutionary portable readers that wirelessly download books, magazines, newspapers, blogs and personal documents to a crisp, high-resolution electronic ink display that looks and reads like real paper. Kindle and Kindle DX utilize the same 3G wireless technology as advanced cell phones, so users never need to hunt for a Wi-Fi hotspot. Kindle is the #1 bestselling product across the millions of items sold on Amazon.
Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and www.amazon.cn. As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.
Forward-Looking Statements
This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management’s expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com’s financial results is included in Amazon.com’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.
