Amazon Web Services hires locally

Cloud service provider Amazon Web Services has moved to expand its Asia Pacific team in line with the March 2 launch of its second data centre in the region.

Since February, the company has sought 25 business and technical staff in Japan, Singapore, China, India, Korea and Australia.

It sought a Sydney-based, customer-facing solution architect and regional sales managers in Sydney and Melbourne.

According to job listings, the solutions architect was to work on “strategic accounts”, assisting local customers with specific implementation projects.

Meanwhile, regional sales managers would aim to drive market penetration in Australian enterprises to meet quarterly revenue targets.

Amazon also planned to appoint AWS account managers in its Singaporean office to look after customers in Australia, China, Korea, Singapore, India and the rest of the region.

A spokesman for Amazon Web Services declined to disclose staffing figures, stating only that its Singapore-based staff travelled across Asia Pacific to serve regional customers.

“We are expanding our APAC team and they travel to all locales in APAC to serve our customers,” she said.

Australian interest in cloud computing has grown in recent months, with the Federal Government expected to establish a cloud procurement panel by December.

But barriers to uptake remained for government and financial organisations, which faced security and data sovereignty concerns when storing data overseas.

Amazon’s spokesman said the company planned to launch additional data centres “over time”, dodging questions about the establishment of an Australian facility.

Last April, Amazon’s senior vice president for web services Andy Jassy told iTnews that the company was “very hopeful and optimistic about have a data centre presence in Australia in the near future”.

The company currently had data centres in five “regions” – the Eastern US, Western US, Ireland, Singapore and Tokyo.

“We plan to launch additional Availability Zones across different regions and countries over time,” the spokesman said on Friday.