Amazon hires creme of Australia's IT talent

Cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services hired three of the most technically competent cloud computing engineers in Australia at the back end of 2012, throwing down yet another challenge to incumbents in the local market.

The US company launched its first two points of presence in Sydney in mid-November 2012, pipping Rackspace by a matter of months and changing the landscape for web hosting in Australia.

Amazon has now hired Melbourne IT chief technology officer Glenn Gore to lead its Australian technology architecture team.

Glenn Gore

Sources at Melbourne IT told iTnews Gore will vacate his post at Melbourne IT at some stage in February 2013. Gore previously held similar positions at OzEmail, MCI Worldcom and WebCentral (later purchased by Melbourne IT).

Melbourne IT CEO Theo Hnarakis praised Gore's 10-year contribution to the company, particularly for his "pioneering" work on new services and technology.

"Glenn is pursuing new opportunities and we are pleased to be continuing to work with him via our partnership with Amazon Web Services," he said.

"It is an exciting time in the Australian enterprise hosting market. The company recently became an APN Consulting Partner with Amazon Web Services - our proven ability to design and manage complex web environments that optimise performance and cost is a compelling offering to deliver predictable web outcomes and strong returns for businesses operating online.”

At AWS Gore will lead a team of pre-sales solutions architects working with Australian customers looking to implement cloud hosting.

Gore will be working alongside Rodney Haywood, the chief cloud architect at Optus/Alphawest, whom Amazon has also scalped as a solutions architect.

Rodney Haywood

Haywood oversaw the build of Optus’ cloud computing services, a project for which he won multiple vendor-led awards. He is also an executive board member of the Storage Networking Industry Association.

Late last year Amazon also poached Internode peering manager Matthew Moyle-Croft to run its peering program out of Seattle, USA.

Matthew Moyle-Croft

Moyle-Croft is well known as the administrator of AusNOG (network operators group).

Earlier in 2012, Amazon hired former Cisco and Oracle execs to lead its Australian operations, plus sales leads from several local hosting companies.

Amazon Web Services would not comment on its recruitment strategy.