Peter DeSantis, AWS senior vice president of global infrastructure and customer support, says the organisation has long history in South Africa, working to support the growth of the local technology community for over 15 years.
“In that time, builders, developers, entrepreneurs, and organisations have asked us to bring an AWS Region to Africa and today we are answering these requests by opening the Cape Town Region,” he says. “We look forward to seeing the creativity and innovation that will result from African organisations building in the cloud.”
DeSantis led the establishment of the first Amazon presence in Cape Town, setting up a Development Centre in 2004, focused on networking, next-generation software for customer support, and the technology behind Amazon EC2, the foundation of its cloud services. In 2015, Amazon opened an AWS office in Johannesburg, employing a local team of account managers, business development managers, customer services representatives, partner managers, professional services consultants, solutions architects, and technical account managers.
In 2017, the Amazon Global Network expanded to Africa through AWS Direct Connect points of presence. In 2018, Amazon established its first physical infrastructure on the African continent, launching Amazon CloudFront locations in Johannesburg and Cape Town. The data centres, or Region, represent the culmination of this journey.
Vogels says that many AWS customers “are doing courageous things, at the forefront of the COVID-19 fight”.
“They are helping to provide life-saving information and resources, modelling data and delivering analytics to governments, ensuring millions of students continue to get the education they deserve, and connecting citizens with healthcare providers – demonstrating first-hand the power of cloud computing.”
He gives the example of virtual schooling provider Top Dog Education, which is allowing millions of school children to continue with their education through the CambriLearn and MyTopDog learning platforms, running on AWS.
“Learners have access to e-lessons, study material, accredited tutors, and interactive material – helping them keep learning and engaged during these challenging times.”
One of its largest customers, Accenture, has developed a COVID call center offer for enterprises, offering Amazon Chime, Amazon Connect, Amazon WorkDocs, and Amazon WorkSpaces services to help businesses stay connected from anywhere, on any device, and respond to customer requests.
“This is giving call centres and customer support operations across South Africa the ability to quickly spin up environments so their agents can safely work from home. Speed, and the ability to quickly deploy technology resources, has been essential to help communities operate during the COVID shutdown in South Africa.”
The COVID Connect platform, for example, was deployed on AWS in three days by a volunteer group of local developers. It allows hospitals and clinics with a shortage of food, water, or medical supplies can be quickly connected with people and organisations that have surplus of these materials.
AWS Partner Network partner iOCO was able to launch a website for the Solidarity Fund in two days, to collect donations that will help South Africa’s national health response to COVID-19, contribute to research to detect and understand the magnitude of the disease, and support those whose lives have been disrupted by the pandemic.
“Learning more about how our customers and partners are doing inspirational things at this uncertain time leads us to believe the future for Africa is bright,” says Vogels. “We have been in South Africa for over 15 years and continue to invest in jobs, community support, and technology infrastructure. The AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will open countless opportunities for organisations of all sizes, and we look forward to seeing the inspiring innovations that will come from our customers.”
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