Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the biggest global players in internet technology, says it is ready to help Indonesia embrace the digital transformation. The US-based company set up its Jakarta infrastructure “region” in December 2021 and has committed to investing US$5 billion in the country over a period of 15 years. AWS ASEAN managing director Conor McNamara spoke to The Jakarta Post’s Deni Ghifari about the company’s philosophy, its views on Indonesia and the digital transformation.
AWS has plans in Indonesia, AWS is easily a billion-dollar run rate business globally and growing at 33 percent year-on-year. In Indonesia, the region announcement was a really big statement for us. We made a commitment to invest $5 billion in the country over the next 15 years. So that’s a forward-looking commitment to the country, and that investment will be broken into multiple different categories.
The first one, obviously, is the infrastructure. We have a three-availability-zone region. An availability zone is one or more data centers, separate power grids, separate floodplains, physically separated. It gives customers a level of resiliency and redundancy for how they run their workloads. And how we operate and run that infrastructure also requires big investment.
The second one is our extended team. We will also allocate a sum of that investment to all of our team in Indonesia over that 15-year period in terms of our support organization, official services organization, our public policy, and legal and marketing departments, etc.
The third pillar is our partners. We really think about our partners as an extension of our own team. We’re focused on building local partners in Indonesia who can help our customers leverage the cloud. We make a lot of investments, upskilling those partners, giving them credits and incentive programs to drive workload adoption. In addition, we also look to get partners who have international businesses to invest in the nation, like GSI, Accenture, Deloitte or TCS and so on, to further invest in building practices with us here.
Then, the fourth big pillar is skills. We’ve already trained 300,000 Indonesians on the AWS cloud, and we plan to train hundreds of thousands more over the years. We look at that through various vectors; we look at how we’re training customers who are currently using us. And then we also look at how we’re training the next generation of builders.
In terms of second-level education, third-level education, we have Laptops for Builders, where we provide laptops for students across Indonesia, because we believe that’s kind of the barrier for them to access cloud technologies. That’s a big area of focus for us as well.
September 9, 2022, The Jakarta Post
(https://www.thejakartapost.com/business/2022/09/09/executive-column-aws-to-invest-5b-in-indonesias-digital-transformation.html?)