Amazon Web Services looks to a future contributing “billions” to Aotearoa.
Amazon Web Services has just celebrated its 10th anniversary in New Zealand. In this opinion piece, Tim Dacombe-Bird, AWS’s public sector country manager, looks back – and ahead to a $10.8bn boost to NZ’s GDP.
It’s been 10-years since Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched operations in New Zealand and what a decade it has been.
When I joined in AWS 2013, not too many people knew who AWS was. Many of my friends asked me why I was leaving the IT industry for an online bookstore. I was even asked if I could speed up delivery of their latest book purchases from Amazon.com (which AWS can actually help with!). Back then, cloud adoption was in its infancy and digital transformation wasn’t yet a priority for businesses. We had a handful of customers and just one channel partner. But what we had was a passion to help Kiwi organisations harness our innate spirit of pioneering, innovation and invention to transform New Zealand and the world for the better. Fast forward to today and we support thousands of active New Zealand customers every month to digitally transform, and deliver innovative products and services that drive revenue, optimise costs, and improve citizen and customer experiences. I’m so proud of the progress made.
Cloud democratises innovation and allows Kiwis to start small and securely scale their businesses with ease. We’ve seen appetite for cloud grow as businesses see the potential to leverage advanced services such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). To support this, we’re making a number of big investments to build infrastructure in New Zealand. Many of these we’ve already launched including an AWS Local Zone location in Auckland, which places AWS compute, storage, database, and other services near large populations, enabling customers with low latency needs or a data residency preference access to run workloads with single-digit millisecond latency.
Next up is our $7.5 billion investment to launch an AWS Region in New Zealand, under development in Auckland. An AWS Region is a physical location where we cluster data centres. Our Region here will have three isolated and physically separate Availability Zones (AZ), with each one consisting of one or more data centres, with independent power, cooling, and physical security. Opening an AWS Region in Aotearoa is expected to generate 1000 new jobs, add $10.8bn to New Zealand’s GDP over 15 years, and bring world-class technology closer to Kiwis. We’re excited about combining this capability with our culture of innovation and invention to see where we will be as a nation in 10 years’ time.
We build our infrastructure with a focus on efficiency, from the design of our data centers and hardware, to modelling the performance of our operations for continuous enhanced efficiency. By continuously improving our efficiency, we can reduce the amount of energy needed to operate our data centers. Last year, AWS announced an agreement with Mercury New Zealand to power our Auckland Region with 100 per cent net-new renewable energy at launch. Our sustainability commitments are part of The Climate Pledge which Amazon co-founded in 2019, to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 – 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement.
We also have a commitment to being water positive by 2030, which means AWS will return more water to communities than it uses in direct operations. A big part of getting to water positive starts with our data centers, where we are working to improve water use efficiency and increase the use of sustainable water sources. To unlock the full potential of cloud infrastructure in New Zealand, and ensure Kiwi businesses of all sizes grow, evolve and innovate, we need a local workforce with the skills to leverage the global digital and AI revolution we’re experiencing. From our own research we know it can be challenging to find the right talent, with 64 per cent of New Zealand employers surveyed confirming this.
AWS is committed to working with our customers, partners, and industry to develop the workforce with the required skillsets. Last year we announced a commitment with the New Zealand government to provide training opportunities for 100,000 people in New Zealand over five years. This is part of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) collaboration with the government on a series of projects to drive innovation across the country, accelerate digital transformation, and support the government’s Digital Strategy for Aotearoa. To meet this goal, AWS is collaborating with industry, government, education providers, and customers to deliver more than 600 free training courses, including many in AI and generative AI, to support re-skilling, upskilling, and organisational training for Kiwis of all ages, backgrounds and experience levels.
We’re also passionate about seeing under-represented communities, like Māori and Pasifika, join the technology sector. In 2021, we launched our AWS re/Start digital skills programme in New Zealand, a free 12-week full-time course providing cloud skills to people in-between jobs or under-employed, and to Māori and Pasifika communities. We also offer free programmes such as AWS Hāpori Wahine, a 4-week initiative, to help women build cloud skills. You can read about Tori Newing’s story here, a young mum of four who completed AWS training to pursue a career in IT and who is inspiring others in the community to retrain.
Our skills commitment extends to key New Zealand industries such as the agriculture and food production industries. In 2022, we launched AWS Agritech School, a one-stop shop for Kiwi farmers, producers and growers to learn more about the cloud and pick up vital skills to continue evolving their production techniques. This is now a global program founded right here in New Zealand.
AWS has and continues to make these local investments to support the growth of our customers and partners – and looking back, there have been many wonderful examples. Perhaps one of the finest is our customer Xero – early adopters of AWS cloud who scaled from 700,000 to over 3.7m customers around the world.
In one of our early meetings with the Xero team in Seattle, Amazon’s Chief Technology Officer, Werner Vogels, discussed Amazon’s own journey and how we could collaborate. We worked with Xero to confirm AWS was the right partner technically and culturally and, at AWS’s Auckland Summit event in 2015, Rod Drury, Xero Founder and then CEO, announced Xero was going all-in on AWS. It’s the moment that signalled that AWS had arrived in New Zealand.
Organisations like Loyalty NZ, Wellington City Council and Datacom have also done amazing things on AWS.
Brian Ferris, Chief Technology Officer, Loyalty NZ: “Over Black Friday we just crank up our e-commerce store by about 800 per cent. That’s not a challenge any more. In the old days that would cost millions of extra hardware that would be sitting around 360 days a year and you’d use it for five. What we can do now is just on a different planet, it’s like comparing a horse and cart to a Ferrari.”
We’re working with Kiwi companies on cloud technology to innovate in areas like urban planning and road infrastructure challenges, healthcare, cybersecurity, carbon emissions and sustainability, and a new generation of more agile, AI-driven technology solutions. For Central and Local Government, there are many opportunities for technology to better place citizens at the centre of public service delivery.
I’m excited to see what we can collectively achieve in the next decade to improve the lives of our customers, our community, and the citizens of New Zealand.