New AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region expands
cloud pioneer’s global footprint and enables customers to run
applications and store their content in data centers in Hong Kong
while connecting to global AWS network
Hong Kong SAR government welcomes the launch as
an economic development milestone, citing the demand for
large-scale cloud technology infrastructure
Thousands of customers and APN Partners across
Hong Kong welcome the new AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region,
including 9GAG, Bowtie, Cathay Pacific, Comba Telecom, FinFabrik,
Fox Networks Group Asia Pacific Limited, Gogo Tech, HSBC, Hong Kong
Disneyland, KPMG China, Melco Resorts & Entertainment, New
World Development, Next Digital, RADICA, Royale International
Group, Swire Coca-Cola, Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB), Union
Medical Healthcare, and many more.
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company
(NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced the opening of the AWS Asia Pacific
(Hong Kong) Region. With this launch, AWS now spans 64 Availability
Zones within 21 geographic regions around the world, and has
announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS
Regions in Bahrain, Cape Town, Jakarta, and Milan. The AWS Asia
Pacific (Hong Kong) Region is the eighth active AWS Region in Asia
Pacific and mainland China along with Beijing, Mumbai, Ningxia,
Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo. Starting today, developers,
startups, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and
non-profit organizations can leverage the new AWS Asia Pacific
(Hong Kong) Region to run their applications locally, serve
end-users across Hong Kong with lower latency, and leverage
advanced technologies from the world’s leading cloud with the
broadest and deepest suite of cloud services to drive innovation.
Customers can get started today at:
https://aws.amazon.com/local/hongkong/
“Hong Kong is globally recognized as a leading financial tech
hub and one of the top places where startups build their
businesses, so we’ve had many customers asking us for an AWS Region
in Hong Kong so they can build their businesses on the world’s
leading cloud with the broadest and deepest feature set,” said
Peter DeSantis, Vice President of Global Infrastructure and
Customer Support, Amazon Web Services. “The dynamic business
environment that exists in Hong Kong – among startups, enterprises,
and government organizations – is pushing them to be one of the
foremost digital areas in Asia. By providing an AWS Region in Hong
Kong Special Administrative Region, we hope this enables more
customers to be more agile, innovate, and transform their
end-users’ experience for decades to come.”
“We are delighted to see the official launch of the AWS Asia
Pacific (Hong Kong) Region, and it comes at a time when we are
embracing digital transformation and developing into an
international innovation and technology hub,” said Nicholas W Yang,
JP, Secretary for Innovation and Technology, Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region Government. “Data has become a new currency
of the digital economy and a new fuel for innovation. This
infrastructure region is an integral component to foster technology
advancements, allowing for greater innovation and further
facilitating our digital transformation. The opening of the AWS
Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region also enhances our leading position
as a data hub and puts Hong Kong in a strong position to lead the
next wave of innovation in data-related technologies.”
The AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region offers three
Availability Zones at launch. AWS Regions are comprised of
Availability Zones, which are technology infrastructure in separate
and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to
significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting business
continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high
availability applications. Each Availability Zone has independent
power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via
redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on
high availability can design their applications to run in multiple
Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault-tolerance. With
the scale of three Availability Zones, the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong
Kong) Region will enable organizations to provide lower latency to
end users in Hong Kong, and across Asia Pacific. Additionally,
local AWS customers with data residency requirements can now store
their content in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region with the
assurance that their content will not move without consent, while
customers building applications now have access to another secure
AWS infrastructure region that meets the highest levels of
security, compliance, and data protection.
Customers and APN Partners welcome the new AWS Asia Pacific
(Hong Kong) Region
Millions of active customers are using AWS each month in over
190 countries around the world, including hundreds of thousands of
customers in Asia Pacific, and thousands of customers in Hong Kong.
Organizations across Hong Kong are moving their mission-critical
workloads to AWS to drive cost savings, accelerate innovation, and
speed-up time-to-market, including enterprise customers such as
Asia Miles, Cathay Pacific, Chinachem Group, Comba Telecom, Fox
Networks Group Asia Pacific Limited, HK01, HSBC, Hong Kong
Disneyland, Kerry Logistics, KeptMe, KPMG China, Melco Resorts
& Entertainment, New World Development, Next Digital, Ocean
Park, Royale International Group, Swire Coca-Cola, Towngas, Turner,
Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) and Union Medical Healthcare.
AWS is also an enabler for Hong Kong’s most successful startups
such as 8 Securities, 9GAG, AfterShip, Bowtie, FinFabrik,
GreenTomato, GRANA, Gogo Tech, Haymarket, Kopi, Lalamove, Madhead,
polljoy, PIXELS, Prenetics, SHOPLINE, Vyond, WeLend, WiZ Connected,
and many more.
Cathay Pacific, the Hong Kong-based international airline, has
been using AWS since 2016, helping the airline deliver
customer-centric products and services responsively, delivering a
high level of performance and reliability for Cathay Pacific’s
website and booking engine infrastructure. “AWS helped us
re-architect and modernize our technology stacks into a cloud
native design, reducing the software development duration time by
67 percent and infrastructure costs by 50 percent. This allowed us
to improve our efficiency and time-to-market significantly,” said
Lawrence Fong, General Manager, IT Solutions, and Information
Technology of Cathay Pacific. “AWS’s impressive and leading suite
of services has opened up a world of possibilities to our IT team,
putting the foremost technology at our fingertips so we can test
new concepts, and deliver innovative ideas quickly to our
end-users. One such idea-to-implementation is to enable blockchain
technology for Asia Miles, which will provide Asia Miles partners a
single data source when managing account activity with a near
real-time ability to manage rewards. Bringing a new AWS Region to
Hong Kong reduces latency for our engineering team, helping them
experiment faster and bring new tools to our travelers, ultimately
resulting in a better customer experience.”
Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB), broadcasting in Hong Kong
since 1967, is the first wireless commercial TV station in Hong
Kong. As Hong Kong’s largest broadcaster, TVB provides
around-the-clock entertainment and news to more than seven million
Hong Kong viewers, and operates an international licensing and
distribution business accessible in more than 200 countries and
regions. “During the year, our terrestrial TV channels continue to
capture robust viewership and report an average audience share of
82 percent against all TV channels, both free and pay, during
weekday prime time,” said SK Cheong, TVB Executive Director and
General Manager. “We have transformed from a traditional TV station
to a complete spectrum of media platforms spanning terrestrial TV,
over-the-top (OTT) service, and social media, and AWS helps us
handle traffic spikes, uplift service availability, and boost
productivity of our digital media business during this journey. By
leveraging the vast amount of features that AWS offers, we have
been able to build a new content marketing and e-commerce business
model in our online video platform, Big Big Channel, and take a
leading role in transforming standard television to a full
digitalized and interactive experience. With the AWS Asia Pacific
(Hong Kong) Region, we will further strengthen our technology
platform, lower latency to online viewers, and continue toward our
goal to expand our digital business to a global scale.”
New World Development (NWD) is one of Hong Kong’s largest
corporations focused on property development, infrastructure, and
services. New World Development develops and invests in properties
in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, mainland China, and
Southeast Asia, and its portfolio includes development and
investment in about 24 million square feet of Hong Kong residential
and commercial property; investments in 17 hotels; and an
additional 4.5 million square feet of land planned for development.
“By running on AWS, we have reduced our time-to-market by 30
percent, and improved service availability by up to 50 percent, all
while saving 60 percent on our overall infrastructure cost compared
to running on-premises data centers,” said Jason Lui, Assistant
General Manager, Technology and Digital Services, New World
Development. “NWD uses services like Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon
S3, Amazon Route 53, Amazon Cloudfront, Application Load Balancer,
Amazon Workdocs, Amazon Workspaces, AWS IAM, AWS WAF, and AWS
Certificate Manager. Now, with the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)
Region, we can leverage more of AWS’s services at near
instantaneous speed, which only furthers our technology
journey.”
Swire Coca-Cola is one of the largest Coca-Cola bottlers in the
world with the exclusive rights to manufacture, market and
distribute products from The Coca-Cola Company in Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region, Taiwan, 11 provinces and the Shanghai
Municipality in mainland China, as well as an extensive area of the
western United States. “We started our cloud journey with AWS in
2018, with a belief that going all-in on cloud would accelerate
innovation, and speed-up time-to-market, which ultimately will
boost our business growth,” said Calvin Ho, Group Manager of
Enterprise Architecture, Cloud Service & IT Operations. “We are
planning to retire our existing data centers, saving us money on
infrastructure costs, while increasing our operational agility with
the security and reliability that AWS provides. We look forward to
extending our partnership with AWS in the new AWS Asia Pacific
(Hong Kong) Region, while modernizing our digital applications so
we can provide a better experience to our customers in Hong Kong,
and across Greater China.”
Bowtie, an Insurtech firm, was granted Hong Kong’s first virtual
insurance company license in 2018. Virtual insurers need to meet
the same standards that regulators require of traditional insurers,
and Bowtie has used AWS’s technology to attract both a younger
generation, and modern users for a convenient experience as a
website and a mobile app. “As a truly ‘made in Hong Kong’ insurance
brand, Bowtie is here to reinvent insurance,” said Michael Chan,
Co-founder and Co-CEO of Bowtie. “Bowtie runs its core system
platform, including policy administration, claims and underwriting
applications on AWS. Building on top of AWS has allowed us to
ensure our company operates in a highly secure and available space
as required of insurance companies operating in a highly regulated
environment. AWS has more security certifications than any other
cloud provider, bringing our customers, and us, a peace of mind
that couldn’t be achieved with another cloud platform. With the
launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region, we will also be
able to meet any requirements to keep our workloads on Hong Kong
Special Administrative Region soil.”
WeLab, a leading Fintech company in Asia, is reinventing
traditional financial services by creating seamless mobile
experiences with proprietary risk management technology and
artificial intelligence capabilities, operating in both B2C and B2B
segments. The startup has recently been granted a virtual banking
license by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, becoming the first
home-grown Hong Kong Fintech company to establish a virtual bank.
In Hong Kong, consumer financing solutions are offered to retail
customers under the brand WeLend. “We leverage the technology
breadth and stability of AWS to run our business, for example,
using AWS to analyze unstructured mobile big data to make credit
decisions for individual borrowers in seconds,” said Eddie Tse,
Head of IT, WeLend. “The simplicity and commoditization of
technologies that AWS delivers enables us to be more agile and
reserve more time to solve real business problems rather than
common platform challenges. The launch of the AWS Asia Pacific
(Hong Kong) Region will further help us use more of AWS’s leading
cloud services, and move workloads that require low latency or data
residency requirements to execute in the cloud.”
AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners welcomed the arrival of the
AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region. The APN includes tens of
thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and Systems
Integrators (SI) around the world. APN Partners build innovative
solutions and services on AWS and the APN helps by providing
business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support. SI
Consulting Partners supporting enterprise and public sector
customers in Hong Kong to migrate to AWS include Accenture,
Capgemini, China Mobile International, Cloudaxis, CloudConnect, DXC
Technology, eCloudValley, GrandTech Cloud Services, ICG, Infosys,
Masterson Technology, Nextlink Technology, Rackspace, Telstra,
GrowthOps, WTT HK, and many others. APN ISVs in Hong Kong including
Deskvault, Multiable, NanoMatriX, RADICA, Torstone Technology, and
many others, are already using AWS to deliver their software to
customers around the world and will serve their Hong Kong customers
from the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region at launch. Customers
can also easily find, trial, deploy, and buy software solutions for
AWS on the AWS Marketplace. For the full list of the members of the
AWS Partner Network, please visit:
https://aws.amazon.com/partners/.
Accenture, a longtime APN Consulting Partner, is a leading
global professional services company, providing a broad range of
services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital,
technology, and operations. With 477,000 people serving clients in
more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the
way the world works and lives. “With nearly 15 years of
collaboration with AWS, Accenture has engineered solutions for tens
of thousands of applications on AWS and employs more than 5,000
cloud professionals trained and certified on AWS which are helping
accelerate innovation for clients globally,” said Peter Yen,
managing director and intelligent engineering services lead at
Accenture Greater China. “The Accenture Amazon Business Group
(AABG) also holds 13 AWS awarded competencies in SAP, security,
mobile, IOT, big data, and machine learning, among others.
Accenture is committed to helping local clients compete at a global
level by joining AWS in their Hong Kong launch and expanding our
own dedicated AABG team in Hong Kong. With impressive results
for clients, such as Cathay Pacific, Accenture is now more ready
than ever to help Hong Kong clients every day across every
industry.”
Jointly engineered by VMware and AWS, VMware Cloud on AWS is an
on-demand hybrid cloud service that is delivered, sold, and
supported by VMware and its partners. VMware Cloud on AWS enables
customers to run applications across a consistent VMware
vSphere-based hybrid cloud environment, with optimized access to a
broad range of AWS services. “Customers across Asia Pacific and in
all industries power their digital businesses using both AWS and
VMware,” said Duncan Hewett, Senior Vice President and General
Manager, Asia-Pacific and Japan at VMware. “Many want to integrate
their on-premises data centers with AWS to create a consistent
hybrid cloud environment. VMware Cloud on AWS delivers on this
promise and we look forward to extending the coverage to the new
AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) in 2019. We look forward to empowering
customers to quickly and confidently scale up or down capacity,
without change or friction, and accelerate their cloud
migrations.”
RADICA provides digital marketing solutions to around 300
businesses, working with customers across Asia to help clients
boost the value of their customer data and customer relationship
management (CRM) systems for email, mobile, and social media
messaging campaigns. The Hong Kong-headquartered company offers a
proprietary e-communication integration platform which automates
campaign activity and sends out as many as three million marketing
messages a day. “To maximize agility, we have migrated the
e-communication platform to AWS, reshaping and strengthening our IT
infrastructure,” said Wallis Chan, Managing Director of RADICA. “We
have been able to enhance our services significantly and can launch
multi-channel campaigns for new clients around 80 percent faster.
Previously, customers may have had to wait up to three months to
deploy this platform for digital campaigns. RADICA uses multiple
Amazon EC2 instance types including M4, C4, R3, and l2, which
provides speedy SSD-backed instance storage for high random I/O
performance. Half of our IT team is now able to concentrate on
development as opposed to administration. We believe that the
launch of AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region will further help us
drive our business forward.”
Investing in the future of Hong Kong
In 2008, AWS opened its first Amazon CloudFront Point of
Presence (PoP) in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to enable
customers to serve content to end-users with low latency. AWS has
since added two more PoPs in Hong Kong, the latest going live in
2016, the same year AWS also launched the first Direct Connect
location in Hong Kong. In 2013, AWS opened its first office in Hong
Kong, which is today staffed by a wide range of functions including
business development, solutions architects, professional services,
technical support, technology evangelists, startup community,
infrastructure engineers, and business operations.
AWS is also continuing to invest in the upskilling of local
developers, students, and the next generation of IT leaders in Hong
Kong through programs such as AWS Academy and AWS Educate. For
students, the AWS Educate program provides access to AWS services
and content designed to build knowledge and skills in cloud
computing. Dozens of universities and business schools in Hong Kong
already participating in the program include the Chinese Methodist
School North Point 1, City University of Hong Kong, College of
Professional and Continuing Education, The University of Hong Kong
School of Professional and Continuing Education (HKU SPACE), Hong
Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong Community College, Hong Kong
Institute of Technology, Hong Kong Institute of Vocational
Education (IVE), Hong Kong University of Science and Technology,
Hong Kong Information Engineering College, the School of
Professional Education and Executive Development, the Chinese
University of Hong Kong, the Education University of Hong Kong, the
Hong Kong Management Association, The Hong Kong Polytechnic
University, The Open University of Hong Kong, and The University of
Hong Kong, and many more.
Another program for higher education institutes is AWS
Academy, which provides AWS-authored
curriculum for students to acquire in-demand cloud computing
skills. In Hong Kong, major institutions taking part include
City University of Hong Kong, Community College of City University,
Hong Kong Community College of Hong Kong Polytechnic University,
Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education, Hong Kong Institute of
Technology, Hong Kong Management Association, School of
Professional Education and Executive Development, Hong Kong
Polytechnic University, Technological Higher Education Institute of
Hong Kong, The School of Professional And Continuing Education of
The University of Hong Kong and Youth College. AWS also offers a
full range of training and certification programs to help those
interested in the latest cloud computing technologies, best
practices, and architectures to advance their technical skills and
further support Hong Kong organizations in their digital
transformation.
To help grow the next generation of Hong Kong enterprises, AWS
supports startups across Hong Kong. AWS launched the AWS
Activate program globally in 2013, helping provide Hong Kong
startups access to guidance and one-on-one time with AWS experts as
well as web-based training, self-paced labs, customer support,
third-party offers, and up to $100,000 in AWS Cloud Credits. AWS
also collaborates with local accelerators and incubators such as
Cyberport, and Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation
(HKSTP) to provide startups with access to peers and investors.
Developers and businesses can access the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong
Kong) Region beginning today. A full list of services and details
on pricing is available at
https://aws.amazon.com/local/hongkong/
About Amazon Web Services
For 13 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most
comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over
165 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases,
networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial
intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security,
hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and
application development, deployment, and management from 64
Availability Zones (AZs) within 21 geographic regions, spanning the
U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong
Special Administrative Region, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea,
Singapore, Sweden, and the UK. Millions of customers including the
fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading
government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become
more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit
aws.amazon.com.
About Amazon
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