Amazon Web Services to open office in Argentina soon

Amazon Web Services plans to open a new office in Argentina over the coming months to boost support and hone in on opportunities in the local market, Marco Grilanda, Latin America regional manager of AWS told BNamericas.

AWS has had a data center in Brazil since 2011 through which it serves the region with cloud computing, storage, database and business applications. Apart from Brazil, the company has offices in Mexico, and since this year in Colombia and Chile.

"The Argentine office will be complete with sales, presales and support, bringing us closer to our clients," Grilanda said.

According to the executive, local sales offices are also used for training purposes for local partners such as, in the case of Chile, Spanish ERP integrator Seidor and US web hosting company Inmotion.

Grilanda said that clients throughout the region include governments and private sector companies like Chilean bank BCI, which uses AWS for digital banking services, and retail giant Cencosud which is leveraging big data for real-time analytics in its supermarkets.

"This is mission critical information, which is what warrants the local support," Grilanda said.

According to the executive, the constant conversation with clients serves AWS to help reduce costs by supporting clients to pay only for the storage they need at the time.

"Startups can be very successful or fail very quickly. If they fail, they just switch off the cloud services they were using and there is no investment left on the table."

E-commerce discount days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are becoming very popular throughout the region and require rapid scalability. During Argentina's recent Black Friday, local e-commerce platform Btech saw 26mn visits over three days.

In Peru, AWS has helped one of the largest banks, Banco de Crédito launch new applications in 14 weeks, when previously it took 12 weeks just to activate a new server.

WHAT ARE CLIENTS LOOKING FOR?

Grilanda said that AWS has 90 families of services and so far this year has launched 928 new services, based on client feedback. Clients are mostly looking for cloud-based databases, like those offered by Oracle and Microsoft, but cheaper.

AWS is also signing memorandums of understanding with some governments including Chile, Honduras and Argentina to push the use of cloud services in the public sector for storing data and files securely using virtual resources.

For startups, AWS offers Activate, a program designed to provide low cost, easy-to-use cloud computing resources to scale and grow their businesses.

According to Grilanda, multi-media and entertainment, big data analytics and ERPs in the cloud are among the main drivers for the cloud storage business in the region.