Middle East holds ‘many opportunities’ for cloud technology, Amazon MENA chief says

As part of its investment, AWS will be collaborating with Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) across the UAE’s knowledge economy on various ecosystem and education initiatives, training and startup enablement programmes.

ADIO said Abu Dhabi’s digital economy will be boosted through the launch of the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region in the first half of 2022 which aims to accelerate cloud adoption and empower organisations to innovate faster.

Vinod Krishnan, head of Middle East and North Africa, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Already ranked the Smartest City in the Middle East according to IMD’s Smart City Index 2020, Abu Dhabi continues to strengthen its digital infrastructure and capacity to support capabilities across the emirate’s rapidly expanding innovation ecosystem.

In an in-depth, exclusive interview with Arabian Business, Vinod Krishnan, head of Middle East and North Africa, Amazon Web Services (AWS) talks about the demand driving the data centres’ creation, the tech behind the centres – including cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) – job creation in the UAE and more.

What demand is driving the move to AWS create these new data centres, where has the increase in demand come from, ecommerce, more businesses starting up?

The Middle East holds many opportunities where cloud technology can be a key enabler: economies that are diversifying; a digitally native and young population; a budding startup community; and a number of industries that are looking to undertake digital transformation. We see very strong demand for AWS services in the Middle East as customers are accelerating their journeys to the cloud. Adoption of AWS cloud services is happening across multiple sectors including financial services, hospitality, media and entertainment, retail, and government. We also see strong demand in the Middle East for AWS technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, data analytics, IoT, and much more.

At a time when so many industries are being disrupted, cloud has become a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and organisations to accelerate their pace of innovation to better serve their customers and achieve their strategic goals. Every organisation in the world is seeing that you have to be willing to disrupt yourself in order to remain competitive and adjust to a rapidly changing world. While having a lower cost infrastructure is an enabler for transformation, it is typically not the main driver. The main drivers are agility and innovation, and the AWS cloud enables these in a very significant way. Why is this important? Because it helps organisations focus on what matters most, which is providing their customers with the best services and experiences.

Adoption of AWS cloud services is happening across multiple sectors including financial services, hospitality, media and entertainment, retail, and government

We have also seen significant acceleration in public and private sector cloud adoption across the region due to the pandemic. We think this is just the early stages of a dramatic acceleration in innovation with cloud computing – companies and organisations will only increase their use of cloud as the far-reaching benefits of the technology become more and more apparent. When the pandemic first started, private and public sector organisations had to find solutions for their business continuity, implement remote solutions, review their architectures to support the peaks of traffic and adapt to so much more. With such a clear and immediate need to transform all aspects of daily life, cloud allowed organisations to move fast and transform their processes and systems.

For example, in education, technology has been essential for students to continue learning during this unprecedented time of temporary and sustained school closings. Cloud technology has played an important role enabling virtual classrooms and keeping students and teachers connected. For example, AWS worked with Alef Education in the UAE to expand free access to its learning platform so learning never stops. We also supported other organisations in the region, working with Mawdoo3.com to create the Darsak e-learning platform in Jordan, as well as with Bahrain’s Ministry of Education to adapt its existing cloud-based learning solution to absorb the nation-wide adoption of remote learning. In Egypt, we worked with the government and Thinqi developer CDSM to scale operations to enable continued education for the country’s 22 million students.

Cloud also provided a new way for enterprises to rapidly respond to an unprecedented and volatile global economy. When Seera, one of the Middle East’s leading travel and hospitality businesses, saw demand drop at the start of the pandemic, the company started talking to AWS about how cloud could help reduce costs, but soon also began to explore how cloud computing could be used to develop new services, increase automation, and improve security. It also took the opportunity to train and empower its team with the latest technologies to accelerate innovation so that it could be ready when travel resumes. Startups too had to adapt fast in the pandemic and benefited from the agility of the cloud to reduce capacity and lower costs during this time, or increase capacity to respond to increased customer demand. For example, talabat, the region’s leading food and grocery delivery application is relying on AWS to respond and cope with the surge in consumer demand over the past year.

How big an expansion on your existing operation is this? And is this a bell weather for economic growth, would you say growing customer needs means more economic activity?

AWS has been investing and expanding our presence in the Middle East for many years. The new AWS Middle East Region in UAE, which will launch in the first half of 2022, will comprise of three Availability Zones (AZ). This is our second region in the Middle East with the existing AWS Region in Bahrain, giving customers more choice, lower latency, and flexibility to leverage advanced technologies from AWS. The new AWS Region builds on our ongoing investment in the UAE, which includes two AWS Direct Connect locations and two Amazon CloudFront edge locations launched in 2018. We opened an office here in 2017 and have been growing the teams to directly engage with AWS.

Opening the UAE cloud infrastructure region is also a commitment to support the local economy to accelerate innovation and growth, encourage entrepreneurship, drive efficiencies, and realise important long-term cost reductions. Cloud computing has completely democratised technology and today anyone with some basic knowledge of IT, an idea and a credit card can access the same, world-class technology services on demand. This gives smaller companies the ability to compete in ways that were very expensive and impossible in the past.

Startups today are able to quickly launch their new ideas at a cost and speed that simply would not have been possible if they had to build their own data centers. And, it means that they’ve been able to focus all of their engineering brain power on the things that consumers love — the app — versus the undifferentiated infrastructure it runs on. An example of this is Careem, one of the region’s great success stories. Born on the AWS Cloud, Careem has relied on AWS for all its IT infrastructure from the very beginning, allowing it to focus on geographical and new vertical expansion and to innovate new technologies and services.

For the Middle East’s young population, this access to leading technology creates limitless opportunities for innovation and the ability to build businesses that contribute to economic growth. As regional governments look to build a digitised future, startups will play a key role in closing the gap for the region’s digital needs. Startups in the Middle East are already taking advantage of the cloud to deliver viable businesses that bring regional solutions, and innovating in every imaginable way – be it to deliver music streaming services like Anghami, or healthcare services like Vezeeta, or personal finance services like Sarwa.

Strong demand in the Middle East for AWS technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, data analytics, IoT, and much more.

Enterprises are also turning to advanced cloud technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive digital transformation. Aramex, the global provider of logistics and transportation solutions, built a data analytics and machine learning platform on AWS to solve for the lack of proper physical addresses in the region by developing intelligent address prediction models that convert descriptive addresses into geo locations. As a result of this adoption, Aramex has increased accuracy in shipping-date predictions by 74 percent, and lowered its average processing time for a prediction from 2.5 seconds to under 200 milliseconds.

In addition to infrastructure, AWS continues to make investments in education initiatives, training, and start-up enablement programs to support the UAE’s digital transformation and economic development plans. To foster entrepreneurship and the growth of new businesses in the UAE, AWS will be further expanding the AWS Activate program to support the UAE’s startups and SMBs. Through the AWS Training and Certification programs, AWS will also work with government entities to support the up-skilling and re-training of the workforce with the latest cloud computing training curriculum. For students and educators, AWS will provide higher education institutions and their educators with cloud computing courses to prepare students to pursue industry-recognised certifications and careers in cloud computing.

Where are the key sectors or the key countries you’ll be serving with these data centres?

With the upcoming AWS Middle East Region in UAE, organisations of all sizes will be able to innovate faster and serve end-users with even lower latency across the region. It will also enable local customers with data residency requirements to store their data in the UAE while also providing even lower latency across the country and region. This opens up new opportunities particularly in regulated sectors that are a growth focus for the UAE, such as banking and healthcare. For example, First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), which is the UAE’s largest bank, has put in place a cloud-first approach as one of the fundamental principles of their technology strategy. The bank has been using AWS Outposts for both development and test and production workloads, which has accelerated their digital transformation with 50% improved time-to-market. The upcoming data centers in the UAE will help them realise their cloud ambitions effectively and securely while being fully compliant with local regulation.

The upcoming data centers in the UAE will help them realise their cloud ambitions effectively and securely while being fully compliant with local regulation

Employment wise will these centres be staffed by new staff, existing staff relocating? What’s the ratio? Any particular focus on emiratisation for new recruits? Can you quantify the numbers of new jobs?

The UAE has a very diverse workforce and a large pool of regional and global talent. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and strives to hire and develop the best employees. The upcoming cloud infrastructure region brings with it – both directly and indirectly – a number of highly skilled, well-paid jobs to the local economy. As cloud adoption grows, demand for cloud related skills will also grow across the public and private sectors, as well as the partner and channel ecosystem. The building of the new region will also support hundreds of jobs in construction, transport, and other industries in the local economy. The kind of roles we are hiring for at AWS include data center engineers, support engineers, engineering operations managers, security specialists, and many more. As well as the data centres, AWS continues to hire in our offices in Bahrain, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. We are looking for individuals to join us as account managers, solutions architects, business developers, partner managers, professional services consultants, start-up community developers, support staff, and various other functions.