Cloud closer with Perth local zone

IT was only five years ago that Gerry Harvey was seeking to convince his company’s shareholders that Amazon’s entry into the Australian market was a “dumb” move. Bricks-and-mortar retailers wouldn’t survive the splash,

Credit Suisse analysts warned at the time, amid expectations the US-based e-commerce giant would swallow significant market share by 2022, much to the detriment of electronic goods outlets JB-Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman.

That warning from the vault would make for interesting reading for Harvey Norman shareholders now, with shares priced at $4 each, at parity with when the ASX shut over the 2017 break.

Not that Amazon has faltered, reporting $1.8 billion in sales revenue in 2021 alone.

Indeed, for all the ink spilled upon Amazon’s arrival, its relationship with the business community has been far healthier than the likes of Mr Harvey could have predicted.

That’s predominantly been fostered by cloud-computing division Amazon Web Services.

Counting Atlassian and Canva as clients, AWS landed in Australia a full five years before its online retail branch, establishing an infrastructure region in Sydney in 2012.

It’s since expanded that presence in the NSW capital with a further two availability zones, with Melbourne slated to receive a standalone availability zone by the end of this year.

Perth, meanwhile, is set for its own boost in connectivity next year courtesy of a local zone. It’s relatively new technology, with the first zone launched in Los Angeles about two years ago.

Local zones are now up and running in more than a dozen US cities.

New locations are slated for major cities throughout Europe and Asia, with Perth and Brisbane the two cities in Australia earmarked.

Western Australia’s local zone is scheduled to come online in 2023.

Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice-president of Amazon Web Service’s infrastructure arm, in February talked up how users all over the world would soon be able to “leverage cloud services within a few milliseconds of hundreds of millions of end users around the world”.

Getting local

Enthusiasm aside, explaining what local zones are, how they work, or why they’re important is markedly more difficult.

Sarah Bassett, who leads Amazon Web Services’ enterprise efforts in WA, tried her hand at it in conversation with Business News last month.

“The vast majority of our customers really get the necessary latency required for their application performance by running in AWS regions, however, we found that there are some applications that require that ultra-low latency,” she said.

“They really want that infrastructure closer to the end user.”

Simply put, a local zone looks and sounds a bit like a data centre. Usually built on the outskirts of cities – whereby they allow users to deploy applications requiring single-digit millisecond latency – a local zone essentially allows users to be closer to computing and storage, with most of the benefits accrued in the consumer entertainment space.

Cloud gaming is an obvious beneficiary, given it’s a latency sensitive task.

So, too, is streaming, another task made easier with infrastructure being closer to users.

Ms Bassett was keen to note, though, that businesses would also benefit from a local zone.

This was especially the case in healthcare, where responsiveness in IT was a matter of life and death, or mining, where the remoteness of the activity necessitated high-quality infrastructure, she said.

“These customers are running compute-intensive simulation and they have these workstations close to their environment, and they also want that interaction with their cloud environment,” Ms Bassett said.

Her familiarity with WA’s business concerns is remarkable. Ms Bassett’s not from WA, rather Wisconsin, where she went to high school and later university, graduating with a marketing degree.

Having moved to Texas in the late 1990s to work in marketing with Dell Computers, she left after a few years to work in small business before eventually landing a gig with oil and gas giant Haliburton.

That role provided Ms Bassett with the opportunity to relocate to Perth, where she became a senior sales employee.

Hired in 2017 as head of enterprise for Amazon’s WA, South Australia and Queensland division in charge of mining, energy and industrial services, Ms Bassett is now in her fifth year in the job, where she’s taken the reins of the company’s cloud computing division.

“Really, my role is to lead a crossfunctional team that’s interfacing with customers from government to startups, small media businesses to global enterprises, and work with them on their digital transformation,” she said.

Exact figures on Amazon’s presence in WA aren’t made public, although the company has previously stated it employs more than 6,000 staff in Australia.

In addition to infrastructure development in Perth, Brisbane and Melbourne, the company is also scheduled to open an office in Adelaide by 2024, which the company expects will employ 50 people.

Ms Bassett, firmly focused on the web services division, said cloud-computing services would remain integral to Amazon’s presence in Australia for the foreseeable future.

“I’ve been here for five years and have seen the growth in adoption of cloud [services] becoming more common and more of a mainstay in our customer strategy,” she said.

“It’s great to see the investment Amazon has made across Australia. “[It’s a] more than $3 billion injection in the Australian economy in both infrastructure and jobs in the past decade.

“We’re committed to that ongoing investment, and the Perth local zone is a really good example of that.”