AWS Launches New Region in Hong Kong
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.
SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–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.
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