Amazon Web Services (AWS) has opened a new office in Johannesburg to address demand for services, particularly cloud-based, in South Africa.

According to the company, the new office will support South Africa’s burgeoning cloud market, and provide a range of services to start-ups, enterprises, and public sector agencies “to help them innovate, lower IT costs, and accelerate migrations to the cloud.”

In July this year, ITWeb Africa reported on research by IDC and Red Hat which showed that while Sub-Saharan Africa is undergoing significant transformation in terms of cloud adoption and emerging technologies like AI, the region is two years behind global counterparts in cloud adoption.

Red Hat predicts that over the next few years, organisations and businesses in SSA will accelerate cloud migration initiatives – and this will impact on enterprise application spend.

As reported by ITWeb, Dion Harvey, regional general manager at Red Hat in Sub-Saharan Africa, said, “When we say that Africa is lagging in cloud adoption, it’s not because we are slower in adoption, it’s because we are perhaps behind time – we didn’t have some of the new cloud-based technologies at the time when they launched in the US and Europe – but I think that gap will slowly narrow going forward.”

Chris Erasmus, Country Manager at AWS, said, “Johannesburg offers an incredible talent pool of highly skilled and creative people. It is home to many notable South African enterprises leading the way in digital innovation as well as fast-growing start-ups. We have seen increased adoption of AWS technology in the country, which has fuelled the need to service our customers from their centre of operations. The new office will support customers to innovate, lower their IT costs, and grow their organisations by leveraging the cloud. We look forward to fostering the country’s pioneering spirit alongside our customers by helping them accelerate their digital transformation and deliver innovative new products and services to the South African economic landscape.”

Tebogo Mokwena, Co-founder and CEO of Akiba Digital, a South African start-up, welcomed the news of the new AWS office in Johannesburg. “We are pleased that AWS opened its latest office in Johannesburg. This announcement reaffirms the country’s position as an attractive place to invest, powered by a high volume of local, talented developers. It further accelerates our country’s digital transformation and inclusive financial services, which in turn drive growth. This is what Akiba Digital is solving with AWS, cloud-based financial services that foster participation in AWS start-up programs.”

The new office continues Amazon’s growing investment in South Africa. In 2004, AWS first established its presence in Cape Town, setting up a development centre to pioneer technologies focused on networking, next-generation software for customer support, and software programs used by AWS, among other technologies.

In 2017, the Amazon global network expanded to Africa through AWS Direct Connect and, in 2018, AWS launched Amazon CloudFront locations in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

In 2019, AWS created the R365-million AWS Equity Equivalent Investment Programme (AWS EEIP), which helps develop 100% black-owned South African small businesses in the ICT industry.

In 2020, Amazon further reinforced its commitment to Africa when it launched Africa (Cape Town) Region, the first AWS Infrastructure Region in South Africa.

The AWS Region enables businesses and government organisations to create remote working platforms, build cloud applications, and store their data locally, “while reaching end users across Africa with even lower latency.”