Amazon Australia drew a crowd of 30 or so journalists to a media briefing it called in Sydney yesterday. But if any of the journos crammed into the presentation room in Amo’s 34th-floor Park Street eyrie thought the execs led by Paul Miglorini, might be about to reveal an Amazon move into the Sydney retail market, paralleling its current Melbourne push, they would have been disappointed.
In Australia Miglorini heads up the Amazon Web Services operation which specialises not in the retail sales and delivery market but offering cloud services to high-end business and government. And Miglorini had assembled a stellar cast of upmarket executives to sing the praises of AWS.
They included execs from outfits like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., online motor pusher CarSales, and Adrian di Marco’s Technology One – the latter now blessedly free of its $50 million barney with the Brisbane City Council, though still fighting off several staff-bullying claims – to discuss how Amazon technology had, well, changed their corporate lives.
News Corp’s infrastructure chief Aaron Kersten said the Murdoch outfit had instituted a “cloud-first, AWS-first” strategy and found it a “game-changing” affair that took just a few weeks to establish.
In a bit of film magic, Nearmap’s vision system director John Corbett demonstrated how the company’s aerial vehicles zip across the nation snapping very detailed 3D pictures of 1000 sq km every day, put it online and keep tabs on it all with AWS technology.
And Edward Chung, CEO of Technology One, fresh from settling last year’s $50m stoush with the Brissie CC, quietly said TechOne’s move to the cloud had involved incredible work – “and we couldn’t have done it without AWS”. Miglorini beamed.
