Amazon Web Services promises better support for Australians

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has opened a technical support office in Australia, and has expanded its AWS Marketplace availability in its new Sydney datacentre.

The public cloud vendor launched its first datacentre presence in Australia in November 2012, with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia being one of the first customers to take advantage of the new location. Since then, the company has seen a swathe of customers take up its services from the Equinix facility that AWS' Sydney Region is hosted in. AWS' other Asia-Pacific datacentres are located in Japan and Singapore.

Speaking at the AWS Summit 2013 in Sydney, AWS vice president Adam Selipsky announced that the company has created a local support centre. There are currently over 14,000 AWS customers across Australia and New Zealand.

"We're going to continue to invest heavily in the region, not just on the infrastructure side — we have been building up our local team in terms of account management and technical resources," he said. "We're opening a technical support centre, and are going to have a team of support professionals in Sydney working with [our customers], joining other support locations around the world to provide 24x7 support."

An AWS spokesperson declined to comment on how many staff members are working at the fully operational support facility in Sydney, but told ZDNet that the employees are "highly experienced technical engineers".

AWS has also made its AWS Marketplace available through its Sydney datacentre. Launched last year, the Marketplace allows customers to acquire software products to configure their AWS Cloud infrastructure. There are currently 778 product listings on AWS Marketplace, and most of the offerings will be available through the AWS Sydney region, according to Selipsky.