Amazon opens new office in Johannesburg

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has opened a new office in Johannesburg, announcing that it is to support growing customer demand.

“The new office will support South Africa’s burgeoning cloud market, and provide a range of services to organisations of all sizes, including startups, enterprises, and public sector agencies,” Amazon said in a statement on Thursday.

“The new office continues Amazon’s growing investment in South Africa.”

AWS was initially developed in Cape Town by South African Internet pioneer Chris Pinkham after proposing the “elastic compute cloud” in an internal Amazon paper in late–2003.

EC2 would become AWS’ first product

Pinkham is well-known in South African tech circles for founding the country’s first commercial ISP in 1993 — The Internetworking Company of Southern Africa (Ticsa).

UUNET bought Ticsa in 1996, and Pinkham took a break from the tech scene, including sailing around the world.

In 2000, he joined Amazon to run their network engineering department.

However, in 2003 he wanted to move back to Cape Town from Seattle.

Not wanting to lose Pinkham, former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos asked if he would look into developing EC2.

Pinkham said by late 2004 or early 2005 they had their first engineers on board in the Constantia area in Cape Town.

Thus began Amazon’s presence in South Africa. Amazon EC2 was officially launched in August 2006.

This is AWS’s second office in Johannesburg. The company launched a local office on 13 August 2015.

“Johannesburg offers an incredible talent pool of highly skilled and creative people,” said AWS country manager Chris Erasmus.

“It is home to many notable South African enterprises leading the way in digital innovation as well as fast-growing startups.”

Erasmus said they had seen increased adoption of AWS technology in the country, fuelling the need to service Amazon’s customers from their centre of operations.

“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.”