AWS News Blog
Opening Soon – AWS Office in Dubai to Support Cloud Growth in UAE
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The AWS office in Dubai, UAE will open on January 1, 2017.
We’ve been working with the Dubai Investment Development Agency (Dubai FDI) to launch the office, and plan to support startups, government institutions, and some of the Middle East’s historic and most established enterprises as they make the transition to the AWS Cloud.
Resources in Dubai
The office will be staffed with account managers, solutions architects, partner managers, professional services consultant, and support staff to allow customers to interact with AWS in their local setting and language.
In addition to access to the AWS team, customers in the Middle East have access to several important AWS programs including AWS Activate and AWS Educate:
- AWS Activate is designed to provide startups with resources that will help them to get started on AWS, including up to $100,000 (USD) in AWS promotional credits.
- AWS Educate is a global initiative designed to provide students and educators with the resources needed to accelerate cloud-based learning endeavors.
- AWS Training and Certification helps technologists to develop the skills to design, deploy, and operate infrastructure in the AWS Cloud.
We are also planning to host AWSome days and other large-scale training events in the region.
Customers in the Middle East
Middle Eastern organizations were among the earliest adopters of cloud services when AWS launched in 2006. Customers based in the region are using AWS to run everything from development and test environments to Big Data analytics, from mobile, web and social applications to enterprise business applications and mission critical workloads.
AWS counts some of the UAE’s most well-known and fastest growing businesses as customers, including PayFort and Careem, as well as government institutions and some of the largest companies in the Middle East, such as flydubai and Middle East Broadcasting Center.
Careem is the leading ride booking app in the Middle East and North Africa. Launched in 2012, Careem runs totally on AWS and over the past three years has grown by 10x in size every year. This is growth that would not have been possible without AWS. After starting with one city, Dubai, Careem now serves millions of commuters in 43 cities across the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. Careem uses over 500 EC2 instances as well as a number of other services such as Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, Elastic Beanstalk and others.
PayFort is a startup based in the United Arab Emirates that provides payment solutions to customers across the Middle East through its payments gateway, FORT. The platform enables organizations to accept online payments via debit and credit cards. PayFort counts Etihad Airways, Ferrari World, and Souq.com among its customers. PayFort chose to run FORT entirely on AWS technologies and as a result is saving 32% over their on-premises costs. Although cost was key for PayFort, it turns our that they chose AWS due to the high level of security that they could achieve with the platform. Compliance with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and International Organization for Standards (ISO) 27001 are central to PayFort’s payment services, both of which are available with AWS (we were actually the first cloud provider to reach compliance with version 3.1 of PCI DSS).
Fly Dubai is the leading low-cost airline in the Middle East, with over 90 destinations, and was launched by the government of Dubai in 2009. flydubai chose to build their online check-in platform on AWS and went from design to production in four months where it is now being used by thousands of passengers a day – this timeline would not have been possible without the cloud. Given the seasonal fluctuations in demand for flights, flydubai also needs an IT provider that allows it to cope with spikes in demand. Using AWS allows them to do this and lead times for new infrastructure services have been reduced from up to 10 weeks to a matter of hours.
Partners
The AWS Partner Network of consulting and technology partners in the region helps our customers to get the most from the cloud. The network includes global members like CSC as well as prominent regional members such as Redington.
Redington is an AWS Consulting Partner and is the Master Value Added Distributor for AWS in Middle East and North Africa. They are also an Authorized Commercial Reseller of AWS cloud technologies. Redington is helping organizations in the MEA region with cloud assessment, cloud readiness, design, implementation, migration, deployment and optimization of cloud resources. They also have an ecosystem of partners including ISV’s with experienced and certified AWS engineers with cross domain experience.
Join Us
This announcement is part of our continued expansion across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. As part of our investment in these areas, we created over 10,000 new jobs in 2015. If you are interested in joining our team in Dubai or in any other location around the world, check out the Amazon Jobs site.
— Jeff;