President of Colombia joins AWS in Bogota, talks innovation across the region

AWS hosted its first-ever Latin America AWS Public Sector Summit in Bogota on Thursday, March 28th, 2019. More than 800 attendees from Colombia and the region joined us to learn about innovation across the public sector, sustainability, database migrations, and the next generation of tech talent.

The President of Colombia, Iván Duque Márquez, helped kick off the keynote presentation with a fireside chat discussing the technology opportunities and initiatives that Colombia is pursuing.

“The use of technology is for the development of a country, this is not right or left, nor politics,” said President Márquez.

The remainder of the keynote was led by Jeff Kratz, General Manager, Latin American, Caribbean and Canada, Amazon Web Services. Jeff highlighted the AWS investment across Latin America. AWS will launch an Edge location in Bogotá, Colombia by the end of 2019, making Colombia our first Latin American network access point outside of Brazil. We also announced a strategic partnership with SENA, the Colombian government institution responsible for the social and technical development of Colombian workers by developing and implementing comprehensive professional training, to train students throughout Colombia in IT and cloud technology starting with 2,000 students in Bogota, and a long-term commitment to Colombia as a key location in Amazon’s Latin America growth strategy.

The keynote also included three customer speakers highlighting the innovation across Latin America:

• Confecamaras – Using AWS, Confecamaras, the confederation of the chambers of commerce in Colombia, reduces risk, lowers cost, has flexible capacity, and can manage, analyze, and share data across the 57 chambers of commerce and 300 state agencies who use their services.
• SAT Guatemala – Superintendenica de Administracion Tributaria (SAT), the Guatemalan Tax Authority, is dedicated to modernizing the tax administration, creating efficiencies, and maximizing costs. Mauricio Romero, IT and Information Systems Consultant at SAT Guatemala, talked about the importance of finding the right cloud service provider, the importance of microservices, and how they are focused on expert hiring and training for the future.
• The National University of Colombia (UNAL) – By using AWS, UNAL deploys applications faster, improves security, and increases data interoperability. “With the use of AWS services, the university has achieved tangible benefits in the areas of security deployment and application management not previously seen in traditional IT models,” said Gustavo Adolfo Pérez Pérez, Director of Information Technology and Communication, UNAL. The university is also using AWS Educate and AWS Academy to train and hire the next generation of tech talent.

The remainder of the day included a full schedule of breakout sessions ranging from security to migration to machine learning.