Amazon Web Service (AWS), Amazon.com’s retail Internet arm, has launched a developer support office in Cape Town, South Africa, set to employ around 1400 people by December, from its base of about 50 engineers.
Set to begin operations before the end of the year, the AWS Developer Support Centre will provide technical assistance to developers building applications using AWS cloud computing services including elastic compute cloud, simple storage service, Amazon relational database service (Amazon RDS), Amazon dynamoDB, and Amazon cloud front.
James Greenfield, head of the Amazon Development Centre, said: “the good experiences of the EC2 development team assisted in bringing the customer service centre to South Africa.”
According to Brent Jaye director of AWS developer support and customer service centre, Cape Town has proven to be a great location to find the top talent essential for supporting the continued growth of the company’s business.
He added that the company is pleased to bring new jobs to the region with the launch of AWS developer support office.
Amazon’s Senior Vice President of operations and customer services Marc Onetto noted the friendliness of South Africans as a reason for the company’s decision to start a service centre in the country.
Amazon.com, the US based giant retail store, has recently started other programmes in the country including Amazon Software Development and Customer Service Centre currently in operation in Cape Town.
This is being interpreted as Amazon Web Services’ move to establish hold on the growing African Internet population. Internet World Stats estimates indicate Africa has some 140,000,000 million Internet users.
