SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--(NASDAQ: AMZN) — Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced the launch of its new Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region, the fifth Region in which the company has deployed its global cloud computing platform. Japan-based businesses and global companies with customers in Japan can now leverage the AWS suite of infrastructure web services to build their businesses and run their applications in the cloud. Starting today, AWS is also offering support in Japanese for any customer with a Japanese language preference. The newly launched Tokyo Region is the second Region in Asia Pacific for AWS, and is now available for any business or software developer to sign up and get started today at http://aws.amazon.com and http://aws.amazon.com/jp.
Before AWS launched in early 2006, businesses would take on the massive capital investment of building their own infrastructure or contract with a vendor for a fixed amount of datacenter capacity that they might or might not use. This choice meant either paying for wasted capacity or having to worry that the amount of capacity they forecasted was insufficient to keep pace with their growth. Many businesses spent time and money managing their own datacenter or a co-location facility, which meant time not spent on growing their actual business or differentiating their offering for customers. Over the past five years, AWS has changed the way that businesses think about technology infrastructure—incur no up-front expenses or long-term commitments, turn capital expense into variable operating expense, scale seamlessly by adding or shedding resources as quickly as you wish, free up scarce engineering resources from the undifferentiated heavy lifting of running your own infrastructure—all without sacrificing operational performance, reliability, or security.
“Today, AWS powers hundreds of thousands of customers in over 190 countries around the world, including individual developers, startups, government agencies and enterprises,” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, Amazon Web Services. “More and more, companies are realizing that they can use AWS to save significant capital, innovate faster, accelerate their pace of technology delivery, and focus their scarce engineering resources on what differentiates their business rather than on infrastructure. AWS is already being used by many companies in Japan, and with single digit millisecond latency in most instances to end users in Japan from our new Tokyo Region, we expect that to accelerate.”
AWS Basic Support is free to all users and offers access to the AWS Resource Center, Service Health Dashboard, Technical FAQs, and Developer Forums. AWS Premium Support is a one-on-one, fast-response support channel that is staffed 24x7x365 with experienced technical support engineers. Companies can now access AWS Basic Support and subscribe to AWS Premium Support in Japanese, giving customers choices for their preferred language so that they can successfully utilize the products and features provided by Amazon Web Services. For more details on the multiple offerings within AWS Premium Support, please visit: https://aws.amazon.com/support.
In addition, AWS plans to provide in the coming months the option for billing in Japanese Yen.
Many Japanese customers have already been using AWS in existing AWS Regions. Today’s launch of the new Tokyo Region enables companies to run their applications in Japan, which significantly reduces latency to end-users in Japan and allows those needing their data to reside in Japan to easily do so.
Mitsui & Co., Ltd, a Japanese conglomerate with diverse business operations around the world, is among the enterprises in Japan currently using the new AWS Tokyo Region. “Mitsui views information technology to be as important as its resources of people, goods and capital,” said Mr. Seiichi Tanaka, CIO of Mitsui. “One of those important IT initiatives we have at Mitsui is using cloud computing to help us develop new products and services that will further differentiate and grow our business. For example, we are using AWS to run the test and development environment of SAP enterprise systems to improve our business efficiency and services. We chose AWS as our cloud platform for these activities because we value the rich experience and global scale that AWS has been delivering to customers over the years. We expect that the AWS Tokyo Region will meet our growing desire to use cloud computing with our enterprise systems," added Mr. Seiichi Tanaka, CIO of Mitsui.
gumi Inc., one of the largest social gaming companies in Japan, built their websites almost entirely on Amazon Web Services. The company handles over 50 million page views and 10 million unique users per day. Before using AWS, they used to rent servers at datacenter, but soon ran out of capacity and could not meet the increasing traffic in a timely manner. “We chose Amazon Web Services due to its ease of use and the flexibility to scale our capacity requirement to meet our customer demand by adding or shedding servers quickly, which is easily managed by a small team of internal people. AWS has freed us from the heavy lifting of infrastructure and allowed us to speed up the testing and evaluation of our social applications. We have since reduced our time to market and our development costs,” said Mr. Yasuhiro Horiuchi, CTO of gumi Inc. The company is currently using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) with the multi-Availability Zone deployment option, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The company is planning to release its next social game in the new AWS Tokyo Region. “By leveraging AWS’ new infrastructure services running in Japan, we are able to develop and launch our new game within a short span of time. We are impressed with the network performance we are seeing, and we look forward to building more of our services on AWS in the new Tokyo Region,” added Mr. Yasuhiro Horiuchi, CTO of gumi Inc.
Zynga, the world’s largest social game developer, has been using Amazon Web Services for the past few months in Japan. “Amazon Web Services reduces our development cycle dramatically and gives us the flexibility to scale the infrastructure resources required to meet high traffic volume very quickly,” said Mr. Mark Stockford, Vice President of Production Operations for Zynga. “In the social games environment, low latency and high availability are critical requirements and we are happy to work with AWS in the Tokyo region to ensure the best user experience possible when playing Zynga games.”
COOKPAD, the most popular recipe site in Japan, has been using AWS for high performance data analysis. “By using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon Elastic MapReduce, we have been able to provision capacity on demand for performing data-intensive tasks such as data mining, log file analysis and data warehousing. We are now able to focus on analyzing our data without having to worry about time-consuming set-up, management or the compute capacity. This has enabled us to concentrate in driving our business much more quickly, and with the newly launched AWS Tokyo Region we expect the benefits to be enhanced even further,” said Mr. Kenta Hashimoto, CTO of COOKPAD Inc.
Olympus Memory Works Corporation runs a photo sharing online service using AWS called “ib on the net” which provides free photo space, print and photobook services for both Japan and US markets. Olympus worked with Accenture Japan to implement the services using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). “Amazon Web Services has given us the peace of mind to meet the holiday peak seasons when there is high volume of customers accessing our online services. We like the fact that we can scale both up and down any time, paying for what we actually use and not sitting on unneeded excess capacity. We have saved capital expenses and reduced our cost to one fifth of what it was previously, as a result of using AWS,” said Mr. Hisakazu Hayashi, Manager of Business Operations, Olympus Memory Works.
SUUMO, a housing and real estate information services operated by Japan Recruit Co., Ltd, uses the AWS infrastructure platform to process vast amount of large data sets easily and cost-effectively. Using Amazon Elastic Map Reduce, SUUMO’s cloud-based data analysis enables them to complete analysis of 1 billion logs in only 10 minutes. This rapid speed of processing to support their scale helps them to continuously enhance their customer experience and service offerings. Recruit is currently running multiple projects in the new AWS Tokyo Region in preparation for launching new services to Japanese customers.
In addition to a broad base of Japanese customers, AWS has a vibrant partner ecosystem in Japan that has built innovative solutions and services on AWS’s pay-as-you-go infrastructure. These partners include: Accenture Japan, Business Architects, CSK, EC-One, Hitachi Solutions, ISID, Intramart CSI, Iret (Cloudpack), JB Advanced Technology, Manabing, MITSUI KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY CO. LTD, Nomura Research and Institute (NRI), Serverworks, TIS (Sonic Garden), Toshiba, WingArc Technologies and Works Applications. AWS works with global ISVs such as Adobe, BitRock, Engine Yard, enStratus, Esri, IBM, Novell, Oracle, RightScale, Riverbed, SOASTA. These ISVs have made or will soon be making their software services available on AWS in the new Tokyo Region, making it even easier for Japanese companies to take full advantage of enterprise class software on AWS cloud.
Developers and businesses can access AWS services from the new Tokyo Region beginning today, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudFormation. More details on each of these services and specific pricing for each is available at http://aws.amazon.com/products/ and http://aws.amazon.com/jp/products.
About Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth’s Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon’s own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Kindle, Kindle 3G and Kindle DX are the revolutionary portable readers that wirelessly download books, magazines, newspapers, blogs and personal documents to a crisp, high-resolution electronic ink display that looks and reads like real paper. Kindle 3G and Kindle DX utilize the same 3G wireless technology as advanced cell phones, so users never need to hunt for a Wi-Fi hotspot. Kindle is the #1 bestselling product across the millions of items sold on Amazon.
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Forward-Looking Statements
This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.