(NASDAQ:AMZN) — Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS, Inc.), an Amazon.com company, today announced the launch of its new Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, the ninth Region in which the company has deployed its global cloud computing platform. Australia-based businesses and global companies with customers in Australia can now leverage the Amazon Web Services (AWS) technology infrastructure platform to build their businesses and run their applications in the cloud. The newly launched Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region is the third Region in Asia Pacific for AWS (joining the Singapore and Tokyo Regions), and is now available for any business or software developer to get started using today at http://aws.amazon.com.

This new Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region consists of two separate Availability Zones at launch. Availability Zones refer to datacenters in separate distinct locations within a single Region that are engineered to be operationally independent of other Availability Zones, with independent power, cooling, and physical security, and are connected via a low latency network. AWS customers focused on running high availability applications can architect their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even higher fault-tolerance.

Prior to the launch of AWS in early 2006, businesses were incurring massive capital expenses from building their own infrastructure or from contracting 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 organizations 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 6.5 years, AWS has changed the way organizations acquire technology infrastructure — incur no up-front expenses or long-term commitments, turn capital expense into variable operating expense, scale quickly and seamlessly by adding or shedding resources at any time, get to market much more quickly with new and critical ideas, and free up scarce engineering resources from the undifferentiated heavy lifting of running backend infrastructure—all without sacrificing operational performance, reliability or security.

“Over 10,000 customers in Australia and New Zealand are already using AWS, and this is before opening our new AWS Region in Australia today,” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, Amazon Web Services. “With the ability to achieve single-digit millisecond latency to end users in Sydney, store data locally in Australia, and get to market more quickly and inexpensively by using AWS’s unmatched infrastructure technology platform, we expect the launch of AWS’s Sydney Region to further increase the amount of Australian and New Zealand customers leveraging AWS.”

Among the more than 10,000 customers in Australia and New Zealand that are already using AWS are the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, City of Melbourne, REA Group Limited, MYOB, Hooroo, RedBalloon, Brandscreen, Viocorp, Think: Education Group, Halfbrick, Freelancer, 99designs, Domayne, Joyce Mayne, Cotton On, Snapper, PredictWind and Harvey Norman.

The Commonwealth Bank is Australia’s leading provider of integrated financial services. “We embarked on our cloud strategy over 5 years ago as part of our strategic vision to deliver the world-leading application of technology to our customers and shareholders. The AWS Cloud has been part of this journey. We are now running some of our important customer-facing web properties on AWS, which scales seamlessly to meet all kind of peaks and this has freed up our IT resources to focus on developing more innovative customer offerings,” said Michael Harte, Group Executive Enterprise Services and Chief Information Officer, Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

MYOB, a leading provider of business management solutions since 1991, delivers innovative software and services such as accounting, payroll, retail POS, CRM, websites, tax and more to over one million businesses. “We chose AWS as the trusted platform for MYOB Atlas, a simple website builder that enables businesses to get online in only 15 minutes. We currently have more than 40,000 small-to-medium businesses in Australia and New Zealand using Atlas on the AWS Cloud. Its flexibility has given us peace of mind in ensuring a great user experience for all our clients regardless of their workload type and volume,” said Matt Mulligan, Web Division General Manager, MYOB Limited. “We have already started using the new AWS Sydney Region, and are very pleased to be pioneering the use of AWS in Australia with our 40,000-plus Atlas clients. We’re looking forward to furthering our use of AWS to deliver more innovative services that make business life easier for clients.”

Hooroo Pty Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Qantas Airways Limited, is a corporate start-up that offers the convenience of accommodation bookings to complement customer’s flight plans. “Hooroo chose Engine Yard's AWS-powered Cloud Computing service for its proven track record of reliability and scalability to build our fresh new consumer-facing web application, as our innovative channel for accommodation suppliers. Working with DiUS, our delivery partner, the team helped us create this new start-up business within a corporate environment in just under two months and it is now running 100 percent on Engine Yard and AWS,” said Peter Moran, Development Manager, Hooroo Pty Ltd. “We feel more confident with Amazon Web Services powering the underlying infrastructure of Hooroo as it can quickly meet all kinds of workload scenarios so that we are consistently delivering good user experiences. We plan to use the new Sydney Region to leverage its low latency speed to deliver an even better and faster experience for our customers based in Australia."

REA Group Limited (ASX: REA) is a market-leading digital advertising business that specializes in property and operates websites including realestate.com.au and realcommercial.com.au. REA has been using AWS for rapid application development and deployment for two years. Richard Durnall, REA Group’s Head of Delivery said, “We chose AWS for its track record of innovation, flexibility and seamless scalability for our development environment. The AWS Cloud has enabled us to have more developers working on new products and features concurrently, reducing development time and increasing the speed of technology service delivery for our customers. REA has already begun using AWS for production components of the platform, and will be deploying assets in the new Sydney Region to provide customers with a low latency, highly scalable web presence.”

Halfbrick Studios is a Brisbane-based start-up that created the highly acclaimed Fruit Ninja intellectual property and other games, with tens of millions of regular players worldwide. “In the social gaming business, maintaining consistently fast user experience is a critical success factor – and AWS enables us to do exactly that. We are using its extremely scalable services such as Amazon DynamoDB and its multiple Availability Zones to build and run our games,” said Shainiel Deo, CEO of Halfbrick. “We love the fact that AWS is always thinking ahead for customers and is quick in rolling out new services or features that make life easier for developers. They are far more ahead than anyone else in this space and we view AWS as the strategic partner to grow our gaming business.”

In addition to a broad base of customers, AWS has a vibrant partner ecosystem in Australia and New Zealand that has built innovative solutions and services on AWS. Some of the local Systems Integrators include: ASG, Bulletproof Networks, Fronde, Industrie IT, The Frame Group, Melbourne IT, SMS IT and Sourced Group. Among the many local Independent Software Vendors are: Aviarc, Deputy.com, Objective Corporation, Sirca and Technology One. Together with other AWS Partner Network members such as Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte, ESRI, RightScale, Wipro and Cognizant, these companies have made or will soon be making their services available on AWS in the new Sydney Region, making it even easier for organizations to take full advantage of the AWS Cloud. For the full list of the members of the AWS Partner Network, please refer to: https://aws.amazon.com/solution-providers.

Developers and businesses can access AWS services from the new Sydney Region beginning today, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, AWS CloudFront, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Direct Connect, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Storage Gateway, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Route 53, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, VM Import and VM Export. More details on each of these services and specific pricing for each is available at http://aws.amazon.com/products/.

Amazon has already established a subsidiary in Australia with offices across Sydney, Melbourne and Perth to support enterprises, government agencies, academic institutions, small-to-mid size companies, start-ups and developers on their use of AWS.

Amazon will also be adding a local technical support operation in Australia early next year, as part of the AWS global network of support center operations that supports customers around the world. The Australian support operations will help customers of all sizes and technical abilities to successfully utilize the products and features provided by AWS, Inc. AWS Support is a one-on-one, fast-response support channel that is staffed 24x7x365 with experienced and technical support engineers. For more details on the multiple tiers of services within AWS Support, please visit: https://aws.amazon.com/support.

About Amazon Web Services

Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services began exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services -- now widely known as cloud computing. The ultimate benefit of cloud computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. Businesses no longer need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources weeks or months in advance. Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon's expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost. Today, Amazon Web Services is a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government and startup customers businesses in 190 countries around the world. AWS comprises of over 28 different services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). AWS services are available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan, Singapore and Australia.

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 Paperwhite is the most-advanced e-reader ever constructed with 62% more pixels and 25% increased contrast, a patented built-in front light for reading in all lighting conditions, extra-long battery life, and a thin and light design. The new latest generation Kindle, the lightest and smallest Kindle, now features new, improved fonts and faster page turns. Kindle Fire HD features a stunning custom high-definition display, exclusive Dolby audio with dual stereo speakers, high-end, laptop-grade Wi-Fi with dual-band support and dual-antennas/MIMO for 40% faster throughput than other tablets, enough storage for HD content, and the latest generation processor and graphics engine—and it is available in two display sizes—7” and 8.9”. The large-screen Kindle Fire HD is also available with 4G wireless, and comes with a groundbreaking $49.99 introductory 4G LTE data package. The all-new Kindle Fire features a 20% faster processor, 40% faster performance, twice the memory, and longer battery life.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, www.amazon.cn, www.amazon.it, and www.amazon.es. As used herein, “Amazon.com,” “we,” “our” and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

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.