In order to support an increasing number of customers and partners using its cloud services, Amazon Web Services announced on Friday that it has opened its first office in Greece. The new office in Athens will support organizations of all stripes—startups, enterprises, and public sector agencies—as they make their transitions to the cloud.
The new office marked the latest investment in Greece by AWS. In January of last year, AWS launched an edge location in Athens for services such as Amazon CloudFront, Lambda@Edge, AWS Shield, and AWS WAF to the country. That edge location also connected Greece to AWS' global infrastructure network, improving the secure delivery of content to customers in Greece by over 50%, according to an AWS blog.
In February of last year, along with Kyriakos Pierrakakis, Minister of State and Digital Governance, AWS signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that included using cloud computing technologies to foster innovation in Greece.
Prior to opening the Athens office, teams of AWS account managers, partner managers, solutions architects, and many other functions were already supporting Greek customers to run everything from development and test environments to big data analytics, mobile, web, social, enterprise business applications, Internet of Things (IoT), and mission-critical workloads.
AWS' roster of customers in Greece includes Beat, Deepsea Technologies, futurehome.gr, Madinad, Marpoint, Money Market, Orfium, Omilia, PAOK FC, Qivos, Spitogatos, Voiceland, Wind Hellas, Workathlon, and Xrysi Eukairia, as well as public sector organizations.
“We are excited to open our first AWS office in Greece,” said Przemek Szuder, AWS Central and Eastern Europe Leader, in a statement. “We have seen increased customer adoption of AWS in the country and decided to open an office in Athens to better support new customers who are looking to use AWS to innovate, lower their IT costs, and grow their organizations on the cloud. We look forward to fostering the country’s pioneering spirit alongside our customers and helping them accelerate their digital transformation and deliver innovative new products and services to Greek customers and citizens.”
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Despite its previous presence and current customer base, AWS faces competition from Microsoft in Greece. In October, Microsoft announced it would build series of data centers in Greece as part of a new data region. Microsoft also said it would create a training program for around 100,000 people in Greece as part of its expanded effort in the country.