Amazon Web Services (AWS) Australia and New Zealand managing director Paul Migliorini believes while the company has been playing a part on closing the technology skills gaps in the local market, more still needs to be done.
“Skills are an acute challenge and opportunity. If you accept the premise that Australia needs access to more skills then we need to be prosecuting and be doing everything we can to be building out our skills,” he told Telecom Times.
According Migliorini, in the last two years the company has trained over 30,000 people and certified over 10,000, which he attributed to the company’s launch of its AWS Academy program last year, but believes “we still think we’re a long way in terms of scale”.
The company has also been working with customers such as AMP, partners including Accenture, and technical colleges and universities to address the skills gap.
“We need to inspire our teenagers, primary school children to really lean into a career in technology, and we need to make more progress in young females particularly. For us, it’s a significant focus area that we’ll be investing into for a long time,” said Migliorini.
In addition to skills, Migliorini said the company has also been investing in iterations of its solutions, pointing out how since launching locally five years ago, AWS has been delivering three new services each year to customers.
“A vast majority of what we build, or 90 percent of it, is based on customer feedback, “he said.
Migliorini attributes the delivery of its services mainly to the shift in conversations among customers.
“What we’re seeing more and more is organisations want to radically and rapidly increase the rate they retire their legacy dev and modernise their existing infrastructure. It’s for a few reasons,” he said.
“They want to remediate increased costs and they want to remove the friction in how they innovate. Another reason is around innovation. It can mean removing restraints of how much data you store and how much computing horse power you can plug into. It could be machine learning, or you could think of innovation in the context of the ways of working where we’re seeing organisations reorganising around agile. It can also mean the degree of which organisations can experiment relative to the cost of innovation.
“Underneath that we’re also seeing whether speed and innovation is an ‘and’ in the context of security and compliance. Innovation doesn’t come at the cost of risk and security; it aids it. As we move more quickly, we’re getting better at deploying services with greater resilience.”