AWS Europe (Zurich) Region allows customers to
run workloads and securely store data in Switzerland while serving
end users with even lower latency
The new AWS Region is estimated to support more
than 2,500 full-time jobs annually through a planned investment of
more than $5.9 billion (approx. 5.9 billion Swiss francs) in
Switzerland through 2036
Tens of thousands of active customers in
Switzerland, including Clariant, iNovitas, Richemont, Swiss Federal
Office of Topography, Swisscom, Verity, and Zurich Insurance Group
are innovating on AWS
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company
(NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced the launch of the AWS Europe
(Zurich) Region. Starting today, developers, startups,
entrepreneurs, and enterprises, as well as government, education,
and nonprofit organizations, will have even greater choice for
running their applications and serving end users from data centers
located in Switzerland, using advanced AWS technologies to drive
innovation. AWS also released an economic impact study estimating
that the company’s spending on the construction and operation of
the new Region will support an average of more than 2,500 full-time
jobs annually at external businesses in the Swiss data center
supply chain, with a planned $5.9 billion (5.9 billion Swiss
francs) investment through 2036. The AWS Europe (Zurich) Region
will also add an estimated $16.3 billion (16.3 billion Swiss
francs) to Switzerland’s gross domestic product (GDP) during the
next 15 years. For more information about AWS Global
Infrastructure, visit
aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure.
“From startups and midsized businesses to enterprises and
government organizations, thousands of commercial, nonprofit, and
public sector organizations across Switzerland are engaging their
end users and growing globally with the support of AWS,” said
Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at
AWS. “With the new AWS Europe (Zurich) Region, we have seven AWS
Regions and 21 Availability Zones across Europe in Frankfurt,
Ireland, London, Milan, Paris, Stockholm, and now Zurich. This is a
continuation of our investment to support customers of all kinds,
help startups scale and grow, enable technical skills development,
and help organizations create cloud-powered applications that
reinvent services for end users.”
“We are delighted that AWS continues to invest in Switzerland,
enabling new possibilities for businesses and citizens to leverage
innovative cloud technologies,” said Dieter Egli, government
councillor and head of the Department of Economic and Interior
Affairs of the canton of Aargau, Switzerland. “The opening of the
new AWS infrastructure Region is a key milestone for our regional
enterprises and the digital transformation agenda that will further
promote and accelerate the rapid introduction of new digital
solutions in our technology and engineering location in the heart
of Europe.”
With the launch of the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region, AWS has 90
Availability Zones across 28 geographic regions, with announced
plans to launch 21 more Availability Zones and seven more AWS
Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, Spain,
and Thailand. AWS Regions are composed of Availability Zones that
place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations.
The AWS Europe (Zurich) Region consists of three Availability Zones
and is the seventh AWS Region in Europe. Availability Zones are
located far enough from each other to support customers’ business
continuity, but near enough to provide low latency for high
availability applications that use multiple Availability Zones.
Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical
security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low latency
networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design
their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve
even greater fault tolerance. The launch of the AWS Europe (Zurich)
Region will enable local customers with data residency requirements
to store data securely in Switzerland, while providing customers
with even lower latency across the country.
AWS is planning to invest an estimated $5.9 billion (approx. 5.9
billion Swiss francs) in Switzerland during the next 15 years
through the new AWS Europe (Zurich) Region. This investment
includes capital expenditures on the construction of data centers,
operational expenses related to ongoing utilities and facility
costs, and the purchase of goods and services from regional
businesses. The investment is also estimated to support an average
of more than 2,500 jobs annually during this time. These jobs,
including construction, facility maintenance, engineering,
telecommunications, and jobs within the country’s broader economy,
will be part of the AWS supply chain in Switzerland. The
construction and operation of AWS infrastructure in Switzerland is
also estimated to add $16.3 billion (approx. 16.3 billion Swiss
francs) to Switzerland’s GDP during the next 15 years.
Customers welcome the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region
More than 10,000 customers in Switzerland join millions of
active customers using AWS every month in more than 190 countries
around the world. Large and small Swiss enterprises that use AWS to
run their mission-critical workloads to drive cost savings,
accelerate innovation, and speed time to market include Buildigo,
Clariant, Crisalix, Datwyler, Dentsu Tracking, Explora Journeys,
Fisch Asset Management, GSR Zug, Helvetia Group, Hexagon, Hilti,
Idorsia, iNovitas, Invit Travel, iptiQ, Klarpay, Kudelski Group,
lastminute.com, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, OC Oerlikon Corporation AG,
Partners Group, Richemont, Ringier, Swiss Marketplace Group, Swiss
Re, Swisscom, Syngenta, Ubique, u-blox, and Zurich Insurance Group.
The country’s top startups that built their businesses on AWS to
scale rapidly and expand their geographic reach in minutes include
ANYbotics, Edgelab, FemTec Health (formerly AVA), flovtec,
GenomSys, holo|one, RetinAI, Smallpdf, SonarSource, and Verity.
Public sector organizations that use AWS to transform the services
they deliver to Swiss citizens include AI Center at Eidgen�ssische
Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zürich), BERNMOBIL, EF Education
First, Radiotelevisione svizzera (RSI), Swiss Federal Office of
Topography (Swisstopo), and Swiss Post.
As one of the world's leading specialty chemical companies,
Clariant addresses key challenges including energy efficiency,
renewable raw materials, emission-free mobility, and conserving
finite resources. From 2020 to 2022, Clariant migrated their
regional data centers around the world to AWS. “When deciding to
move from on-premises managed services to the cloud, we sought an
agile but cost-effective solution to support our business model as
well as merger and acquisition activities. AWS enabled us to build
a more secure infrastructure, improve the quality and speed of
provisioning, and standardize and consolidate our service model.
Since migrating to AWS, we’ve cut our global data center costs by
27% and built a new internal cloud competence team within only two
years," said Ali Khosravi, head of Global Technology Operation at
Clariant. "As a global company operating out of Switzerland and
running on the world’s leading cloud, we welcome the launch of the
new AWS Europe (Zurich) Region to even better serve the needs of
our business and customers around the world."
iNovitas, a leading Swiss provider of cloud-based image
services, delivers a high-resolution, geo-referenced 3D panoramic
image environment (3D street images) to simplify infrastructure
maintenance and management. “We chose AWS as our preferred cloud
provider at a very early stage as it provided the highest
reliability, flexibility, and scalability required to develop and
run our services,” said Joel Burkhard, chief technology officer at
iNovitas. “Since starting the business in 2011, we have relied on
AWS services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 to build and scale
our cloud-built business and digitize more than 77,000 kilometers
of streets, 11,000 kilometers of rail tracks, and 200 kilometers of
river banks across Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and Sweden,
resulting in the processing and storing of more than 2.6 petabytes
of image data. For a small enterprise with limited technology
resources like ours, the benefits of AWS are compelling. Using AWS
allows us to innovate quickly and access machine learning
technologies such as Amazon Rekognition for image and video
analysis that would otherwise be unavailable to us or too costly.
The new AWS Region opens up new opportunities for us to serve more
customers, especially those who prefer to keep their data stored in
Switzerland.”
Global luxury group Richemont—owner of the Cartier, Montblanc,
IWC Schaffhausen, and Van Cleef & Arpels brands—moved its
entire enterprise information technology (IT) infrastructure,
including 120 SAP instances, to AWS, its preferred cloud provider.
“AWS, with its depth and breadth of services, enables us to provide
our customers with new digital experiences faster, including
personalized storefronts and styling services, video chat
consultations featuring fashion shows customized to the shoppers’
tastes, and tailored offers for early access to new items before
they hit stores,” said Kim Hartlev, group chief information officer
at Richemont. “We are delighted that AWS has brought a new
infrastructure Region to our home market in Switzerland because it
will be a major booster for scaling, curating, and further
personalizing the shopping experiences for our customers.”
Swisscom, a leading telecom company in Switzerland, selected AWS
as its preferred cloud provider to accelerate its digital
transformation strategy and support its move toward a built-for-the
cloud 5G network. Swisscom is also an AWS Partner with deep
technical and industry expertise, helping Swiss companies move to
the cloud and adopt advanced technologies. “Our customers have
always relied on Swisscom to connect them to the world using the
best technology available,” said Frank Dederichs, chief technology
information officer at Swisscom. “We have enjoyed a successful
relationship with AWS for several years, not only as a cloud and
technology provider, but also as a trusted and inspiring partner,
delivering top-grade cloud services to our business customers. The
opening of the new AWS Europe (Zurich) Region with the same high
levels of data protection, user privacy, and regulatory compliance
as their other Regions around the world is great news for us and to
all tech companies in Switzerland.”
Swisstopo, Switzerland's federal mapping agency, adopted AWS in
2010 to empower its digital geographic information system and
services for over 80,000 daily users across the country. “Thanks to
automatic provisioning, we were able to scale horizontally on
demand and achieved a decrease in the setup time for hardware from
10 weeks to under one hour,” said Hanspeter Christ, head of GeoIT
at Swisstopo. “The new AWS Region will open up new possibilities to
provide users with even faster access to our services and
best-in-class experiences with the additional choice to host data
in Switzerland.”
Founded in 2014, deep-tech startup Verity provides an automated
inventory management system powered by self-flying drones, which
sets a new standard for big-box retailers, third-party logistics
providers, and manufacturers. “Our system uses drones to collect
and process accurate inventory data at the edge—up to 10 gigabytes
per flight per drone—and uses AWS to transfer data to the cloud,”
said Raffaello D'Andrea, founder of Verity. “With the ability to
identify discrepancies between data stored in a customer’s
warehouse management system and where inventory actually is or
isn’t in the warehouse, customers gain valuable insights that
enable greater operational efficiencies and help cut labor and
equipment costs, eliminate errors and disruptions, and reduce waste
and CO2 emissions. AWS's powerful APIs and managed services have
helped us take our business to the next level and scale fast. Using
AWS’s technology services, Verity is making the zero-error
warehouse a reality for our clients.”
Switzerland-based AWS Partners also welcome the AWS Europe
(Zurich) Region
The AWS Partner Network (APN) includes tens of thousands of
independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs)
around the world. AWS Partners build innovative solutions and
services on AWS, and the APN helps by providing business,
technical, marketing, and go-to-market support to customers. AWS
SIs, consulting partners, and ISVs help enterprise and public
sector customers migrate to AWS, deploy mission-critical
applications, and provide a full range of monitoring, automation,
and management services for customers' cloud environments. Examples
of Switzerland-based AWS Partners include 1plusX (a TripleLift
Company), Amanox Solutions, amazee.io, Appway, Avaloq, Beekeeper,
BSI, copebit, crealogix, dbi services, ELCA Cloud Services SA,
Finnova, Ingram Micro, Nexthink, Secutix, SmartWave, SoftwareONE,
Swisscom, TD SYNNEX, Trivadis, WebGate Consulting, and Zühlke
Technology Group. For the full list of AWS Partners, visit
aws.amazon.com/partners.
ELCA Cloud Services SA, known as ELCA, focuses on cloud and
workplace managed services and is part of the ELCA Group, one of
the largest independent Swiss full-service IT providers. “The
opening of the new AWS Region is a pivotal moment in the
acceleration of transformation and innovation for Swiss companies,
particularly those in highly regulated industries such as financial
services, health care, and government. It is key for ELCA to be
able to benefit from AWS’s cloud portfolio in Switzerland to help
us best serve our customers’ needs,” said Maxime Claux, vice
president at ELCA. “The new AWS Region will unleash the full
potential of the cloud for Swiss public sector organizations,
midsize businesses, and enterprises. It will enable them to
securely deploy applications, increase efficiencies, improve
performance, and meet data residency requirements. AWS’s continued
investment will also help ELCA to expand our business and train
local cloud professionals to further support Switzerland’s digital
transformation efforts.”
SoftwareONE is a global leader in software and cloud portfolio
management with more than 9,000 technology experts in more than 90
countries providing end-to-end software and cloud technology
solutions. “Like AWS, SoftwareONE has been a pioneer in shaping the
way customers deploy technology and innovate around the world. We
are proud to work closely with AWS to help our customers strengthen
their reliability, flexibility, scalability, security, and
compliance in the cloud,” said Reinhard Waldinger, president at
SoftwareONE EMEA. “As a global company headquartered in
Switzerland, we welcome the continued growth and investment AWS is
making in the region as it demonstrates how important Switzerland
is in the global technology space. We look forward to empowering
our customers with the scale and agility of AWS Cloud to further
thrive and grow while improving security and cloud skills.”
AWS investment in Switzerland
Swiss companies have been among the earliest adopters of cloud
services in Europe, and as the number of Swiss customers has grown,
so has the size of AWS’s presence in the country. The new AWS
Europe (Zurich) Region is the latest in AWS’s ongoing investment in
Switzerland. In order to support its rapidly growing customer base
across the country, AWS opened two offices in Switzerland, Zurich
(2016) and Geneva (2017), and created new jobs, including technical
experts, solutions architects, technical account managers, partner
managers, systems engineers, and professional services experts.
AWS established Points of Presence in Zurich (2017 and 2019),
connecting Switzerland to the AWS network backbone and offering
customers access to AWS services like Amazon CloudFront and AWS
Direct Connect, among others. Amazon CloudFront is a highly secure
and programmable content delivery network that accelerates the
delivery of data, videos, applications, and application programming
interfaces (APIs) to users worldwide with low latency and high
transfer speeds. AWS Direct Connect enables customers to establish
private connectivity between AWS and their data center, office, or
colocation environment. This can reduce network costs, increase
bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network
experience.
In December 2019, AWS launched AWS Outposts in Switzerland. AWS
Outposts offers customers and partners in Switzerland access to the
same AWS infrastructure services, APIs, and tools in virtually any
data center, colocation space, or on-premises facility for a truly
consistent hybrid experience. AWS Outposts enables customers and
partners to run key AWS services in their own data centers while
connecting to a broad range of AWS global infrastructure
services.
AWS continues to invest in the upskilling of local developers,
students, and the next generation of IT leaders in Switzerland
through programs like AWS re/Start, AWS Academy, and AWS Educate.
These programs help learners of all backgrounds and experiences
prepare for careers in the cloud. From higher education courses to
full-time training programs and self-paced learning content, AWS
education programs offer access to the skills needed to begin or
grow a cloud career. Several universities in Switzerland, including
Fachhochschule Luzern, Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz (FHNW), and
Technische Berufsschule Zürich, have delivered AWS Academy courses
as part of their curriculum. To date, 32 Swiss institutions
participated in the AWS Academy program, and 16 offered classes in
2022.
As part of its AWS re/Start program, AWS collaborates with Swiss
educational and training providers like Powerhouse Lausanne and
Powercoders on programs targeted to unemployed and underemployed
individuals. The programs prepare individuals with no technical
experience for careers in the cloud and connect them to potential
employers.
AWS has partnered with the ICT Berufsbildung Schweiz association
for several years to deliver vocational education and training to
Swiss workers. In 2020, AWS supported the association in its
efforts to rework the national IT curriculum by helping develop new
cloud modules that have been taught to every Swiss IT apprentice
(3,000 per year) since 2021.
To continue fostering entrepreneurship in Switzerland, AWS
offers startups and small businesses support through the AWS
Activate program. This program provides access to guidance,
one-on-one time with AWS experts, web-based training, self-paced
labs, customer support, third-party offers, and an opportunity to
access up to $100,000 in AWS service credits—all at no charge. AWS
also works with venture capital investors, startup accelerators,
and incubators to help startups grow in the cloud. In Switzerland,
this includes fostering entrepreneurs such as the Swiss Startup
Association and Swisspreneur, as well as venture capital firms like
btov, F10, Redalpine, Verve Ventures, and Wingman Ventures to
support the rapid growth of their portfolio companies.
Commitment to sustainability
Amazon is committed to becoming a more sustainable business and
reaching net-zero carbon across its operations by 2040, 10 years
ahead of the Paris Agreement, as part of The Climate Pledge. Amazon
co-founded The Climate Pledge and became its first signatory in
2019. As part of its Climate Pledge commitment, Amazon is on a path
to power its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, five
years ahead of the original 2030 target. Amazon is the world’s
largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy, and as of the end
of 2021, the company reached 85% renewable energy across its
business. See Amazon's public methodology for more on its approach.
Organizations that move compute workloads to AWS can benefit from
the net effect of Amazon’s sustainability efforts to reduce their
carbon footprint. Compared to the computing resources of the
average European company, AWS infrastructure is up to five times
more energy efficient.
About Amazon Web Services
For over 15 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most
comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offering. AWS has been
continually expanding its services to support virtually any cloud
workload, and it now has more than 200 fully featured services for
compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine
learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things
(IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR
and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and
management from 90 Availability Zones within 28 geographic regions,
with announced plans for 21 more Availability Zones and seven more
AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand,
Spain, and Thailand. Millions of customers—including the
fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading
government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become
more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit
aws.amazon.com.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather
than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to
operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to
be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth’s Best Employer,
and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click
shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by
Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire
tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology,
Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things
pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about
and follow @AmazonNews.
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