AWS has supported many regional countries in cloud transformation. What is your path in Vietnam and which country in Asia Pacific will see the biggest shift towards the cloud?

Eric Conrad, regional managing director for Worldwide Public Sector ASEAN at Amazon Web Services

In Vietnam, we have worked with several educational institutions, including the Vietnam National University, on getting their language training online.

We have also worked with Med247, which is a medical app and care facility organisation. And they have been moving through COVID-19 by using video consultation and doing testing and drug delivery.

We continue to build out meaningful engagements in Vietnam, and we are very excited about the growth that we see.

All countries are moving through a path of maturity and adoption. ASEAN nations have different dynamics at play.

Across the region, we see governments taking bold steps to accelerate and simplify the process for public sector agencies to adopt the cloud and leverage its benefits.

In Malaysia, we signed a cloud framework agreement with the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit, to help accelerate cloud adoption and drive innovation in the public sector.

In Thailand, we signed an MoU with the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society which allows Thai government agencies to use AWS cloud services, helping them to reduce costs and innovate securely.

And in Indonesia, AWS has worked with the government procurement policy agency, LKPP, to provide ministries and agencies access to AWS cloud services through the national e-catalog.

So with each of them, you see a similar pattern, it takes a little bit of a different route.

We continue to work closely with all of our governments around the region to support innovation by streamlining how public sector agencies can procure and access cloud services more widely.

Have you seen signals of stiffening competition in regional markets, and how will AWS compete with rivals?

AWS is very focused on its customers. We are obsessed with our customers and their outcomes. So when it comes to competition, our focus is on what our customers are doing and what they need and how we can help them.

We are not looking at short term kind of gains. We are trying to do what is necessary to help both the customers and the nations in which we operate. Furthermore, we are also at our hearts pioneers, inventors, and builders. And so we are listening very carefully to what our customers say, trying to anticipate what they need and how we can help them. These are the things that really distinguish us from our competition.

It is said that customers feedback is the key to AWS success. What feedback and demand have you received thus?

I will use Malaysia as an example because that is a very recent discussion. If you look at the targets that they have for MyDIGITAL, they are very clear. When you talk about things like e-learning for all, that tells you, and it tells the ministries and us, what we need to focus on.

What they say is where we need to go, and then we sit with the relevant ministers or agencies and begin to work out how we can help them. And that is what we are doing with each country. It comes with that dialogue of trying to understand what they are trying to accomplish.

Now, if you go back from that, and you look at specific organisations, that same discussion happens.

There are organisations that want to talk to us about national health records or population health. We sit with them and discuss how we can help them progress that and work from there on the next steps.