Amazon's ever-growing presence in SA - both physically and in the 'cloud'

JOHANNESBURG — Last week, I attended the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in Cape Town. It was the third event of its kind in the city and the attendance has surged from around 600 IT developers several years ago to over 2,000 last week. It's no surprise that demand for the event is on the rise, especially as Amazon's presence in Cape Town has quietly grown, apparently to several thousand staff. Of course, Amazon's growing South African base didn't come about by accident. It started with South African Chris Pinkham who set up an Amazon office in Cape Town in 2004. Pinkham, an internet pioneer in South Africa, was previously VP of Engineering at Amazon and a legendary player behind the company's foray and explosive rise in the cloud market. He would also go on to become VP of Engineering at Twitter for a brief period as well. At the AWS Summit then, I sat down with Geoff Brown, the Sub-Saharan Africa Regional Manager for Amazon Web Services, to chat about the company's presence and future plans in South Africa and the rest of the continent. - Gareth van Zyl