Amazon Web Services Launches “The Lean Cloud” Program for Start-Ups in Asia Pacific

Program brings the AWS Cloud to the ecosystem of start-ups, venture capitalists, business incubators to help startups accelerate their business

 Amazon Web Services (AWS) launches its regional “The Lean Cloud” program at the Australian Technology Park (ATP) in Sydney, Australia on Tuesday, April 3, 2012. Dr Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer of Amazon, will be delivering an opening keynote on how aspiring start-ups can use AWS Cloud to power a lean lifecycle when running, scaling, and innovating on their products or services. Guest speaker, Eric Ries, author of “The Lean Startup”, will outline the concepts in his book and share how this new approach to business is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. They will be joined on stage in a panel discussion by Stuart Richardson, Founder & Managing Partner of Adventure Capital; Andrew Stead, Business Development Director of ATP Innovations and co-founder of Sydney Angels; Australian entrepreneur Nathan Brumby, CEO of Deputy.com and Hong Kong-based Technology Director of 8 Securities, Francis Otshudi. This event will also be streamed online live across Asia Pacific at 3:00 p.m. AEDT.  To watch the event live, visit http://aws.amazon.com/apac/leancloud/livestream/

Many aspiring entrepreneurs have often spent time navigating routes in starting a business. Many require help and resources to bring ideas to fruition in a short timeframe.  Start-ups have also been traditionally constrained by the availability of technology infrastructure to develop their products and services. Since launching publicly six years ago, AWS has enabled hundreds of thousands of companies of all business sizes in over 190 countries to free up their precious engineering resources to focus on their core competence that truly differentiate their business, rather than worrying about the infrastructure. This has helped level the playing field for start-up companies to leverage the AWS Cloud to easily and quickly experiment their ideas at a low cost, build their businesses and compete in the global marketplace. Many of these start-ups have grown into large global businesses such as Flipboard, SmugMug, Etsy, Foursquare and Playfish. In Asia Pacific, many start-up customers like 8 Securities, 99Designs, FilterSquad, Deputy.com, Dropmyemail.com, Dolphin Browser, Olaworks, Paprika Lab, Papaya Mobile, Myntra and redBus are running their businesses on AWS Cloud.

To support the growing start-up movement, AWS in Asia Pacific launches “The Lean Cloud”, a program that aims to provide education, training, and the global exposure for promising start-ups. The program will include business mentoring, technical workshops, networking events etc which start-ups can leverage AWS Cloud to develop their product faster, accelerate time to market and monetize their offerings as their business grow. For more information on the program, visit http://aws.amazon.com/leancloud

With the global ecosystem of AWS customers, venture capitalists and business incubators, “The Lean Cloud” program brings together the key stakeholders in Asia Pacific that enable aspiring start-ups to learn quickly and provide access to the resources, expertise and cloud technology that help their businesses to be successful.

“Many of the Amazon Web Services’ customers have grown from start-ups to global businesses at a rapid rate as they are able to use cloud services to focus on their core competence instead of worrying about the infrastructure,” said Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer of Amazon. “We are pleased to provide the learning platform with ‘The Lean Cloud’ program in Asia Pacific for the vibrant start-up community at their early stages to enable them to accelerate their journey to success. With AWS Cloud and our global ecosystems of venture capitalists, business incubators and start-up customers, we are excited to bring these resources and knowledge in one platform that makes it so easy for the entrepreneurs to gain access quickly.”

Quotes from venture capitalist, business incubator, AWS customers in Asia Pacific

Venture Capitalists’ Quote

“When we fund companies, we are investing in the founding team and their ability to execute. We need them to focus on acquiring customers, generating revenue, and minimizing costs”, said Stuart Richardson, Founder & Managing Partner of Adventure Capital. “Amazon Web Services removes the barrier of infrastructure investments and management, allowing startups to focus on growing their business. Furthermore, their pay-as-you-use pricing model and continuous price reductions help to minimize the costs of experimentation, development, and scaling out.”

“Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) invests in start-ups that can grow very fast so scalability is crucial. Amazon Web Services enables this scalability on a global scale, allowing some of our portfolio companies to reach customers globally in an easy and cost effective way,” said Songbo Li, Partner at DFJ Compass. “For fast growing start-ups, building your business on the cloud is a no-brainer, and AWS is a logical choice.”

Business Incubator’s Quote

“Amazon Web Services is a start-up's best friend,” said Niki Scevak, co-founder, Startmate. “Not only have they taken a large upfront cost and turned it into a small pay-as-you go fee, they have also taken the time to understand each Startmate’s business and their founders and introduce them to useful people.”

AWS customer based in Sydney, Australia

“Deputy.com is a young company looking to truly exploit the paradigm shift in technology that cloud infrastructure has enabled. We believe we have a disruptive solution to a very common problem confronting employees and employers every day - how to connect and communicate better,” said Nathan Brumby, CEO of Deputy.com.  “In working with Amazon Web Services, Deputy.com has a cloud platform, an expert team and a global presence through AWS cloud to remove some of the challenges that typically confront small companies. We know we offer an enterprise quality cloud solution, we know we can gain access to help when needed, we know we can be anywhere in the world to grow our customer base, and we know we can realize our vision to be a truly ubiquitous application.”

AWS customer based in Singapore

"Once we decided on Amazon Web Services, it took us one day to move all of our workload on AWS Cloud. We couldn’t scale with our other providers but with AWS, there is no limitation. If we get a lot of traffic, we just scale up; and if we have less traffic, we just scale down, and we only pay for what we use. That’s really important to our business. We just don’t want to fail," said, John Fearon, Founder & CEO, Dropmyemail.com.

AWS customer based in Seoul, South Korea

 "Now that we have gathered experience and working knowledge of managing AWS Cloud with our existing product, we believe we can accelerate our time to market for future products, and free ourselves from the burden of managing a physical server infrastructure," said John S. Kim, Founder and CEO of Paprika Lab.