Amazon Web Services Announces New Investments in Germany to Drive Innovation

New office includes collaborations with Boston Consulting Group and Siemens to boost productivity of small, midsized, and enterprise businesses.

Munich, September 16, 2019 – Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced it has moved to a new office in Munich to support the rapid growth of cloud computing in Germany. The office, located in Maxvorstadt, will house teams of account managers, solutions architects, partner managers, professional services consultants, support staff, and various other functions to engage with local customers and partners. As part of this opening, AWS is also announcing it will hire over 500 people in Germany in 2019, across data centers, development centers, and offices in Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich, and Walldorf, to support its rapid growth. These positions are part of the July 2019 announcement of 2,800 new jobs that Amazon committed to create in Germany by the end of this year.

Today, AWS is also announcing the launch of new customer engagement facilities, which will be located in the first floor of the new office building. The Digital Builders Showroom, Industrial Software Showcase, and multi-functional event space are open for business leaders, developers, and engineers, from customers, prospects, and AWS Partner Network (APN) partners. Organizations of all sizes, from startups, small and midsized businesses, to enterprises, not-for-profits, and public sector organizations, will be invited to come to the AWS office for training and education, networking, and collaboration to grow their cloud knowledge and skills.

"Organizations from all sectors of the German economy are using the AWS Cloud to innovate, save substantial costs, and operate more securely as they expand in Germany, across Europe, and around the world,” said Klaus Buerg, General Manager – Germany, Austria, and Switzerland – Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL. “The new AWS office in Munich, with the Digital Builders Showroom, Industrial Software Showcase, and multi-function event space marks our continued investment in supporting cloud adoption in Germany. We are seeing a strong appetite from organizations across the country to innovate and grow with AWS, while maintaining industry-leading levels of reliability, data privacy, and IT security. We look forward to welcoming our customers and APN Partners to our new office."

The Digital Builders Showroom was created in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global management consulting firm, and is open to businesses of all sizes and public sector organizations looking to innovate and grow using AWS cloud technologies. In the Digital Builders Showroom, AWS cloud experts will provide hands-on workshops to train customers on the latest cloud technologies, while BCG consultants will deliver training and consultancy workshops to help customers adapt to both the cultural and technological change successful organizations go through as they adopt the cloud. The Showroom will have stations with technical demonstrations showcasing AWS-based applications in action, such as smart factory and smart city solutions, highlighting how cloud technologies can help business leaders more quickly and efficiently navigate the challenges facing their organizations. Technical and management consulting experts will also guide senior decision makers through how advanced technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Computer Vision, edge computing, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) can help their organizations to innovate and grow.

“Working with AWS in the Digital Builders Showroom, we will bring digital transformation to life for German organizations of all sizes,” said Matthias Tauber, Senior Partner and Head of BCG in Germany and Austria. “We want to make digital transformation more tangible and having our consultants working alongside AWS’s experts we will be able to achieve this. Through helping organizations of all sizes understand disruptive technologies, such as AI, Computer Vision, edge computing, and Internet of Things (IoT) we will be able to help drive innovation inside all German companies.”

The AWS Munich office will also be home to the new Industrial Software Showcase, which has been built in collaboration between AWS and Siemens Digital Industries Software. The Industrial Software Showcase is a world first in the manufacturing automation field and demonstrates how cloud technologies can improve all steps of the manufacturing process, from engineering design through to production and continued monitoring and maintenance. Visitors can see Siemens’ software running live on AWS infrastructure, how they can launch solutions in minutes – as opposed to months – and interact with the technology, getting hands-on with the most advanced manufacturing applications. The Industrial Software Showcase can help manufacturers understand how they can speed up innovation and rapidly increase the design process while inspiring new manufacturing techniques using AWS and Siemens.

“We are thrilled to be working with AWS on the Industrial Software Showcase to show companies of all sizes from around the world how they can innovate and grow their businesses with cloud technology,” said Tony Hemmelgarn, President and CEO of Siemens Digital Industries Software. “Manufacturing companies are undergoing rapid change, as they figure out how to use advanced analytics, Machine Learning (ML), IoT, and other technologies to transform their operations. AWS is a pioneer and leader in cloud computing and we look forward to working closely with them to help industrial businesses navigate the cultural and technological changes needed to thrive in this era of disruption.”

To maximize the opportunity to engage with AWS customers and partners, AWS has designed co-working areas, public training rooms, meeting rooms, and auditorium to hold events in its new, centrally located Munich office. AWS welcomes customers and APN Partners to come by and work alongside AWS business and technical specialists in the co-working area, while the training rooms will host regular training and certification classes, providing easy access for developers and technical specialists to grow their skills in cloud technology. This space will also host the AWS Loft program, which is a series of events that helps startups to develop and grow their businesses on AWS. The first AWS Loft will run for two weeks, starting on November 4, 2019, and those interested in learning more, or signing up for education and training sessions, can find information here: https://www.awsloft.de/.

The new AWS Munich office adds to AWS’s continued investment in Germany. AWS first established a presence in the country in 2008, with the launch of an AWS Edge location in Frankfurt. This was followed with an AWS office in Munich in 2011 and Development Centers in Berlin and Dresden in 2013. These development centers have attracted many of world’s brightest minds to build some of the core elements of the AWS cloud. In Dresden, the team is responsible for core parts of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) technology, including the hypervisor and compute instance types. In Berlin, teams are focused on areas such as ML and Deep Learning and are contributing to some of the latest AWS technologies, such as Amazon SageMaker, a fully-managed service to build, train, and deploy ML models quickly, as well as AWS OpsWorks, a configuration management service, and other AWS technologies. AWS’s investment in Germany has continued to accelerate over the years with the launch of an AWS infrastructure Region in October 2014 and additional Edge locations in Berlin and Munich, in 2017.

Additionally, AWS has invested in technology education and training across the country. These include the AWS Academy and AWS Educate programs, which provide cloud computing curriculum and resources to higher education institutes in order to accelerate cloud-related learning. Dozens of education institutes in Germany are now benefitting from both of these programs. AWS has also opened Cloud Innovation Centers (CICs) in Berlin and Munich. CICs provide technical training as well as mentoring sessions to help students to understand Amazon’s innovation processes and to build services that address the needs of the community. At the CIC in the Munich University of Applied Sciences (MUAS) they are addressing challenges in the metropolitan area, ranging from reducing the environmental impact of the city to civil security, and health and inclusion. At the CIC in the CODE University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, they are focused on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, ranging from clean oceans and responsible consumption, to the reduction of inequality in society and better health service provision.

In addition to the growth of AWS in Germany, Amazon continues to grow. By the end of the year, the number of Amazon employees in Germany will grow to more than 20,000 – at over 35 locations. Similar to AWS, Amazon also supports other businesses to become successful. Small and medium-sized companies, that sell their products at Amazon.de, have created an additional 120,000 jobs to date, with 10,000 of them exporting products worth over 2.5 billion euros in 2018 alone.

For more details of AWS in Germany visit aws.amazon.com/de and for details of jobs available in the new AWS office, in the data centers, development centers, or any AWS location across the country, visit www.amazon.jobs