Amazon Web Services Announces the Opening of Data Centers in Sweden in 2018
New AWS Infrastructure Region will enable customers to run workloads
in Sweden and serve end-users across the Nordics with even lower latency
SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN),
today announced that it plans to open an infrastructure region in Sweden
in 2018. The new AWS EU (Stockholm) Region will comprise of three
Availability Zones at launch. Currently, AWS provides 42 Availability
Zones across 16 infrastructure regions worldwide, with another five
Availability Zones, across two AWS Regions in France and China, expected
to come online this year. For more information on AWS’s global
infrastructure, go to https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/.
“For over a decade, we’ve had a large number of Nordic customers
building their businesses on AWS because we have much broader
functionality than any other cloud provider, a significantly larger
partner and customer ecosystem, and unmatched maturity, reliability,
security, and performance,” said Andy Jassy, CEO, AWS. “The Nordic’s
most successful startups, including iZettle, King, Mojang, and
Supercell, as well as some of the most respected enterprises in the
world, such as IKEA, Nokia, Scania, and Telenor, depend on AWS to run
their businesses, enabling them to be more agile and responsive to their
customers. An AWS Region in Stockholm enables Swedish and Nordic
customers, with local latency or data sovereignty requirements, to move
the rest of their applications to AWS and enjoy cost and agility
advantages across their entire application portfolio.”
This announcement has been welcomed by Sweden’s Innovation and
Enterprise Minister, Mikael Damberg, describing the decision as good
news for the country. “I am very happy to welcome AWS to Sweden. Their
decision to establish a new region in our country is a recognition of
Sweden’s competitive position within the European Union (EU), with the
highest levels of renewable energy, in the power grid, in the EU, as
well as a world leading digital infrastructure and IT industry,” said Mr
Damberg. “The AWS investment in Sweden will strengthen our position in
the global digital shift. For us, trade in a modern globalized economy
is not only about goods, but also about services, sharing of knowledge,
and the free flow of data.”
AWS has been steadily increasing its investment in the Nordics to serve
its growing base of customers. In 2011, AWS opened a Point of Presence
(PoP) in Stockholm to enable customers to serve content to their end
users with low latency. In 2014 and 2015 respectively, AWS opened
offices in Stockholm and Espoo, Finland. Today, AWS has teams of account
managers, solutions architects, business developers, partner managers,
professional services consultants, technology evangelists, start-up
community developers, and more, helping customers of all sizes as they
move to AWS. When launched, the AWS EU (Stockholm) Region will enable
organizations to provide even lower latency to end users across the
Nordics. Additionally, local AWS customers with data sovereignty
requirements will be able to store their data in Sweden with the
assurance that their content will not move unless they move it.
Organizations across the Nordics – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway,
and Sweden – have been increasingly moving their mission-critical
applications to AWS. Hot Nordic startups like Bambora, iZettle, Quinyx,
Tidal, Tink, Tradeshift, Trustpilot, and Vivino, as well as leading
gaming firms like King, Mojang, and Supercell have built their
businesses on top of AWS, enabling them to scale rapidly and expand
their geographic reach in minutes. Enterprises in the Nordics, like ASSA
ABLOY, Finnair, F-Secure, Gelato, Husqvarna, IKEA, Kesko, Modern Times
Group, Nokia, Sanoma, Scania, Schibstedt, Telenor, Wärtsilä, WirelessCar
(Volvo), WOW Air, and Yleisradio (Yle), are also using AWS to drive cost
savings, accelerate innovation, and speed time-to-market.
One Nordic enterprise that is using AWS to innovate is ASSA ABLOY, the
global leader in door opening solutions, with over 47,000 employees and
annual sales of USD $8.3 billion worldwide. The company’s hospitality
division is using AWS to power their Mobile Access solution, allowing
hotels to offer their guests the ability to check-in via mobile phone
and to use their device as their room key. “AWS has been critical to our
ability to innovate and quickly develop new solutions for our
customers,” said Jan Hedström, Cloud Operations Manager at ASSA ABLOY.
“With AWS, we have been able to develop and test new business ideas the
same day they come up, allowing the project teams to build fruitful
partnerships with internal stakeholders, such as business owners and
project managers. This also allows us to bring new services, such as our
Mobile Access solution, to customers worldwide, such as major hotel
chains, who are using the solution to enhance their guests’ stay.”
Another well-known Nordic enterprise using AWS to transform their
organization is Scania, a world leading manufacturer of heavy vehicles.
Scania has a long history of research and development and is bringing
advanced technologies to their trucks, buses, coaches, and engines to
help them reach their goal of becoming the leader in sustainable
transport solutions. Scania is training hundreds of their employees on
the latest AWS technologies, enabling them to develop and build
reliable, secure, and scalable solutions quickly. Scania is now planning
to use AWS for their connected vehicle systems, allowing truck owners to
track their vehicles, collect real-time running data, and run
diagnostics to understand when maintenance is needed, reducing vehicle
downtime. ”In a connected world, a flexible, scalable, and reliable
cloud infrastructure, such as what we get from AWS, is critical for our
ability to develop, experiment, innovate, and stay ahead of the
competition,” said Michael Müller, Director Infrastructure Services, at
Scania. “For us, cloud is more than a technology, it is a fundamental
part of our strategy moving forward. Through connectivity, powered by
the cloud, we can enhance vehicle performance and customer
profitability. This makes AWS much more than just a service provider,
they are an important business partner supporting our future growth.”
WirelessCar, part of the Volvo Group, is a Swedish company using AWS to
innovate quickly. WirelessCar connects two million vehicles in more than
35 countries. It moved its delivery engine, a test environment for
WirelessCar software, from its on-premises data center to AWS.
WirelessCar delivers global, high quality, and secure services, that
enable vehicles to respond to remote user commands, intelligently plot
routes, and communicate with the manufacturer about service
requirements. “We run our entire delivery engine on AWS, from test and
development through to deployment,” said Martin Rosell, Managing
Director at WirelessCar. “Using AWS we are able to provide our
developers with a more flexible, agile, and scalable platform. Before
moving to AWS we added major features only a few times per year. Now, we
are able to add features on-demand and in continuous deployment mode.
This rapid pace of innovation has allowed us to scale our business
according to customer needs and has also brought greater transparency to
our operations. With AWS’s pay-as-you go pricing, we will be able to
work out the precise cost of each of our services and make better, more
informed business decisions as a result.”
As well as innovative enterprises, many of the most well-known and
fastest growing startups in the Nordics are using AWS to build and
rapidly expand their businesses around the world. One former startup
which is now a leading mobile gaming company, Finland-based Supercell,
used AWS to run their business from day one. Supercell is ‘all-in’ on
AWS and their games – Boom Beach, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, and Hay
Day – make use of almost every service available on AWS and attract more
than 100-million players on iOS and Android devices every day. “Using
AWS we have been able to focus our resources on improving the gaming
experience for our players, instead of wasting time on procuring and
maintaining the infrastructure,” said Sami Yliharju, Head of IT
Infrastructure at Supercell. “Our games generate about five terabytes of
log data every day, which we analyze to better understand player
behavior and improve the game experience. This would be very hard to
maintain with an on-premises setup, especially as we have seen explosive
growth. With AWS doing the heavy-lifting, we have been able to iterate
faster to quickly and seamlessly deliver new games and features to our
millions of users around the world.”
Trustpilot, another Nordic startup, leveraged AWS to expand its business
globally. The company provides over 150,000 e-commerce businesses,
across 24 countries, with TrustScores. A TrustScore is a consumer rating
that is based on more than 27 million online reviews. “Trustpilot chose
to go ‘all-in’ on AWS from day one to enable us to support our rapid
growth,” said Rudy Martin, VP of Operations at Trustpilot, which serves
over 1.6 billion website impressions per month. “Retail is a seasonal
business which experiences peaks during the holidays, such as Christmas
and Easter, and when there are special events, such as Black Friday
sales. These peaks are reflected in the increased demand for reviews to
help the consumer make an informed purchasing decision. AWS enables us
to easily scale our infrastructure to manage these peaks in traffic,
which can sometimes exceed 250 percent of our usual daily traffic load.”
In addition to established enterprises and rapidly growing start-ups,
AWS also has a vibrant ecosystem in the Nordics, including partners that
have built cloud practices and innovative technology solutions on AWS.
AWS Partner Network (APN) Consulting Partners in the Nordics helping
customers to migrate to the cloud include Accenture, Capgemini, Crayon
Group, CSC, Cybercom, Dashsoft, Enfo Group, Evry, Jayway, Nordcloud,
Proact IT Group, Solita, Tieto, Wipro, and many others. Among the APN
Technology Partners and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) in the
Nordics using AWS to deliver their software to customers around the
world include Basware, eBuilder, F-Secure, Queue-it, Xstream, and many
others. For the full list of the members of the AWS Partner Network,
please visit: https://aws.amazon.com/partners/
About Amazon Web Services
For 11 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most
comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 90
fully featured services for compute, storage, networking, database,
analytics, application services, deployment, management, developer,
mobile, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI),
security, hybrid and enterprise applications, from 42 Availability Zones
(AZs) across 16 geographic regions in the U.S., Australia, Brazil,
Canada, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the
UK. AWS services are trusted by millions of active customers around the
world monthly — including the fastest growing startups, largest
enterprises, and leading government agencies — to power their
infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs. To learn more
about AWS, visit https://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. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping,
personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle
Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa
are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more
information, visit www.amazon.com/about.
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