AWS Does Not Fear Exodus After Amazon Australia Launch

Amazon Australia went live this morning, after almost a year of hype and speculation about the timing of the launch. And as expected, shares of other big retailers in the country took a nosedive.

Myer stock price is down 30% since Amazon confirmed its plans for Australia in April, while shares of electronics retailer Harvey Norman have fallen 7% since the announcement. Same for JB Hi-Fi, which is down 6%.

In other words, the aftershocks of the arrival are still being felt.

However, there are no fears of a mass scale exodus from AWS, similar to what happened to the cloud provider in the United States.

Paul Migliorini, managing director of AWS in A/NZ recently talked to CIO Australia about this development, saying that major retailer want access to the best cloud technology. Meaning, leaving a platform to avoid helping their competitor doesn’t make rational sense:

“We don’t see the two as related. Obviously, AWS and Amazon.com run separately and many of Amazon.com’s competitors are great customers of ours, so we run very, very separately… But I have heard that and customers do rightly ask us questions, you know, ‘what’s the linkage?”

He was speaking on the sidelines of the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas last week.

In case you are out of the loop, retail giants like Walmart, Target, and Kroger began actively moving away from the Amazon Web Services platform after Amazon completed the blockbuster acquisition of Whole Foods earlier this year.

Walmart, in particular, started forcing companies to move their applications away from AWS if they wanted its business. Amazon responded to this by calling Walmart a bully. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, the cloud arm of the company did have to pay the price for its broader ambitions.

No risk of that happening in Australia, and by that extension New Zealand, though.

Which is a relief.