Amazon: tech company opens office in Lisbon
After having announced it would open an office in Porto, the tech company decided to bet first on the Portuguese capital, opening an office in Lisbon. The company hit $1tn in profit recently.
Amazon’s first office in Portugal will open in Lisbon, not Porto. In January, the tech giant announced that it would open an office in the north of the country, in Porto, the second most visited city in the country.
However, the city on which the company will bet first for its AWS (Amazon Web Services) new office will be Lisbon. Amazon Web Services is a services platform with millions of clients, “offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow”, as can be read at the AWS website. Opening the new office is aiming at “supporting the growing network of clients based in the country”.
The new office shall support startups and some older client companies in the country, accompanying their transition to the AWS Cloud.
“We are excited to open our first AWS office in Portugal”, Miguel Alava, the Southern European director of AWS announced, in an official statement. “The decision of opening an office in Lisbon comes in line with the fact that many of our Portuguese clients are based here and we want to support their transition to the cloud”, he noted.
“We have been noting a growth of tangible interest from Portuguese companies to invest in our AWS innovation system, in order to reduce IT costs and to foster the growth of their companies worldwide. We are looking forward to promoting pioneering ideas with our clients, helping them to accelerate their digital transformation at the same time as we help them in providing their costumers with innovative products and services” he added.
At the beginning of the year, the Portuguese newspaper Jornal de Negócios (JN) said that Amazon was preparing a great investment in Portugal. The information was given to JN through a source which had “close ties to the process”. Later on, the same source noted that the official announcement regarding the office in Porto would be made in the first quarte of the year, which ended up not materializing.
Following up on the news buzz, Expresso, another Portuguese newspaper, informed that the company would indeed have an office, but not for retail and distribution, it would be for their AWS services.
ECO tried to understand whether the company would still get an office in Porto, but our Amazon source did not want to comment on the matter, claiming to not know whether the “Invicta” (an expression used to refer to Porto) had been substituted by the capital, Lisbon.
AWS teams are constituted by team managers, partner managers, consultants, solution architects, amongst many other professionals. Each of them is in charge of developing a specific area such as big data, mobile and social media, business apps, and others, and among the Portuguese companies which are AWS clients, there is EDP, Feedzai, Grupo Impresa, Miniclip, OutSystems, Unbabel and Uniplaces.
Manuel Caldeira Cabral, Portuguese minister for the Economy, welcomed AWS’ new office in the country, noting that he is “particularly satisfied that the company chose Portugal ” as such decision “reaffirms the positioning of the country at the forefront of digital innovation”, showing the government is thrilled about AWS’ role in reinforcing the country’s path towards becoming the innovation centre in Europe.
