Michael Shimota (Slalom)
Consultancy firm Slalom is to open a cloud migration ‘Launch Centre’ in Australia in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
As part of the launch, Slalom and AWS will open a joint physical centre in Melbourne later this year in a move they claim will help accelerate enterprise customers’ cloud migrations and modernise their IT services.
The Australian Launch Centre is the first outside of the United States, where the cloud provider and its partner have bases in Seattle, Chicago, and Atlanta.
“Australian organisations continue to embrace the benefits of the cloud, and as they do so, we are seeing organisations who require support with the scale and complexities of migrating their core and most critical workloads,” Slalom Australia country managing director Michael Shimota said.
“This requires greater emphasis beyond the modernisation of technology, with true digital transformation bringing organisational, financial, and operational elements together. Australian customers will benefit from Slalom’s proven consulting and technical skills and AWS’s leading cloud services and migration experience to drive transformation and value further into their businesses.”
The centre comes almost a year after Slalom first launched in Australia in a move it claims will create more than 200 jobs over the next two years.
As part of the launch, the consultancy hired Shimota, the former Accenture Asia Pacific technology lead, to head up the local operation.
Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Seattle, Slalom has grown to 8,400 employees globally and claimed to be valued at $1.5 billion as of January last year.
As well as being an AWS premier consulting partner, Slalom is also a Google Cloud premier partner and gold Microsoft partner.
It also boasts partnerships with Salesforce and Tableau and has offices in more than 35 cities globally, although the bulk of these are in North America.
AWS, the world’s biggest cloud provider, said the Launch Centre will help local organisations quickly transition their infrastructure, workforce, processes, and applications to the cloud.
“Through this collaboration, our aim is to equip organisations with the tools to make the transition to the cloud, with the confidence of having Slalom’s proven consulting and technical skills and AWS’s leading cloud services and migration experience supporting them,” said AWS head of channel and alliances in Australia and New Zealand Davinia Simon.
“We are pleased to expand our relationship with Slalom and collaborate to transform Australian organisations as they modernise their systems, increase efficiency, and drive innovation leveraging AWS.”
