Impressed with Innovation Environment, US Giant Amazon Eyes Athens for Expansion – The Pappas Post
The world’s largest provider of on-demand cloud software services has announced the opening of an office in Athens.
Cameron Brooks, Amazon Web Services director of Public Sector for Europe wrote a glowing account of his experiences in Athens and what led to the company’s decision to make the investment in the country.
“When speaking about Greece, people normally start by talking about its scientists and philosophers from antiquity,” Brooks said on the company’s blog, adding that “During my visits to Athens last year, I was impressed by how the city nurtures its innovators and reinvents itself thanks to technology, placing Greece at the forefront of the digital economy.”
The office will support organisations of all sizes—startups, enterprises, and public sector agencies—as they make the transition to the cloud. Teams of AWS account managers, partner managers, solutions architects, and many other functions are already supporting Greek customers to run everything from development and test environments to big data analytics, mobile, web, social, enterprise business applications, Internet of Things (IoT), and mission-critical workloads.
Amazon Web Services’ new investment comes only a year after the launch of Amazon’s first investment in the country back in January 2020 when the company opened its Edge location, also in Athens.
Amazon’s latest entry into Greece comes as the country’s government has made a big investment in technology and digitization, headed by Kyriakos Pierrakakis, Minister of State and Digital Governance. Numerous tax incentives are also in place to skilled works back to Greece, including hundreds of thousands of Greek nationals that fled the country during the 2008 financial crisis.
But it’s not only returning Greeks they’re trying to lure.
The City of Athens is also positioning itself as an ideal place to attract “digital nomads,” a new species of high-skilled workers that have evolved as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic that has proven that people can practically work from anywhere.
In a new campaign by This is Athens, the city’s official visitors guide online, the city is touted as being pandemic-friendly and inviting the global community to live and work there since, “Even lockdown is better in Athens.”
The campaign features stories of digital nomads like fashion insiders, financial analysts and digital marketers who have left their home countries to make Athens their new home.
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