But these days, the growth talk at AWS is more about the future of data management, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the Internet of Things. Plenty of other companies are talking about this, too, of course. The record of AWS, as well as of its parent Amazon, still suggests at least the potential to lead the supply of such services and technology. Just ask AWS's Alexa – naturally now available for business as well as at home.

That focus will certainly feature at the AWS annual summit in Sydney next week. More than 14,000 people are expected to attend, reflecting the increasing number of Australian companies, big and small, that already use AWS services.

Thousands of customers

For all the hype about the impact of the arrival of Amazon in Australia at the end of last year, AWS has been operating here extremely successfully for more than five years. Australia was the second location to open in Asia after Singapore due to the perceived level of demand from business here.

The thousands of AWS Australian customers and partners now range from start-ups to the largest energy and banking and mining companies to the Australian Tax Office. The appeal of AWS has been to use AWS cloud computing and technology to run their operations more quickly, cheaply, simply and securely than they could by developing their own computing systems.

Paul Migliorini, AWS managing director for Australia and New Zealand, says there is a scarcity of talent and skills in the market to take advantage of technological advances. Daniel James Grant

The result is that AWS locally has grown to a business of about 1000 people, headquartered over several floors in the Citi building in the Sydney CBD.

Paul Migliorini, managing director of Australia and New Zealand, says many of the algorithms being used today are not new. What is different, he says, is the access to the huge amount of data and computing power.


He still insists 90 per cent of what AWS does is in response to feedback from customers while the remaining 10 per cent is AWS "interpretation" of different requirements in different sectors. And what works well for an individual customer can then be scaled up to apply to any number of other companies.

But the problem, for AWS and for the Australian economy, he says, is the scarcity of talent and skills in the market to be able to take advantage of such advances in order to innovate efficiently and well.

"We are orders of magnitude behind where we need to be in terms of investing for the future," he says. "I firmly believe success over the long term is going to be determined by the quality and breadth and depth of the skills we have here.

"The technology is available – not just at AWS, but across many platforms. It is really that success will be determined by how effectively we skill up the people here to use it."

Education lacking

Yet despite the pace and scale of this change – and the reluctant acknowledgement the Australian education system remains ill-quipped to deal with it – the outcome in schools, tech colleges and universities for most students doesn't seem much closer to meeting the need.

For its part, Migliorini says AWS has now trained more than 40,000 individuals or employees in other companies, including formal certification for more than 10,000 of them, and the establishment of special AWS academies in businesses as varied as AMP and Sportsbet. AWS also has more than 30 universities signed up to a program that provides them with free AWS training material.

The aim is to produce an additional 3000 to 5000 graduates each year with a high degree of practical skills in software development and the use of APIs and technology generally in order to build a vibrant eco-system based on agility and innovation.

This does sound rather like Malcolm Turnbull's initial enthusiasm for boosting "innovation" in Australia before he was scared off the topic by the reaction of voters nervous about what that meant for the security of their existing jobs.

But despite the political sensitivity, constant technological innovation is the commercial reality for business everywhere as the revolution in data and computing power changes the dynamics for all companies. Machine learning and AI are the new lingua franca in technology terms.

And it's the ability to use those sorts of advances with skill and speed that will actually be far more important to economic growth in Australia than whether or not Amazon can sell consumer goods more cheaply than domestic retailers. Don't tell Donald.