Today, I am happy to announce our plans to open a new AWS Region in Italy! The AWS Europe (Milan) Region is the 25th AWS Region that we've announced globally. It's the sixth AWS Region in Europe, joining existing regions in France, Germany, Ireland, the UK, and the new Region that we recently announced in Sweden. The AWS Europe (Milan) Region will have three Availability Zones and be ready for customers in early 2020.

Currently we have 57 Availability Zones across 19 technology infrastructure Regions. As of this announcement, another five AWS Regions and 15 Availability Zones are coming over the next year in Bahrain, Hong Kong SAR, Italy, South Africa, and Sweden. We are continuing to work to open additional Regions all over the world where our customers need them the most.

Organizations across Italy have been using the AWS Cloud for over a decade, using AWS Regions located outside of Italy. This has led us to steadily increase our investment in Italy. We needed to serve our growing base of startup, government, and enterprise customers across many vertical industries, including automotive, financial services, media and entertainment, high technology, education, and energy.

In 2012, Amazon opened its first Italian office and its first Italian point of presence (PoP) based in Milan. Since then, AWS has added another PoP in Palermo in 2017. We have offices in Rome and Milan, where we continue to help Italian customers of all sizes move to the AWS Cloud. In Italy, we employ local teams of account managers, solutions architects, business development managers, partner managers, professional services consultants, technology evangelists, start-up community developers, marketing managers, and many more.

Some of the largest enterprises and public sector organizations in Italy are using AWS to build innovations and power their businesses, drive cost savings, accelerate innovation, and speed time-to-market. This includes:

Enterprises such as Decysion, Docebo, Eataly, Edizioni Conde Nast, ENEL, Ferrero, GEDI Gruppo Editoriale, Imperia & Monferrina, Lamborghini, Mediaset, Navionics, Pirelli, Pixartprinting, SEAT Pagine Gialle, Tagetik Software, and Vodafone Italy.

Public sector customers such as A2A Smart City, City of Cagliari, Corte dei Conti, Istituto Centrale per i Beni Sonori ed Audiovisivi, Madisoft, National Institute for Astrophysics, National Institute of Molecular Genetics, Politecnico di Milano, Politecnico Torino, Regione Autonoma Sardegna, UniNettuno, and Università degli Studi di Cagliari.

Lamborghini, the world-famous manufacturer of elite, luxury sports cars based in Italy, has been using AWS to reduce the cost of their infrastructure by 50 percent, while also achieving better performance and scalability. Today, their time-to-market is close to zero. The Lamborghini website was being hosted on outdated infrastructure when the company decided to boost their online presence to coincide with the launch of their Aventador J sports car. When evaluating the different options, Lamborghini looked at an on-premises data center, which was costly; a local hosting provider, which did not offer scalability; and cloud computing with AWS. The company decided it wanted the scalability, flexibility, and cost benefits of working in the cloud. By moving to AWS, Lamborghini was able to prepare the development and test environment in a couple of days. The website went online in less than one month and was able to support a 250 percent increase in traffic around the launch of the Aventador J.

ENEL is one of the leading energy operators in the world. ENEL is using AWS to transform its entire business, closing all of their data centers by 2018, migrating workloads from over 6,000 on-premises servers onto AWS in nine months, and using AWS IoT services to better manage and understand energy consumption.

Seat Pagine Gialle Italia is an Italian media company most famous for producing the Yellow and White Pages directories. Since first launching in 1925, Seat Pagine Gialle has been looking to help companies to market themselves better, and has branched out from telephone directories. They now offer street maps, online advertising, mobile and web content creation, and ecommerce services.

Seat Pagine Gialle currently hosts over 100,000 websites while serving the needs of over 12.5 million households and over 3 million businesses in Italy. To meet such large traffic numbers, they need a technology infrastructure that is secure, reliable, and flexible. Seat Pagine Gialle is working to move their technology infrastructure to AWS. Seat Pagine Gialle is now able to scale its infrastructure, and at the same time reduce operational costs by 50 percent. This helps support over 50 million searches every month on its networks across Italy.

GEDI Gruppo Editoriale is an Italian multimedia giant that publishes some of the largest circulation newspapers in Italy, including La Repubblica and La Stampa. They are the trusted source of news for millions of Italians. Using AWS has allowed them to scale up and down whenever their news cycles require it, allowing them to deliver the news to readers when it is needed the most.

A great example of this comes from the Italian general elections in March 2018 where they experienced the highest peak traffic ever for Repubblica.it. On that day, they had over 80 million pageviews and 18.8 million unique visits. Instead of spending all their resources on making sure that the website was available, La Repubblica was able to provide their readers with continuous special election-day coverage with real-time data of elections results.

AWS also has a vibrant partner ecosystem in Italy as part of the AWS Partner Network (APN). This includes system integration (SI) and independent software vendor (ISV) partners who have built cloud practices and innovative technology solutions using AWS.

APN SIs working in Italy include Accenture, BeSharp, Capgemini, Claranet, CloudReach, Deloitte, DXC, NTT Data, Sopra Steria, Storm Reply, Techedge, XPeppers and Zero12. They help enterprise and public sector customers migrate to the AWS Cloud, deploy mission-critical applications, and provide a full range of monitoring, automation, and management services for customer's AWS environments. Some of our Italian ISV partners include Avantune, Docebo, Doxee, Tagetik Software, and TeamSystem.

We are also focused on supporting start-up companies across Italy. In 2013, we launched a dedicated program called AWS Activate. This program gives startups access to guidance and one-on-one time with AWS experts. We also give them web-based training, self-paced labs, customer support, third-party offers, and up to $100,000 in AWS service credits—all at no charge. This is in addition to the work AWS already does with the venture capital community, startup accelerators, and incubators to help startups grow in the cloud.

To support the rapid growth of their portfolio companies, we also work with accelerator organizations such as H-Farm, Nana Bianca, and PoliHub and VC firms like United Ventures and P101. Startup customers have built their businesses on top of AWS, including Beintoo, brumbrum, DoveConviene, Ennova, FattureinCloud, Musement, Musixmatch, Prima Assicurazioni, Satispay, SixthContinent, Spreaker, and Wyscout.

The new AWS Europe (Milan) Region—together with our portfolio of existing European Regions in France, Germany, Ireland, and the UK—will provide customers in Italy and across EMEA with highly reliable, scalable, secure, fast, and low-latency access to the powerful and innovative capabilities of the AWS Cloud.