Latest news with #JaimeVallés
Forbes
01-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Innovation That Delivers Results
Jaime Vallés, Vice President of AWS Global Sales, Asia Pacific and Japan AWS Innovation isn't just about technology - it's a mindset. With the right approach, businesses can spark meaningful transformation and accelerate their growth, says Jaime Vallés, Vice President of AWS Global Sales, Asia Pacific and Japan. The most successful organizations aren't the ones with the most ideas, but the ones that can turn ideas into measurable business impact, fast. Across Asia-Pacific, we have seen this play out time and again; businesses that build innovation into their operating model are better equipped to respond to change, serve customers and lead in their industries. At AWS, this has been our experience as well. Innovation is in our DNA. And it doesn't start with a whiteboard or a brainstorming session, but with a customer problem. Every new feature, service or capability we have built in the region stems from a real customer need, whether explicitly stated or not. More than 90% of new AWS features come directly from customer feedback. If something doesn't address a real challenge or improve the customer experience, we don't pursue it. This customer-first approach has resulted in a practical, repeatable methodology that organizations of all sizes can adapt and scale. The challenge is while technology can unlock possibilities, it's culture and people that turn this potential into tangible business outcomes. Building An Innovation Engine At AWS, we've developed a powerful engine that turns customer feedback into continuous innovation. This engine runs on four essential components: our culture of innovation, our experimental builder mindset, our proven mechanisms and our flexible architecture. Together, these elements help organizations make innovation part of their daily rhythm, not an afterthought. Turning ideas into results consistently takes more than good intent. At AWS, we use defined mechanisms that ensure clarity and accountability. One example is our 'Working Backwards' concept, written narratives that start with the customer and work backward to create solutions. This sharpens the focus on customer outcomes and transforms vague ideas into concrete solutions. We have also designed our technical and organizational systems to keep this engine running smoothly and enable rapid innovation. Our use of microservices and APIs lets teams test, build and launch without waiting for large-scale system overhauls. This architecture allows us to test hypotheses quickly, learn from failures and iterate rapidly. Amazon's Day 1 culture drives innovation. AWS Cultivating A Day 1 Culture At Amazon, we often say it's always Day 1, meaning we maintain the agility and customer obsession of a startup, even at our scale. This mindset shapes how we approach innovation. While mechanisms and architecture provide the foundation, culture is what determines whether innovation actually happens. We cultivate builders who think long-term, have an enormous level of curiosity and aren't afraid to push boundaries. Our culture empowers teams to take intelligent risks, experiment, learn fast and fully own their ideas - including their failures. 'While it's a huge tech company, it's not actually the tech, but the culture and the people that were Amazon's single most significant contribution to our transformation. They really live the culture and the values, and definitely we would not be where we are today without them,' says Dennis Omila, Executive Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer, Union Bank of the Philippines. We encourage experimentation - even if it means getting things wrong sometimes. Intelligent failure is a critical part of the learning process. What matters is whether a team can extract insights and pivot quickly on what they learned. Finally, we have designed our organization to support innovation at scale. Leaders own specific outcomes with full accountability. Meanwhile, our 'two-pizza team' model (small teams that can be fed with just two pizzas) ensures that groups remain small and agile, enabling them to make decisions quickly and own their outcomes. Most importantly, our organizational structure puts decision-making authority as close to the customer as possible. Clear ownership, fast decisions and alignment around customer outcomes help us move from ideas to results quickly - and help our customers do the same. AWS Innovation Hub AWS Bringing Innovation To Life The ability to respond to change by leveraging innovation has become table stakes in today's environment, where digital-native competitors are disrupting established players, customers expect more and wait less, and technology cycles are accelerating. Our customers tell us that while they realize the imperative, they are struggling to find a catalyst to accelerate their transformation. Working backward from this, we created the AWS Innovation Hub in Singapore. Rather than another corporate showcase, it's a hands-on workspace where leaders from across the region experience how innovation happens at Amazon and develop concrete next steps for their own transformation journeys. Visitors practice using our mechanisms, experiment with our frameworks and witness our customer-obsessed innovation in action. Through industry-specific use cases, we demonstrate how AWS is helping transform businesses across the region. More than 90,000 startups in Asia-Pacific are using AWS to solve complex challenges, scale rapidly and stay ahead. Our real-world examples demonstrate the best of Amazon, AWS Partner Network and customer co-innovation with real-world solutions to solve real-world problems. We highlight locally optimized solutions with proven business and societal value: from financial services applications that expand access for the unbanked to healthcare solutions that improve access in remote areas. Rather than leaving with just inspiration, customers leave with a clear action plan of what they can do next and how to do it. Innovation That Lasts The journey doesn't stop when a customer leaves the Hub. We continue working with organizations to build internal capability, refine their processes and keep moving them forward. In addition to business transformation, we're focused on helping organizations use technology to solve meaningful challenges across the region to create lasting positive impact in our Asia-Pacific and Japan communities. The Innovation Hub is much more than a collection of demos; it's where we bring together our culture of innovation, cutting edge technology and proven mechanisms to solve real challenges. We co-innovate with customers and partners to build practical solutions, bridge essential skill gaps, prototype and validate ideas rapidly, and create responsible approaches to scalable digital transformation. For CEOs and business leaders ready to transform their business and reimagine customer experiences, the AWS Innovation Hub offers a path forward. It's where visionaries come together to build the capabilities needed to pull the future forward, creating meaningful impact that extends beyond business to benefit billions of people across Asia-Pacific and Japan.
Korea Herald
26-06-2025
- Business
- Korea Herald
AWS Launches Innovation Hub to Supercharge Cloud and AI Innovation in Asia Pacific
SINGAPORE, June 26, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Amazon Web Services (AWS), an company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today opened its first 8,000-square-foot AWS Innovation Hub in Asia Pacific (APAC), located at the AWS corporate office in downtown Singapore. This new innovation facility offers an immersive experience for CEOs and business leaders in APAC to interact with AWS and Amazon-wide technologies, and over 30 partner solutions across 50 real-world customer use cases for cloud technology. The experience culminates in AWS customers receiving a practical roadmap for accelerating their digital transformation, designed by Vision Builder, a proprietary AWS road-mapping solution powered by Amazon Nova. The AWS Innovation Hub aims to fast-track digital and artificial intelligence (AI) transformation and innovation for public and private sector organizations across APAC. The multi-million-dollar facility is an additional investment on top of AWS's commitment to invest US$9 billion into cloud infrastructure in Singapore by 2028. Each year, AWS plans to engage over 1,000 C-Suite leaders and business decision makers at the Hub on cloud and Gen AI technology-led innovation, and will provide 200 students from Singapore's tertiary education institutions an exclusive learning experience at the facility. The virtual and physical demos of existing and new technology solutions are co-built with AWS partners and customers to address top business challenges and can already be adopted by companies in the region. The AWS Innovation Hub builds on AWS's existing innovation offerings around the world such as the AWS Builders Studio in Melbourne where customers connect with AWS technologists to build, experiment, validate, and test prototypes before scaling. AWS also supports customers to accelerate their generative AI innovation through global initiatives, such as the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, where AWS's expert AI scientists and strategists bring deep industry and AI expertise to guide customers across the full AI lifecycle from ideation to enterprise-wide scale. Additionally, AWS brings startups, developers, investors, and industry experts together at the AWS Gen AI Lofts that are pop-up collaborative spaces and immersive experiences aiming to foster innovation. The AWS Gen AI Lofts visited Bengaluru and Seoul in 2024 and will be coming to Bengaluru and Osaka in 2025. "Technological innovation is critical to the growth of Asia, and we need innovation to transform customer experiences while also delivering real business value," said Jaime Vallés, Vice President, AWS Asia Pacific & Japan. "The AWS Innovation Hub empowers our customers to convert big ideas into real business outcomes by combining our comprehensive cloud and AI technology, proven expertise from our network of over 140,000 partners worldwide, and Amazon's unique culture of innovation. Here at the Hub, our customers can build practical roadmaps to solve the region's most pressing challenges and opportunities in collaboration with AWS. From smart farming and personalized retail to emergency response and digitalized citizen services – the opportunities are endless, and we are excited to help accelerate the pace of digital innovation for the region." Experiencing cutting-edge technology that accelerates innovation At the Hub, a first-of-its-kind globally, AWS will curate bespoke innovation experiences for C-Suite leaders depending on their business needs and challenges. Guests will walk through three zones – Aspiration, Acceleration, and Action, ending with a clear digital transformation roadmap to be executed in collaboration with AWS and its partners. In the Aspiration Zone, executives can experience how the latest technologies such as generative AI, quantum computing, and virtual reality can transform APAC businesses and communities. In the Acceleration Zone, executives learn from Amazon's unique culture of innovation with examples of how Amazon has created long-term impact with technology solutions underpinned by a customer obsessed mindset and a strong purpose driven culture. The zone showcases AWS technical innovations, such as the cost optimized and efficient AWS Graviton, Inferentia and Trainium chips, and AWS Outposts, a fully managed solution that extend AWS infrastructure to on-premises or edge locations. Executives end their experience in the Action Zone in the Working Backwards Studio. Here, the customer discussion is summarized into a vision board by Vision Builder, a proprietary AWS road-mapping solution. Vision Builder can help customers visualize their Think Big ideas and develop concrete transformation roadmaps with AWS. Vision Builder is powered by Amazon Nova, a new generation of generative AI foundation models that deliver frontier intelligence and industry leading price performance, designed to be easily accessible and customizable, and available on Amazon Bedrock. Limitless possibilities with advanced technologies The innovations featured in the Hub will continue to rotate and evolve in step with the rapid pace of technology evolution. This is particularly to address the most top-of-mind challenges and opportunities that businesses face in APAC. The Hub showcase includes: Deloitte, a long-standing AWS Partner, is also showcasing technology solutions at the AWS Innovation Hub. "We are excited for leaders across APAC to experience the AWS Innovation Hub and Deloitte's suite of generative AI solutions tailored to the needs of legal and regulatory agencies, to empower them with greater productivity," said Lee Chew Chiat, Deloitte Singapore Technology & Transformation Leader. "AWS and Deloitte have been working together for over seven years to help organizations turn ideas into solutions that drive real-world impact across various industries – from health care and life sciences to financial services, manufacturing and the public sector. We look forward to continuing to support leaders in achieving their strategic visions based on a clear understanding of what the latest innovations can offer and how they can deliver meaningful impact and create lasting value." The AWS Innovation Hub is inspired by and aims to inspire customers with Amazon's Leadership Principles – Learn and Be Curious, Invent and Simplify, Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility, and most importantly, Think Big. For more information about the AWS Innovation Hub and to request a visit, go to: About Amazon Web Services Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 114 Availability Zones within 36 geographic regions, with announced plans for 16 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Chile, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth's Best Employer, and Earth's Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit and follow @AmazonNews.
