Amazon Web Services' IoT lead Lee Hickin returns to Microsoft

Microsoft Australia's former IoT lead Lee Hickin has returned to the company after a two-year stint working for cloud rival Amazon Web Services.

Hickin returns to Microsoft as national technology officer for Australia, replacing former CTO James Kavanagh who is now Microsoft's Azure engineering lead. Kavanagh took on the role in August last year when Microsoft launched two data centres in Canberra in a bid to attract more government agencies to its cloud services.

Hickin joined Microsoft in 2005 and was promoted to the top IoT role ten years later, where he was responsible for driving Microsoft's business plan for IoT and creating the partner channel for enterprise customers. Prior to Microsoft, Hickin worked in identity management business development for RSA.

In October 2016, he left Microsoft to join AWS as its IoT lead for APAC, based in Singapore, before being appointed as head of platform technology business development.

According to LinkedIn, Hickin will be responsible for helping customer's on their digital transformation journeys to develop solutions in Azure.

“The investments Microsoft has made in the Australian market are incredibly exciting and present us with a unique opportunity to help our customers on their digital transformation journeys," Hickin said.

"I will be based in Sydney, supporting all states and territories – to help accelerate the delivery of innovative projects across our customer base with a deep focus on AI.”

One of Microsoft's most significant cloud investments in Australia came in April this year when it became the first hyperscale public cloud provider to be accredited to host 'protected' level certified data on behalf of the government in Azure and Office 365, beating out AWS for the honour.

The Digital Transformation Agency was revealed as the first customer to trial Microsoft's protected-level Office 365 environment last week.