Amazon Web Services launches 'Data Lab' in Australia

Amazon Web Services has announced it has launched a ‘Data Lab’ in Australia and New Zealand to help its local customers “accelerate” their data and analytics journey.

AWS Data Lab is a program aimed at supporting customers through in-house data experts to collaborate data projects using AWS services. The program is hosted online and available in two engagements, Build Lab and Design Lab.

Build Lab is a two-to-five day intensive build exercise with a technical customer team, while Design Lab is a shorter engagement for customers looking to engage with AWS but still not ready to build.

Some of the use cases for Data Lab include data projects such as database migrations, data lakes and analytics, real-time data pipelines, graph analytics and more.

At a media briefing in Sydney, AWS principal solutions architect Rada Stanic said the program won’t take away from the work of its data and analytics-specialised channel partners, saying that Data Lab was derived from an internal process that had worked for AWS.

Data Lab is staffed by Australia-based data engineers with deep technical skills and experience in analytics, databases and machine learning platforms. The program is led by AWS Data Lab manager for Australia Vicky Falconer.

Falconer said the idea behind the Data Lab was to bring together a team that focuses entirely on helping customers “to build real solutions to address real needs by thinking big, starting small, and scaling fast”.

“Customers want to know how to effectively use data analytics, but they often struggle with how to get started,” Falconer said.

“We always start with a business problem, and then we work backwards from there. We take a big problem, and we scope it to something we can address in a few days. This is an effective way to validate whether a great idea will solve a problem.”

Falconer added that customers learn best by building and getting hands-on experience, with AWS guiding them into developing a solution and the skills they need to take the customer’s data and analytics to the next level.