Amazon to open Tel Aviv office to support cloud services

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Amazon.com (NSQ:AMZN) will open an office in Tel Aviv to support its cloud computing offering called Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company's chief technology officer said on Tuesday.

The office is expected to begin operating at the start of 2014 and support companies from start-ups to large organisations as they move to cloud computing services offered by Amazon.

Companies in Israel, which has a large concentration of technology start-ups, were among the first to turn to cloud computing when AWS was established in 2006, the CTO said.

"If you start a business today you no longer buy IT (information technology). You spend your money on getting better engineers and product builders," Werner Vogels told a news conference.

AWS, which is the market leader in cloud computing, according to the latest Gartner research, rents remote computing and storage to other companies, providing over 30 different services.

Vogels said Amazon is focused on driving costs down and has lowered the price for its services 37 times since 2006.

"We've always know that this is not a winner take all market. There is room for many providers with differentiating products," he said. (Reporting by Tova Cohen)