In November 2015, Amazon Web Services announced that it would launch a new AWS infrastructure region in the United Kingdom. Today, I'm happy to announce that the AWS Europe (London) Region, our 16th technology infrastructure region globally, is now generally available for use by customers worldwide.

UK companies are using AWS to innovate across diverse industries, such as energy, manufacturing, medicaments, retail, media, and financial services and the UK is home to some of the world's most forward-thinking businesses. These include startups like Fanduel, JustEat, and Monzo to enterprises such as British Gas, Trainline, Travis Perkins, News UK, the Financial Times.

The British Government is also helping to drive innovation and has embraced a cloud-first policy for technology adoption. Take Peterborough City Council as an example. The council has deployed IoT Weather Stations in Schools across the City and is using the sensor information collated in a Data Lake to gain insights on whether the weather or pollution plays a part in learning outcomes.

London has also established itself as a critical center for the financial services sector and a significant hub for venture capital activity across all Europe. The City's thriving venture capital and start-up accelerator communities are fueling growth and innovation, making it one of the most important locations in the world to do business. AWS is working with incubators and accelerators such as SeedCamp and Techstars, in London; Ignite100 in Newcastle; and DotForge in Sheffield and Manchester to help startups make the most of the cloud.

We believe in our customers and are investing for the long term. With the AWS Europe (London) Region, we look to better serve end users in the UK. With the launch of the AWS Europe (London) Region, AWS can enable many more UK enterprise, public sector and startup customers to reduce IT costs, address data locality needs, and embark on rapid transformations in critical new areas, such as big data analysis and Internet of Things.

All around us we see that the AWS capabilities foster a culture of experimentation with businesses of all sizes. AWS is not only affordable but it is secure and scales reliably to drive efficiencies into business transformations. I have been humbled by just how much our UK customers have been able to achieve using AWS technology so far. In just this past month we've had HSBC, ARM, Missguided, and most recently at re:Invent 2016, Trainline, talking with us about how they are using AWS to transform and scale their businesses.

Following are just a few of the reasons that customers have given us for building their business on the AWS Cloud:

• Blend seamlessly into the digital world: With the rising importance of technology-driven business transformation, an emphasis on certain enterprise and consumer-based opportunities emerges.

  To take advantage of the game-changing opportunities, businesses are looking to blend into the digital world. Take GoSquared, a UK startup that runs all its development and production processes on AWS, as an example. GoSquared provides various analytics services that web and mobile companies can use to understand their customers' behaviors. With AWS, GoSquared can process tens of billions of data points every day from four continents to provide customers with a single view.

• Use catalysts for real-time business models: The Internet of Things (IoT) is undoubtedly driving a philosophy of interconnecting people, process, and machines to create massive volumes of data that has potential for disruptive change.

  The BMW Group is using AWS for its new connected-car application that collects sensor data from BMW 7 Series cars to give drivers dynamically updated map information. BMW built its new car-as-a-sensor (CARASSO) service in only six months leveraging several AWS services. By running on AWS, CARASSO can adapt to rapidly changing load requirements that can scale up and down by two orders of magnitude within 24 hours. By 2018, CARASSO is expected to process data collected by a fleet of 100,000 vehicles traveling more than eight billion kilometers.

• Mobilize business operations by computing everywhere: Computing and data processing within the confines of a data center or office is easy. There is much interesting and potentially valuable data out in the field, if only it could be collected, processed, and turned into actionable intelligence.

  This data could be located miles below the surface of the Earth in a mine or an oil well, in a sensitive and safety-critical location like a hospital or a factory, or even on another planet. At re:Invent 2016, AWS announced Greengrass (in limited preview), a new service designed to extend the AWS programming model to small, simple, field-based devices.

• Parse real time information to generate visibility : Big data tools have enabled organizations to manage resources, anticipate activity relevant to their business, and make informed decisions faster. Real-time monitoring and evaluation of events have led to a positive impact on performance or operations.

  Channel 4 (in the UK) chose AWS to help monetize volumes of platform data. By running on AWS and using Amazon EMR, the broadcast company can collect and analyze vast amounts of data in real time to deliver highly targeted ads to viewers during a 60-minute program.

• Extract valuable insights with machine learning: The world is witnessing the emergence of a broad and powerful range of new systems—computer programs that can teach themselves to grow and change when exposed to new data.

  Fraud.net is a good example of this. Fraud.net use AWS to support highly scalable, big data applications that run machine learning processes for real-time analytics. Fraud.net uses AWS to build and train machine learning models in detecting online payment fraud. Fraud.net uses Amazon Machine Learning to provide more than 20 machine learning models and relies on Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda to run code without provisioning or managing servers.

• Develop the next-generation software application that is capable of action: Chances are that you may already be using artificial intelligence as you interact with applications that not only sense and comprehend but are capable of action, especially when one views solutions through the lens of automation.

  The Airbnb application, for instance, uses Aerosolve to deliver its dynamic pricing feature. Unbabel uses a combination of artificial intelligence and human translation to deliver fast, cost-effective, high-quality translation services globally. VizSense is yet another paragon that develops advanced visual search and image recognition solutions to serve companies in e-commerce, mobile commerce, and online advertising.

These short sketches illustrate the power of the cloud for customers, but it is still early days. With the launch of the AWS Europe (London) Region, I look forward to seeing many more innovative use cases enabled by AWS.

Our AWS Europe (London) Region is open for business now and we are excited to offer a complete portfolio of services—from our foundational service stack for compute, storage, and networking to our more advanced solutions and applications. We look forward to broadening this portfolio to include more services over the next several quarters.

For more information about the services we offer in our London region, see the Europe/Middle East/Africa tab of our Region Table.

For more information about how customers are innovating using AWS, see All AWS Customer Stories.

You can learn more about how we help connect the world to the cloud at AWS Global Infrastructure.