I don't see Amazon opening up an AU datacentre for a very long time(and probably never). They have Singapore now which will cover a much larger market then Australia will ever be for them.
However it doesn't really pose a risk to our market niche. We differentiate ourselves from Amazon on numerous fronts, primarily performance and paradigm. Both of which are sustainable for the foreseeable future.
Amazon coming to Australia mainly poses a risk to traditional VPS hosting and commodity cloud providers.
Personally, Amazon joining us here shows that validation and maturity of the market in Australia has been reached and is a big boost to our business.
That's what I hear too (I work in an area fairly closely related) - although some think it might be just a CDN node.
[1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=45867
[2] http://akb.id.au/2011/amazon-ec2-latency-australian-soil
Also remember that PPC1 when it stops over in Guam can end up coming back into asia via Asia-America gateway/etc. I'm not sure if any of the major providers actually backhaul through there.
No we aren't! We are one of the few rich countries where the economy is growing, and our currency is very strong. At the moment we are very attractive to offshore companies because we offer revenue growth.
Amazon executives are in discussions with several large independent data centre providers in Australia to house another availability zone for its global cloud computing service.
http://www.crn.com.au/News/267585,amazon-hires-first-aussie-...