Chris Pinkham and Willem von Biljon, both local IT luminaries, have quit their positions at the Amazon.com Cape Town development centre, after 18 months.
Neither Pinkham and Von Biljon, nor Amazon.com are giving reasons for the departure as their employment contracts, which include confidentiality clauses and restraint of trades, preclude public comment on the exact reasons. However, ITWeb believes the parting was amicable.
Pinkham, employed by the US online retailer for more than five years in total, returned to the country to set up the centre. For four years he served as Amazon.com's vice-president responsible for global IT systems and network infrastructure. Previously, he was instrumental in setting up one of the country's first Internet service providers, Tisca, which eventually evolved into Verizon Business Solutions.
Von Biljon, who left his former position as director of new business at Mosaic Software, joined Pinkham at the development centre where he became responsible for business strategy and product development.
Both men are taking some time off, but are considering their next move.
"Willem and I aren't currently in business together. We are old friends, however, and we are in the process of consolidating some ideas that we hope to bring to fruition in the first half of 2007. In the meantime, we're enjoying some time off," Pinkham says.
Cloud computing
Amazon.com spokesman Andrew Herdener says the Cape Town development centre played a key role in the creation of the group's new Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) that provides resizable computing capacity in the Web cloud. It is designed to make Web scale computing easier for developers.
According to US media reports, EC2 is part of Amazon.com's strategy to begin to rent out its investment in computer storage and computing, and diversify from its established online retail business.
Herdener says: "These services fill a growing need for companies to do business at Web scale, or as we call it, Web scale computing. This means being able to cost-effectively scale to the demands of what is becoming an increasingly huge population of people that do everything from banking to trading to shopping on the Web - all around the world."
He says this business allows Amazon to "monetise" its excess capacity, and while that is a benefit, it is secondary to the fact it is building a new business for Amazon.com.
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