Amazon, the largest Internet-based retailer in the U.S., wants to increase its footprint in Africa by pushing cloud adoption and boosting partner networks on and off the continent, a head of Amazon Web Services told ITWebAfrica.

Since Amazon Web Services launched more than nine years ago, its partner ecosystem has evolved well and fast,  said Attila Narin, head of solutions architecture at Amazon Web Services for Europe, Middle East and Africa. “We now have thousands of consulting/systems integrator partners helping companies in Africa, and around the world, move to the cloud.”

Amazon Web Services is a collection of remote computing or web services that make up a cloud computing platform offered by Amazon.com. These services are based in 11 geographical regions across the world. The best-known of these services are Amazon S3 and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Amazon markets these products as a service to provide large computing capacity more quickly and cheaper than a client company building an actual physical server farm.

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources and applications via the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Users share computing resources rather than having local servers or personal devices to handle applications.

Amazon Web Services determined early on that the partner ecosystem was critical to the success of its customers and its business, Narin told ITWebAfrica.

Amazon’s partners include South Africa-based Sahara Systems; Kenya-based eMomentum, and global companies such as Capgemini and Accenture, Narin told ITWebAfrica.

Reuters reported in April that Amazon had lost some big fund managers at a time when its shares have been climbing. In the previous 12 months, 116 funds with more than $1 billion under management either reduced or sold all their Amazon holdings, according to Reuters. These included well-known names such as the T Rowe Price and Touchstone Sands Select growth funds; Fidelity Contrafund and Washington Mutual Investors Fund.

Some analysts and investors said such a drop in fund ownership suggests large-cap managers see the company as over-valued, particularly at a time when it is spending tons of cash branching off into everything from selling its own smartphone to producing a Woody Allen TV series, Reuters reported.

Amazon Web Services believes cloud computing is on the way to becoming the new norm in Africa, Narin told ITWebAfrica.

“The reason organisations in Africa are moving to the cloud are much the same as other parts of the world,” Narin said. “They like the idea of not having to invest vast amounts of capital up front in technology infrastructure and the ability to only pay for what they consume, which allows them to save money on their technology investments.”

Narin sells the cloud by talking about the innovation and disruption it enables.

“The fact that anyone with an idea and a credit card can now get access to the same amount of technology resources as the world’s largest companies is creating tremendous opportunity for developers and business in Africa,” he told ITWebAfrica.

As examples, he cited how accommodation website Airbnb challenged the hotel industry, and how Spotify transformed the music industry by building businesses on top of the cloud.

Nigeria and South Africa are most advanced for cloud adoption out of five countries included in a survey, according to a report by IDG Connect for SAP Africa, TheWhir reported in 2014.

Overall, 30 percent of respondents in Morocco, Algeria, Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria said their organization’s approach to cloud was “little or no activity.” In Kenya, that number was 42 percent.

In Nigeria, 35 percent of respondents said they’d made significant progress in cloud adoption, and 30 percent in South Africa.

In all five African countries, 39 percent of respondents said the state of infrastructure was a huge problem for cloud adoption.