Datacom leverages AWS for cloud architecture modernisation

Datacom is using generative AI tools to fast-track cloud migrations across Australia and New Zealand through its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The IT service provider will use Amazon Q Developer and AWS Transform to move customers away from legacy systems and prepare them for digital innovation.

This comes at a critical time when organisations are looking to migrate or modernise their cloud environment to be able to take advantage of AI-driven capabilities, said Datacom director cloud Mike Walls. “[However], cost and risk are a real concern.”

“For many organisations we talk to, the need to modernise legacy systems is a key priority to deliver greater resiliency, efficiency, and new digital experiences,” said Datacom director cloud Mike Walls. “[However] cost and risk are a real concern,” he said. “Amazon Q for app modernisation and migration Datacom’s AI agents can write up to 70 per cent of the code.”

Walls noted this can lead to, “significant cost savings of between 30 per cent – 50 per cent for our customers in some cases even more – and a significant reduction in time spent to complete the project”.

Access to Amazon Q will also provide 1,700 Datacom’s developers with the ability to support cloud migration and modernisation processes for its customers.

This includes being able to enhance developer productivity and accelerate application development cycles, as well as streamlining and accelerating code migration projects, like writing and testing code and creating APIs.

AWS Transform will be used by Datacom to accelerate and simplify the migration and modernisation of enterprise workloads.

It provides agentic AI, specialised AI assistants, to automate and streamline complex transformation tasks that traditionally require significant manual effort and expertise. For example, it can help customers automate and improve services like payroll and customer service.

The partnership between Datacom and AWS comes at a time when generative AI was revolutionising how customers across A/NZ modernise their business, said AWS director partnerships Asia Pacific and Japan Chris Casey.

“It also presents an opportunity for our strategic partners like Datacom to transform their managed service business,” he said.

In a previous interview with ARN, Casey said technologies like Amazon Q Developer and Amazon Q Transform enable customers to tackle challenging migrations, such as those involving VMware estates, mainframes, and even .NET code, that were previously pushed aside due to their complexity.

“With the help of these technologies, many customers are revisiting these projects,” he said. “They’re seeing a return on investment because of the time saved through automation, whether it’s code transformation, testing, or documentation, ultimately reducing both the time and total cost of these migrations.”

The initiative with Datacom comes at a time when the hyperscaler was also looking to ramp up AI investment in A/NZ, said AWS Australia and New Zealand vice president and managing director Rianne Van Veldhuizen.

During the 2025 AWS Summit in Sydney on 4 June Van Veldhuizen said AWS had established a flagship program called AI Spring Australia.

The program offers a range of initiatives to help customers and partners across different sectors and industries build AI capability

 AI Spring initiative comes on the heels of a planned $13.2 billion investment in existing cloud infrastructure by 2027 in AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region and AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region.

Which, by AWS’ estimation, will likely contribute “$35 billion to total gross domestic product (GDP) by 2027 and support an estimated average of 11,000 full-time equivalent jobs at local vendors”.