Mr Simon Elisha

Simon Elisha is a technology visionary and unique translator of innovation into clear business benefit, with a 30 plus year career spanning everything from hands-on development to business leadership. Nine cloud technology patents underline his commitment to innovation.

Carving a niche for himself as a compelling communicator of digital transformation, Simon advocates constantly evolving our thinking as the key to making real business changes with technology; frequently educating people of the need to “be stubborn on the vision and flexible on the detail.”

Simon’s deep technical knowledge and aptitude for expressing technology concepts in highly accessible and understandable ways is brought to bear at Amazon Web Services (AWS) with regular global speaking engagements such as AWS re:Invent and AWS Public Sector Summit - learning conferences addressing tens of thousands from the worldwide cloud community - and is a go-to business and technology media spokesperson for APAC, including appearances on Channel 7 and Channel 9. Additionally, he applies it in defining, growing, and leading technology teams across 14 countries in his current role as Director of Technology and Transformation, Australia, New Zealand and Oceania, Worldwide Public Sector.

Simon describes it as having three phases. The first was dedicated to building highly-reliable, large-scale systems. The second shifted the focus to bringing business and IT goals into alignment with each other. More specifically during the last 10 years, the third phase has been about helping organisations to unlock innovation and access the value and efficiency of the cloud.

Simon is the founder and host of The Official AWS Podcast for developers and IT professionals (with more than 17 million downloads and 4.5 million listened hours globally, to date), as well as more than 20 episodes of This is My Architecture on YouTube.

Before joining AWS over twelve years ago, Simon held senior roles at organisations including Pivotal Software, Cisco, Hitachi Data Systems, VERITAS Software, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Electronic Data Systems.

Simon completed a Bachelor of Computing (Honours) and a Bachelor of Computing (Information Systems) at Monash University and lives in Melbourne with his wife, two children and cheeky Cavoodle, Chewie.