Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are the heart of the Australia and New Zealand economies, representing about 97% of all businesses in both countries. Digitising small businesses across the region can create significant economic opportunities. Recent research from global small business platform, Xero, and the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) found that SMBs could increase Aotearoa’s GDP by up to NZ$7.8 billion (A$7.2 billion) each year by using cloud-based tools to improve productivity. In Australia, research suggests that if all SMEs fully embraced digital technology, they could unlock another A$181 billion in revenue.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Xero have a shared vision to help SMBs unlock this opportunity and advance the digital economies of both countries. To support this, we are collaborating to offer AWS Lift through the Xero App Store, to help Xero’s small business customers and ecosystem community leverage the power of the cloud to digitally transform their business.
Launched in February this year, AWS Lift is a program that helps SMBs to kickstart their digital transformation journey by offering a starter pack of AWS Credits* over 12 months to help them get started on the cloud. SMBs can access these credits, up to US$83,500, to try out over 240 AWS technology services including machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), using its extensive global cloud infrastructure and deep functionality.
“At Xero, we enable small businesses and their advisors to operate efficiently using our cloud accounting platform,” said Jeremy Butteriss, EGM ecosystem and partnerships at Xero. “We know that small businesses do better when supported by technology, so we are proud to support small businesses and our ecosystem community to get started on their digital transformation journey leveraging AWS’s broad and deep set of services through the AWS Lift program, available directly via the Xero App Store.”
Xero has been a long-term customer and partner of AWS since migrating their platform to AWS in 2016, which has enabled them to scale, innovate, and rapidly grow their business globally. From a startup in New Zealand in 2006, they now have more than 3.95 million subscribers globally.
Recently, Xero announced it was experimenting with a generative AI in its customer experience platform, Xero Central.
