Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky made his pitch to businesses to double down on the company’s cloud technologies, and made it clear that Amazon’s own ambitions increasingly extend well beyond its core cloud capabilities.
Selipsky sought to reassure AWS customers that Amazon is dedicated to helping them cut costs, preserving their bottom line in the turbulent economy.
He also unveiled a series of new cloud applications that make AWS a player, if not a competitor, in some of the same sectors where its customers do business.
The dual messages framed a keynote spanning more than two hours at the annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday morning. It was the second re:Invent keynote for Selipsky, the former Tableau Software CEO, since returning to Amazon to lead AWS, succeeding current Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
Selipsky did not mention Amazon’s own corporate cutbacks but referenced the tough economy in listing the cost savings that some AWS customers have achieved by shifting more of their workloads to the cloud.
“In times of uncertainty, it actually can be tempting to cut back, slow down. But when it comes to the cloud, many of our customers know that they should be leaning in precisely because of economic uncertainty, not despite it,” he said. “The cloud is more cost effective, and many customers are saving 30% or more.”
In addition to numerous upgrades and additions to its core cloud computing, database, storage, and machine learning technologies, the company unveiled new cloud applications including:
- AWS Supply Chain, which combines a company’s supply chain data from different sources into a unified view for analysis and decision-making.
- AWS Clean Rooms, an analytics service that is meant to help multiple companies collaborate on shared data without undermining confidentiality.
- Amazon Omics, a service designed to help life sciences researchers store, query, and analyze data.
Dilip Kumar, a longtime Amazon executive who now leads the AWS Applications group, describes applications as “a growing category of AWS services that helps our customers take advantage of AWS’s cloud and machine learning expertise, without them having to build solutions from scratch.”
The event continues Wednesday with a keynote by Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS VP of database, analytics and machine learning. After a partner keynote Wednesday afternoon, with Ruba Borno, AWS VP of worldwide channels and alliances, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels will deliver the closing keynote Thursday morning.
