This week marks Amazon Web Services' annual re:Invent conference, which has grown by leaps and bounds in accordance with the cloud vendor's majority share of the IaaS (infrastructure as a service) market. Last year's event was notable for many reasons, which I'll recap here along with a preview of what to expect this week.
More Enterprises 'All-In' with Amazon: In 2015, re:Invent featured keynote appearances from the CIOs of General Electric and Capital One. GE is moving 9,000 application workloads to AWS and will ultimately pare down its data centers from 34 to just four. Capital One is looking for greater agility in its IT operations and finds AWS is the answer. CIO Rob Alexander notably also said AWS is a more secure option than its own data centers—quite the ringing endorsement coming from a financial services firm that handles massive amounts of regulated data.
Expect re:Invent to showcase more large enterprises that are buying into AWS's vision. The show's session catalog reveals that Capital One will make another presentation, and other large customers doing so include BP, T-Mobile, Harvard University and Edwards Lifesciences.
ISV Influence: More large ISVs such as Salesforce and SAP have inked deals with AWS of late, and you can expect their presence to be felt at the event, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. Between the two of them those companies have several sessions planned. ISVs relying on AWS for infrastructure is in itself another strong endorsement of its maturity.
New Growth Areas: "I expect AWS to go after some areas of it that can be addressed by cloud and have good margins," Mueller adds. Three years ago, the answer was virtual desktop infrastructure, two years ago it was the Aurora database service, and last year it was QuickSight for easily adoptable business analytics, he notes. Also expect more noise on a competitive standpoint from AWS regarding its plays in machine learning and artificial intelligence, Mueller adds.
IoT in the Spotlight: This year's re:Invent features an entire "mini con" centered on IoT issues. The roughly 20 sessions associated with it include a "state of the IoT union" talk, a fair number of pitches for AWS's IoT services, and welcomingly, a session on IoT security. In light of the many recent, high-profile IoT hacks, security is arguably the most important part of the IoT discussion to have at this time. AWS will discuss "device provisioning, firmware updates, securing communication between devices and AWS IoT endpoints, updating policies to control the actions devices can make, isolating the control and data planes in firmware, and securely integrating AWS IoT with broader AWS services ecosystem," according to the session description.
