Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosted over 70,000 attendees at its 13th annual reInvent conference in Las Vegas, Nevada on December 2nd to 6th, 2024. Since its humble beginnings in 2012 when there were 6,000 attendees, this event has been on the must-attend list for developer and innovation focused business and technology leaders. After losing three years of momentum, AWS finally found the right replacement for Andy Jassy with Matt Garman as the new AWS CEO. This year’s announcements showcase significant product investments that will provide a stronger roadmap of how AWS will support AI startups and enterprises moving fast into AI. Overall, announcements from reInvent reflect a deep customer understanding.
Catch Constellation Research's AWS coverage:
- AWS unveils next-gen Amazon SageMaker in bid to unify data, analytics, AI
- AWS aims to make Amazon Bedrock your agentic AI point guard
- Amazon Bedrock vs. DIY approaches benchmarked (full report)
- AWS adds capacity sharing, training plans to SageMaker HyperPod, marketplace for Bedrock
- Amazon Q Business gets a story at AWS re:Invent 2024
- PagerDuty integrates with Amazon Bedrock, Q Business: Will it boost large enterprise traction?
- AWS launches Amazon Nova foundation models in commoditization play
- AWS aims to make Amazon Bedrock your agentic AI point guard
- AWS revamps S3, databases with eye on AI, analytics workloads
- AWS scales up Trainium2 with UltraServer, touts Apple, Anthropic as customers
- AWS outlines new data center, server, cooling designs for AI workloads
- AWS re:Invent 2024: Four AWS customer vignettes with Merck, Capital One, Sprinkr, Goldman Sachs
- Oracle Database@AWS hits limited preview
- AWS CEO Garman Q&A: Model choices, competition and AI's future
- AWS Marketplace adds 'Buy with AWS' as it expands reach, woos procurement departments
CXO Trends Indicate Optimism On Economy And AI
On the enterprise tech event circuit, AWS reInvent is one of the Big 7 must attends for quality of networking, innovation announcements, and overall show quality. The other six include Adobe Summit, Google Cloud Next, Nvidia GTC, Salesforce Dreamforce, ServiceNow Knowledge, and World Economic Forum. For this year’s reInvent, this analyst spent time speaking with over 50 C-Suite executives and identified five major technology buying trends for 2025:
- Positive post-election economic outlook. Almost every executive indicated that tech budgets are up 5 to 10%. With the election over, the economic outlook is very positive and almost bullish.
- AI ushers a return of on-premises compute. Executives worry about AI in the wild. A rush to move AI to on-premises development and deployment is hot again for security and cost reasons.
- Global competency centers or captives are on the rise. The biggest wave of technology offshoring is happening right now with one new captive being built every four days.
- Exponential efficiency funds AI innovation. CXO’s prioritize projects that have a 10X return or deliver 1/10th the cost when evaluating AI projects
- AI POC’s convert at about 17%. Organizations have converted POCS to projects for use cases in code generation, procurement, and customer experience (CX)
The Bottom Line: Executives Mostly Have Positive Reactions To Their reInvent Experience
Select quotes from the event highlight the overall sentiment of C-suite level attendees:
“With time and volume, most my costs go down except with healthcare and cloud. AWS costs me way too much”, CFO, Fortune 500 manufacturer
“AWS finally got its act together on AI now that Matt is here”, CIO, Fortune 500 Healthcare organizations.
“The level of meetings have been helpful for furthering our IT strategy and mission. We now know how to build out our AI roadmap”, Enterprise Architect, Fortune 500 energy company.
“This event allows me to meet my entire AWS ecosystem from software vendors to global system integrators. I will be back next year”, CTO, Fortune 500 media and entertainment company.
“We will now move our SAP instance onto AWS knowing that there is a path for AI”, CIO, Fortune 500 BFSI
“The future is multi-agent orchestration and we will need collaborative agents”, Chief Product Officer, SaaS startup
“The billion dollar cloud credit for AI startups is the smartest thing Matt’s done. This is the sequel to the playbook for startups in the cloud “, CTO Global System Integrator.
"It's a good thing Matt's here, Adam's lack of understanding cost AWS a lead in AI", Founder, Fast-Growing AI startup.
Your POV
Ready for the Age of AI? Are you in the midst of margin compression? How do you view AWS in your overall AI strategy? What are your plans for reducing OpEx to pay for innovation in 2025?
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