(AWS Photo)
Welcome to another special re:Invent 2019 morning edition of Mostly Cloudy! As we await the final keynote from the Harley-driving metal god that is Amazon CTO Werner Vogels later this morning, here’s what happened Wednesday in Las Vegas.
State of the Cloud: With a little help from their friends
The partner keynote at AWS re:Invent is a little like when you’re at a show and the band plays a song that’s not among your favorites; sure, you appreciate the effort, but it’s an ideal time to visit the bathroom or get a beer. While the business of reselling AWS services to large corporations might not be the sexiest thing on offer in Las Vegas, it is a serious distribution channel for the cloud leader, and new partner chief Doug Yeum took his turn in the spotlight Wednesday morning.
Ahead of his keynote address — punctuated by testimonials from partners, customers, and some guy named Andy Jassy — Yeum sat down for an interview with CRN, which follows this space better than anyone in the enterprise tech game. “Some of the partners are making big bets with us—and I want to make sure that I find ways to reciprocate,” Yeun told CRN, underscoring how important partners are now that AWS is calling on some the largest companies on the planet.
AWS built its reputation on the back of developers who wanted a quick and easy way to spin up applications, as well as startups that didn’t have the cash to shell out on servers in service of a dream. It is playing a very different game these days, courting huge corporations with bureaucratic purchasing departments, and a lot of those companies prefer to work with partners who can negotiate pricing and support on their behalf.
It remains amazing how many technology products and services are purchased because a senior executive saw an ad or played golf with a sales rep and asked their technical staff members, “what is our IT strategy, and why aren’t we buying from these folks?” AWS long ago joined the ranks of large enterprise tech companies that purchase significant ad time during golf tournaments and football games, and people who are swayed by such ads are likely to turn to partners such as Deloitte, Accenture, or independent software vendors they already know and trust to bring them into the cloud.
Yeum’s job is to grow that pie, and he has had some ideal training: for the last few years Yeum served as Jassy’s chief of staff, a role that the AWS cloud leader played for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos before he was tapped to lead the bookseller’s fledgling cloud operation.
There didn’t appear to be any major changes to AWS’s partner strategy unveiled this year, at least as compared to past years, such as when it introduced a brand-new partner program in 2017. Still, the company took great pains to recognize the efforts of partners who are helping AWS grow while making money for themselves, and it also introduced a new program for startups that want to work with partners and resellers.
AWS is turning into a traditional enterprise technology organization, and that is an interesting or troubling thing depending on where you sit in the food chain. The role of key partners will only grow over the next several years as cloud holdouts start to take the plunge, and while the partner keynote might not be the most entertaining part of the re:Invent calendar, it helps pay for the extravagant EDM concert Thursday night.
Yesterday at AWS re:Invent 2019
Amazon cloud boss chides Pentagon for awarding Microsoft lucrative contract (The Washington Post)
One amazing thing about Our Current Moment is how many people have trouble acknowledging that the President of the United States conducts a lot of his malfeasance in the open: citing no evidence, President Trump questioned the integrity of the bidding process for the JEDI contract on live television, after years of railing against Bezos based on his ownership of The Washington Post. If the President is willing to fire the Secretary of the Navy for daring to punish a Navy Seal for conduct his own squad found abhorrent, is there anybody left who thinks Trump would have swallowed his disdain for Bezos and allowed the Department of Defense to award the JEDI contract to AWS?
Fox to Use Amazon Web Services for Cable, Satellite Broadcasts (Bloomberg)
Months after Fox “personalities” such as Tucker Carlson railed against the supposedly horrifying prospect of awarding the JEDI contract to Amazon, this week Fox executives signed a deal with Amazon Web Services to power its broadcast services. People will tell you there have been many times to be alive, but folks, this is quite a time to be alive.
Amazon Faces Widening U.S. Antitrust Scrutiny in Cloud Business (Bloomberg)
Along those lines, AWS might have a new headache thanks to the fact that its CEO owns a newspaper. While AWS wields a great deal of power in cloud computing, the market is still very new and remains a fraction of the overall market for information technology services, which means the Federal Trade Commission might have a tough time proving that it is harming market competition.
With Graviton2, AWS compute customers will have some interesting choices (Mostly Cloudy)
I had a chance to sit down with Raj Pai, vice president of EC2 product management for AWS, to discuss how the company designed its Graviton2 processor. For my money, this was one of the biggest announcements of the week: AWS is now making its own processors that offer comparable performance to chips from Intel and AMD, and it can charge far less for that computing power thanks to its in-house design process.
Avoid ransomware by moving to the cloud, says AWS Public Sector boss (ZDNet)
There have been far too many stories this year about municipal governments that have fallen victim to ransomware, forcing them to pay criminals in order to deliver very basic services to their constituents. Cloud computing definitely offers some security advantages, but it still requires administrators to properly configure their cloud presence, which takes a fair amount of training.
BP shifts 900 workloads to AWS as Novartis, FINRA spin up new cloud data projects (Silicon Angle)
This is an interesting way to think about cloud market share: as multicloud options become more plausible, cloud companies will fight for individual workloads within an organization’s tech budget. Customer win announcements are the hallmark of any re:Invent, and these are three companies worth noting.
Canonical announces Ubuntu Pro, premium images, for Amazon Web Services (Softpedia)
Ubuntu is one of the more popular Linux distributions used on AWS, and these new images will allow companies running Ubuntu on AWS to enjoy a longer period of security updates and support without signing up for long-term contracts. Fun fact: “Ubuntu” was the rallying cry of the 2008 world champion Boston Celtics.
Novartis taps Amazon Web Services to beef up manufacturing efficiency (MedCity News)
Rounding out the parade of new customer deals announced at re:Invent 2019, pharmaceutical giant Novartis plans to use AWS to monitor and analyze its drug assembly lines, hoping that machine-learning tools can help it deliver medicine more efficiently. Healthcare companies played a prominent role at re:Invent 2019, with Cerner also announcing a large partnership deal with AWS during the event.
And Now, A Word…
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Around the Cloud
Slack Sales Growth Holds Up Against Growing Microsoft Rivalry (Bloomberg)
The unspoken truth about the growth of Microsoft Teams is that Teams is being forced on a lot of companies that already have Office 365 subscriptions, often for little to no additional charge. Slack, on the other hand, still appears to be a product that people actually want to use and pay for, which is a much more enviable position over the long term.
Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract (The Los Angeles Times)
You don’t have to take their money.
Who Wins and Loses at Alphabet From Page Departure (The Information)
This report caught my eye because it suggested that Urs Hölzle, one of the search giant’s earliest employees and perhaps the person most responsible for its world-class technical infrastructure, might be on the outs following the surprising departure of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin this week. Hölzle was last seen on stage at Google Cloud Next in April declaring that the company ran the most reliable cloud computing operation in the game, a claim that was swiftly debunked by the two companies that Google cited in making that statement.
A Wall Street analyst says Oracle's business will take a hit from the cloud trend 'even in optimistic scenarios' (Business Insider)
Jassy loves to ding Oracle during his re:Invent keynotes, but the writing has been on the wall for Oracle’s core business irrespective of any competitive marketing jabs. Developers have never had more choices when it comes to selecting a database for their applications, and very few people these days are starting with Oracle.