With Re:Invent 2018 officially wrapping up I wanted to share reflections and observations – Clearly 10 Key Themes emerged for me looking at the announcements and messaging both within the event and across social media.
1. This show was clearly all about VISION and THE FUTURE – Very few, if any of the announcements were available right away, most were announced with availability in 2019 and even 2020. That being said, Amazon has clearly adopted a strategy to leverage the standard release cycles for product launches and leveraging Re:Invent about expressing their technical strategy and direction
2. Clearly Amazon is the global leader in Public Cloud (In terms of overall Revenues) –
- $27B in Annual Run-rate at 46% YoY Growth
- According to their stats they have 51.8% of the Cloud Market (Microsoft – 13.3% / Alibaba 4.6% / Google 3.3% / IBM 2% / Others 25%)
- Microsoft grew 2X as Fast (albeit off of a much smaller baseline)
3. Cloud is NOT about cost savings, it is about agility – Amazon never says they are cheaper than on-premises, they talk about removing the complexity of hardware so you can focus on building and deploying transformation applications. Agility = “Saying yes to more” and allowing traditional IT departments to focus on driving incremental value rather than solely saving cost.
4. Amazon views themselves as an “Enabler of Platforms” – They don’t want to build applications, they want to simplify the design and delivery of platforms so that customers can get a faster time to value. In return for this quick time to value, customers are tied into Amazon services. Flexibility vs. Time-to-Market will be a key decision factor moving forward
5. Amazon has embraced “Hybrid Cloud” both with native AWS and VMware on AWS–
- Following in Microsoft’s footsteps Amazon is allowing customers to bring AWS into their data center with native AWS services and VMware on AWS available in an “on-premise” Outpost appliance managed by Amazon – This is HUGE as it finally brings down the walls of the Data Center and gives customers the ability to get the flexibility of Amazon without moving their data offsite (Of course, I would expect it will take some time for internal IT ops and governance to understand the complexities of having AWS manage workloads inside the Data Center”
- VMware on AWS announced to be available in every availability zone by the end of 2019 – We all expected this.
- It will be interesting to see what these announcements do with respect to customers plans around Private Cloud, do they continue to buy on-premise HW for VMware or just give it to Amazon?
6. Amazon seems to clearly understand where the market is going next – Their announcements clearly point to a focus on Analytics, Blockchain, Machine Learning and IoT – Right in the heart of where enterprises are focusing their innovation agendas. These services appear to be a great way to get early adoption through the build out of minimally viable products and establish a foundation for revenue as the services take-off
7. They are extending the capabilities of S3 to bring unstructured data services to the masses – Security (Governance), Enrichment and Activation of data are critical success factors in any data strategy. The common evolution of S3 APIs simplifies and accelerates this journey.
8. Enterprise customers have a strong preference for the cloud for NET NEW applications but are still defining their plans for traditional business applications some of which have sensitive data requirements, legacy code bases or out-dated architectures – Beyond SaaS, clearly there is a large opportunity here for valued service providers to help with the modernization, migration and management of traditional applications to the cloud
9. Amazon seems to have 3 major businesses –
- Core – Core Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Server / Storage / Virtualization / Containers) – Large Revenue, Significant competition, Limited Lock-in, Small Margins
- Growth – Application and Data Services (Database, Analytics, Management, Security) – Moderate Revenues, Significant growth and differentiation, High Lock-in, Large Margins
- Incubate – Data Services (IoT, Blockchain, IoT, Robotics) – Small Revenue, incredibly strategic for future growth, full lock-in
10. The Traditional IT Ecosystem needs to evolve at the same rate as the Public Cloud – Clearly Amazon is innovating at a faster rate than traditional HW, SW and Services players. and in some cases they are even building services that compete head-to-head with their partners or Amazon themselves. This ecosystem will need to stay nimble and evolve in order to protect their relevance moving forward and become a part of the thriving Multi-cloud world.
#VMware #AWSReinvent
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