By Will Nankivell, Director of Partnerships
Not surprisingly, attendance was down at the Amazon re:Invent tradeshow this year, from 70,000 people in 2019 to only 25,000 this time. Since so many of you didn’t attend, you may be wondering what you missed. So we’re going to break from tradition and actually tell you what happened in Vegas.
Here are the AWS re:Invent highlights. It will give you a good idea of what is AWS re:Invent.
- Digital transformation is still a major topic
One may think that companies attending AWS re:Invent would be well underway with their digital transformation efforts. Apparently that is not the case – judging from the number of AWS re:Invent exhibitors, AWS re:Invent announcements, and even Amazon itself touting digital transformation acceleration as their main message. AWS, for example, is predicting $1 trillion in revenue from AWS cloud migrations in the coming year. So if your enterprise hasn’t completed its cloud transformation, you’re in good company. - People went for the training
AWS training and certification were free at the tradeshow, and that was a big draw for many people. Training sessions were held at multiple venues. AWS even provided shuttle buses to transport people between locations. It was easy to spot AWS trainees by their special backpacks. Good thing they didn’t come for the exhibitors: The exhibition hall was half empty. - Most vendors were about big data
Most of the exhibitors at AWS re:Invent were data-centric, offering professional services to organize your data for you, and you take it from there. - Financial folks favor the cloud
Traditionally there has been a disconnect between Finance and IT because each group does not speak the other’s language. Interestingly, the migration to the cloud is helping to bridge that gap. AWS itemizes services on its bills so you know exactly what you’re spending for storage, compute, containerization, and so on. As Finance begins to understand IT, it paves the way for IT financial management (ITFM). The difficulty in embarking on ITFM was that companies didn’t know where to start. Cloud is actually enabling the first step toward an ITFM discipline at many organizations, starting with optimizing their cloud spend. - Everything as a Service – XaaS
Everything (or sometimes called Anything) as a Service, XaaS, reflects how the as-a-Service model is being used for delivering just about everything. XaaS is sometimes a nod to the three traditional pillars of cloud computing – SaaS, PaaS and IaaS – which now support such a wide range of services. But the XaaS model goes beyond that. Everything as a Service also entails converting one-time buyers into service subscribers who receive ongoing benefits from a product, such as service or maintenance contracts based on device usage, tied to IoT.
Cloud adoption will only continue to increase, and it was clear that the attendees at AWS re:Invent were keenly interested in learning more and optimizing their cloud in terms of both cost and security. We’re looking forward to attending AWS re:Invent next year, when hopefully it will be back to capacity.
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