Amazon Web Services, aiming to boost its reach among big corporate customers, announced major expansions of its relationships with the National Football League, Walt Disney Company and Expedia this morning.
- The NFL has selected AWS as the “official cloud and machine learning provider” for its Next Gen Stats player tracking system, which use RFID tags in equipment and footballs to track and analyze data from the field.
- Walt Disney Co. has chosen AWS as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider, building on its existing usage of AWS in its media, studios and resorts businesses.
- Amazon says Expedia is going “all-in” on AWS, including the cloud provider’s machine learning technologies and database technologies, largely migrating from the Bellevue-based travel giant’s owned data centers.
AWS announced the deals this morning, in advance of AWS CEO Andy Jassy’s keynote at the company’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. In each case, the companies were previously using AWS to varying degrees, but are doubling down with AWS through these deals.
During the keynote on Wednesday, Expedia CEO Mark Okerstrom took the stage to talk about why Expedia is committing to AWS, noting the ability to increase resiliency, optimization, and performance of its computing processes, particularly for larger projects and acquisition integrations.
“We started with AWS in 2012, and over the course of the last five years, have created increased confidence that this is absolutely the right move,” Okerstrom said, noting that in the next few years, Expedia will have 80 percent of its mission-critical apps in AWS.
Amazon Web Services is the public cloud leader, but much of its early growth came from startups and smaller development shops. Amazon is now looking to expand its appeal to large companies, competing head-to-head with Microsoft for many of its legacy customers, while also facing a tougher challenge from Google Cloud Platform.
Stay tuned for more coverage of AWS re:Invent from Las Vegas this morning.
