As a steady stream of last-minute Thanksgiving shoppers poured into Whole Foods stores around the country Wednesday afternoon, Amazon Web Services chose what is traditionally the best time of the year to bury bad news to announce that it has won a significant amount of business away from its closest rival.
Symantec, the giant security vendor, plans to run “the vast majority of its workloads” on AWS, the two companies said in a press release. As noted by The Seattle Times, the move comes just weeks after Microsoft announced that Symantec “is using the Microsoft Azure cloud” for its Norton antivirus software.
The two companies have entered into a “long-term and bi-directional” relationship, they said in the release. Symantec now considers AWS its “strategic cloud provider, which seems like more of a commitment than the usual “preferred cloud provider” language usually used in these types of releases from all cloud vendors.
The deal is obviously good news for AWS, which has continued to grow at a very strong rate throughout 2017. It’s just a little surprising that it chose to announce the deal on Thanksgiving Eve when it is set to have the entire enterprise tech news budget to itself next week at its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.
It’s probably safe to assume, however, that Symantec won’t be the only new customer unveiled at re:Invent next week. Last year at the conference, AWS introduced Matson, Capital One, and Workday as new cloud customers.
