Amazon Web Services this week is holding its first re:Invent conference without Andy Jassy at the helm of the tech giant’s cloud unit. The traditional keynote address Tuesday morning will be delivered by Adam Selipsky, who returned to AWS this year as its CEO after Jassy was named to succeed Jeff Bezos as Amazon CEO.
Seplisky, previously Tableau Software CEO, gave a preview of two new directions for AWS in interviews prior to the event.
First, he said AWS plans to offer more high-level “horizontal” services that can be used across a variety of industries, expanding its business further beyond the basic AWS building blocks of EC2 cloud computing and S3 cloud storage. He cited the AWS Cloud Contact Center service for call centers as an example.
“More and more, customers are asking us to provide them with higher-level abstractions on top of AWS services,” he told enterprise technology publication SiliconANGLE in an interview.
Second, he said AWS plans to build more services tailored to specific industries. In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Selipsky said AWS is starting to build specific offerings for industries such as financial services, telecommunications, automotive and healthcare offerings.
Microsoft and Google, Amazon’s main cloud rivals, have been more aggressive than Amazon in rolling out cloud services and platforms tailored to specific industries.
AWS has struggled to break into the business applications market, as detailed in a story by published by Insider last week, based on an internal document critical of Amazon’s Pinpoint marketing software.
“The world around us is changing so much that we’re going to have to be different,” Selipsky said in the Bloomberg interview. “It doesn’t matter what we did yesterday.”
He elaborated on that theme in an interview with CRN.
“No matter how successful we have been in the past—just given the rate of change in the industry, how quickly our market segment is evolving and just the rate of growth of AWS—there are always going to be big opportunities … to double down even further on successes, to find new areas in which our customers need us to innovate and to improve existing things we do,” he told CRN. “So I’ve really been trying to find and focus on the most important of those.”
Amazon Web Services remains the public cloud leader with 33% market share in cloud infrastructure, platform and hosted private cloud services, according to Synergy Research Group. Microsoft Azure is second with 20%, and Google Cloud is third with 10%, the firm estimates.
Overall enterprise spending on cloud services in the third quarter topped $45 billion, an increase of 37% from the same quarter a year earlier.
AWS re:Invent takes place this week in Las Vegas. Sessions are also streamed online.
