AWS: Barriers to large expensive computing systems are a thing of the past

Barriers to accessing large expensive computing systems such as time, money and experience are a thing of the past AWS has declared.

Brian Matsubara, AWS head of global alliance strategy told CBR: Cloud computing removes a number of barriers that have existed in the past including the expenses associated with large computing systems. The cloud being an utility based service lowers the barrier entry for people out there to actually take advantage of large scale computing infrastructure that they could not have used because they did not have the time, experience or money."

"The cloud is empowering people, consumers, individual developers as well as enterprise customers to come up with innovative ideas and build products that did not exist before."

No particular region is adopting cloud technology than others, Matsubara says but "the overall global rate of adoption in cloud computing is accelerating fairly rapidly".

"It is interesting how quickly this is happening and also the number of born in the cloud companies [that have appeared], as well as the products existing companies are delivering."

He said technology and cloud computing allow cloud born firms to emerge rapidly and be very competitive in markets once dominated by legacy companies.

However, when existing companies look to enter this space, Matsubara said that they need a strong and well-built migration strategy to achieve their desired outcome.

"Migration strategies are hugely important for taking infrastructure, existing workloads to the cloud. Do dependency resolution, and identify the infrastructure and applications that are good candidates for the cloud, ."

But he said the cloud is not just about migrating existing workloads from one environment to another as businesses are now looking at the cloud to build new products and services that they can provide to customers.

"Customers are using the cloud to increase their top line revenues and by creating higher value products that they could not build before, and also reaching markets that geographically they could not have reached before.

"Two areas I encourage to look at are: how to increase your top revenue and how to also manage the cost associated with running legacy IT while moving those workloads to the cloud."

When launching a product, he said that companies should never launch something that is not intuitive for a customer base.

"[Do not launch something] That does not come with the appropriate documentation and information that customers are going to need to run their product."

Page 2: AWS’s global alliances

Alliance strategy

With a vast portfolio of products out in the market, AWS has built a partners ecosystem that includes SoftwareAG, Adobe, Bitdender, Brocade, CA Technologies, Chef and Cisco,.

"We have always known that the disruptive nature of what the cloud does is creating a tremendous market opportunity.

"It is not going to be a one winner takes it all kind of thing. We fully expect that there are going to be other infrastructure cloud providers that are going to enter the market and have their own specialities and value to provide the market."

Matsubara said that partners have been at the core of the company since the beginning, and that AWS always knew that the partner ecosystem, both consulting and technology partners, were going to be critical to the customers’ experience using its services.

"If you look at consulting partners, customers need smart people to help them do the architecture, do implementation, do fully manage services on AWS.

"On the technology partner side, there is almost an infinite amount of other specific technologies and applications, from OSs to databases, middleware, security software, management software, that the market already has providers of.

"For us, in order to be able to allow customers to solve their business problem, we have to make sure we have the right ecosystem of technology partners, whose products run on AWS and are supported on AWS."

With 90% of the company’s roadmap coming from customer insights, Matsubara said that is hard to say where the cloud is going to be in five years but "it will continue to accelerate".