Being the leader in the public cloud market isn’t enough for AWS as it uses its fourth annual conference to move into Business Intelligence.
Hosted predominantly by Andy Jassy, SVP, AWS, he quickly outlined the success of its expansion, saying: "It’s not just that we have a lot more services than every other provider, we have a lot more features."
Although Jassy said that the event isn’t a sales pitch, he spent a long time revealing new products and services. So many that he almost reach double digits, where typically in my experience a company may bring out two or three.
With the stream of products came a bullishness, particularly with its Database Migration Service. AWS wants customers to bring their databases to its cloud and it feels it can do a better job than Oracle.
Jassy spoke about its customer focus and criticised some relational database vendors, punctuating his point with an image of negative articles about Oracle.
So AWS is heading into the relational database market, it is also turning itself into a Business Intelligence tool with Amazon QuickSight.
Plenty of BI tools already exist and AWS appears to be offering as much data integration and analytics as the rest. Where it wants to differentiate is of course cost, Jassy said it would be around a 10th of the cost of traditional BI tools.
These aren’t small market areas that the company is aiming to disrupt, the question will be whether or not it can achieve it.
Jassy spoke about the seven basic freedoms of cloud, which included the freedom to migrate, to build unfettered and freedom to say yes.
The company has clearly done a lot of work to build relationships with partners to increase its chances of success. Teaming up with Accenture to create the Accenture AWS Business Group, is one way to bring in customers.
Along with the partnerships and services, Jassy spoke of cloud first start-ups like Airbnb which have disrupted their markets. It looks as though AWS want to take that cloud first approach and disrupt across multiple markets.
