AWS Growth Is Unparalleled, UK Boss Claims

Amazon Web Services kicked off its largest ever European event earlier today, the AWS Summit in London, with the AWS UK managing director making some bold statements at the gathering.

Gavin Jackson, in his keynote opening at the event, revealed how the growth of the cloud provider is unlike anything that has ever been seen in the technology sector before. He highlighted the $14 billion revenue run rate and 43% year-on-year growth for the first quarter of 2017.

His words:

“It’s unprecedented for a company with limited tenure like AWS, at just 11 and a half years old. It’s unparalleled as a paradigm from any other technology shift we’ve ever seen in history, so it’s a pretty good indicator that cloud is the new normal.”

But revenue is only one indicator, and another equally important measure is the fact that technology firms are keen on using the AWS cloud architecture.

In fact, eight of the top ten growth companies are using the platform, according to Gavin:

“This should be a really clear indicator as to how people are thinking about their investments in technology, but also as a clear indicator as to how people are thinking about investments in talent and skills, with the center of gravity really shifting up towards these cloud companies.”

CTO Werner Vogels followed up the Jackson keynote, making a special mention of ever growing portfolio of cloud applications that Amazon Web Services hosts, while also explaining how AWS has improved their performance.

He paid particular attention to the AI capabilities of the cloud platform, detailing how the artificial intelligence technology used on the Amazon retail website is now being moved to AWS:

“We’ve been doing AI for 20 years. AWS is the center of gravity for AI because of all the services you can use, whether it’s the hardware, the software or high-level services.

The good thing is that we’ve been doing this for 20 years. If you’ve been visiting the Amazon.co.uk web page, you’ve been exposed to AI for 20 years or more. Your recommendation engine is machine learning. ‘Customers who bought X or bought Y’, is machine learning.

We’ve been doing it for such a long time and we have thousands of engineers working on it. You’re now seeing this experience that we have in that world go into AWS.”

Vogels capped off his time at the stage emphasizing the commitment that AWS has to partners and customers, while stressing that the cloud giant will continue to innovate aggressively, and focus on bringing innovative solutions to the market.

Some 6,000 attendees were expected the event, and technology leaders from companies like BP and Deliveroo were also part of this UK gathering.