Amazon Messes With Billions in Corporate Computing Dollars.
LAS VEGAS — There is a famous story from the early days of Google that goes something like this: When a group of New York media big shots heard about the huge efficiency of search advertising, which could hurt their own businesses, the memorable reaction of one of them was a more vulgar take on “You’re fussing with the magic!” Amazon Web Services just did much the same thing to the multibillion-dollar business of corporate computing by going after the legacy customers of companies like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft.
Amazon.com Inc. and consulting giant Accenture Plc are teaming up to provide cloud-based technology services to businesses, catapulting the Web retailer further into territory long dominated by companies such as HP and IBM. It’s a threat to privately held cloud BI providers like Birst, Domo, GoodData, and BIME, as well as more traditional BI software that can be run in companies’ on-premises data centers, too. A legacy business consists of current customers who use a company’s databases and software applications, and can generally be counted on to buy the new versions.
The new venture, announced Wednesday at an Amazon event in Las Vegas, will be staffed by Amazon and Accenture employees, who’ll design new services and help corporations shift technology operations to the cloud. In two hours AWS packed its first re:Invent keynote today with announcements of — deep breath — QuickSight, Kinesis Firehose, Snowball, the Database Migration Service, the Schema Conversion Tool, the MariaDB database engine, Config Rules, and Inspector.
And, on top of that, major consulting firm Accenture, which just bought Google Cloud Platform consulting shop Cloud Sherpas, announced a new AWS Business Group. Many of AWS’s individual products are seeing their usage — which fuels revenues — almost double, year on year, according to Jassy. “Do I think cloud technology is here to stay in an ever-increasing way?” Omar Abbosh, Accenture’s chief strategy officer, said in an interview. “One hundred percent.” Established almost a decade ago, AWS has been working closely with customers to tailor its services to their needs. At its annual customer conference, Amazon on Wednesday introduced new features and services aimed at offering legacy customers on all sorts of computing systems not just easy ways to get off the old technology, but also better and faster ways their old data can work on A.W.S. Infor, an enterprise software company, began exploring AWS’s capabilities five years ago and gave Amazon a list of about 100 services it needed the company to deliver.
Among the most notable, there was a 47-pound data storage device that A.W.S. would ship to a customer, and for $200 would suck down 50 terabytes of data, incidentally converting it from an older system to a more modern one. The startup’s tools can run on multiple public clouds or in on-premises infrastructure. “That better matches the needs of enterprises that don’t want to be locked into one provider or need hybrid or on-premises for corporate protocol or security reasons,” Iron.io cofounder and chief executive Travis Reeder told VentureBeat in an email. As Amazon brings Big Five consulting firms such as Accenture on board, more and more companies could be tempted to ditch traditional IT services companies for AWS, which offers more flexible contract terms. Ellison, the longtime head of Oracle and now its executive chairman, as a symbol of the “old guard” companies that abused their customers with onerous terms. It will be available for “a tenth of the cost of traditional business intelligence providers,” AWS senior vice president Andy Jassy said at the AWS re:Invent conference.
The tool is meant to be very easy to use — providing visualizations in as little as 60 seconds, Jassy said — and comes powered with Amazon’s new proprietary Super-Fast Parallel In-Memory Computation Engine (dubbed SPICE). Previously, old-guard enterprise companies dismissed A.W.S. and cloud computing, then grudgingly ceded them a place for start-ups and new applications. And of course, it’s integrated with other AWS services. “As soon as we recognize an AWS customer and we take all of their data and store it in the various AWS stores,” Jassy said, “we move it to our query engine.” AWS today announced Kinesis Firehose, a new tool to push data from a web app, mobile app, or telemetry system into AWS storage systems for further analysis. But so be it — Snowball is actually a pretty interesting idea when you realize AWS just wants to get customer data into the cloud as fast as possible.
The service generates reports on security posture and suggests next steps. “You can tell which assessments were done, what findings they have, and what they actually did to remediate,” Jassy said.