Only 4 percent of companies are on the cloud, says AWS CEO Andy Jassy

Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy on Tuesday said the coronavirus pandemic was pushing large businesses to reinvent to the cloud from on- premise business, and yet only four percent of the world’s enterprises were using cloud services.

Delivering the keynote address at AWS re:Invent, its first ever digital conference for developers and businesses, he said:

“COVID-19 has been very difficult. Businesses have closed down and people have lost jobs. Large enterprises are now looking at transformation and want their applications engineered for the cloud.”

“During discontinuity, people take a step back and want to move to the cloud. The pandemic has accelerated cloud adoption,” added Andy.

At present, AWS’ ARR stands at $46 billion, with a 29 percent y-o-y growth.

During the event, Andy focused on what it meant to reinvent and thrive. In his presentation, he showed developers why companies must reinvent. Only 17 percent of the companies featured in Fortune 500 in the year 1970 remain. And from 2000's Fortune 500 list, only 50 percent of the companies remain.

“Don’t wait too long to reinvent. You need good leadership to be maniacal, relentless, and tenacious about the product and you have to challenge people to get to the truth. To reinvent and change, you need to have the courage. Better experience for customers will always win.”

“In the nineties, Amazon owned inventory and shipped them. At the time several companies were allowing third party sellers to ship products through their platform. In the beginning we believed that we had to own products to serve customers better. We soon realised that it was better to be a marketplace, which works better rather than owning inventory,” said Andy.

He added that companies need to focus on talent to transform themselves and must also focus on their product with speed and urgency to stay ahead.

For example, J P Morgan, a client of AWS, is going through digital transformation. Lori Beer, Global CIO, J P Morgan Chase, said: "Transforming takes a lot of work. Our developers use AWS to scale and we use its AI and analytics services. AWS helps train our algorithms using AWS Sagemaker. We are a company looking for change all the time. We funded Thomas Edison's Lightbulb, we introduced the first ATM and championed early enterprise banking and internet banking. However, today’s world is about rapid innovation. We are transforming our two hundred and fifty thousand employees, our 6,000 apps, and the 450 peta bytes of data which we use. This transformation is happening with AWS, app refactoring is happening to be more cloud native and we are leveraging AI.”

During the event, Amazon also made several announcements of new services for storage, security, and analytics.

AWS and BlackBerry Limited announced a multi-year global agreement to develop and market BlackBerry’s Intelligent Vehicle Data Platform, IVY. BlackBerry IVY is a scalable, cloud-connected software platform that will allow automakers to provide a consistent and secure way to read vehicle sensor data, normalise it, and create actionable insights from that data both locally in the vehicle and in the cloud.

Amazon Web Services and Boom Technology, Inc. (Boom Supersonic), a Denver-based aviation company that is bringing commercial supersonic flight back to the skies, is going to use AWS compute power, storage, security, and comprehensive set of services to reinvent supersonic commercial travel.

AWS believes that managing data at scale will change customer experiences. To help the engineering community to get to that level of app functionality, it also launched several new cloud infrastructure, including open source products, services such as Babelfish for PostGreSQL, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Anywhere, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Anywhere, AWS Trainium, and AWS Proton.