AWS Re:Invent 2015: The CMO Land Grab and Rise of Professional Services

Since its first year in 2012, Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent conference has brought together chief technology officers, technology vendors, and cloud influencers under one roof. This year, over 19,000 IT professionals came to Las Vegas for the event, many with many with massive cloud budgets. It’s the most influential cloud event of the year, setting the tone for the cloud expanding reach into real enterprise budgets, enriching services for a wide variety of use cases, and, of course, deal making. Here are a few major takeaways from this year’s event, from a four-time re:Invent veteran:

AWS Will Tap Directly Into the Chief Marketing Officer Budget

AWS made a huge land grab into the mutli-billion dollar marketing technology industry with the launch of Amazon QuickSight, a service that not only crunches big data, but provides an interface for marketers to view and take action. This is a groundbreaking step into the CMO’s budget and workflow. Traditionally, CMOs invest into new marketing technologies by working with the engineering team to build or buy the solution. The new dynamic here is that AWS is poised to deliver a total solution to the CMO, not just services for the DevOps engineers to build upon. Granted that QuickSight is in its infant stages, but expect in a few years to see more CMOs directly paying AWS a new class of professional services that customize AWS’s new marketing solutions.

If you’re a funded startup, AWS is not just the best infrastructure choice, it’s the only choice.

AWS is Enabling Many Companies That Will be Full Enterprises Within 10 Years

If you’re a funded startup, AWS is not just the best infrastructure choice, it’s the only choice. Basic economic factors drive this momentum: AWS knowledge is a powerful and valuable skill set that is in demand and rapidly accelerates income potential for any developer. The tremendous community of DevOps-oriented talent can solve a wide variety of infrastructure problems over the IT organization’s lifecycle. And the high volume of company case studies with true production-ready workloads (from Hotel Tonight to Nokia) outshines alternatives.

Enterprise Adoption of the Cloud is Proven

From the beginning, AWS has sent a clear message that it is ready to serve as a cloud solution for traditional enterprises, and not just the cloud startups. More and more re:Invent attendees are senior level technology executives from traditional enterprises who come, not just with an interest in how to use the cloud, but to enhance proven production workloads. This can be seen with many Fortune 1K attendees working the exhibition hall and attending sessions.

The Rise of Professional Services and Strategic Partners

Professional services hold the keys to onboarding more and more long term traditional enterprise customer workloads to production-ready cloud deployments. This year, more managed service providers (MSP) and professional services sponsors moved in on territory previously ruled by managed technology ecosystem plays. The gap between managed technology and professional services is a big one: just consider a managed NoSQL database service (i.e. Mongo Labs) versus a company that will build, deploy and manage a total solution (Datapipe).

The gap between managed technology and professional services is a big one, just consider a managed database service versus a company that will build, deploy and manage a total system. Strategic technology plays that add trust and confidence to AWS, such as security, are a key component to winning large enterprise production-ready workloads.

The Rise of the Business ‘Bro’

Since 2012, re:Invent has been a magic experience where access to CTOs and technology-doers of valuable startups was just a handshake away. This access still exists, with an added value layer of vendors and business-facing attendees. This is expected as the event matures, and it will be interesting to see how AWS balances a quality knowledge and vendor offering to keep techie attendees coming back and growing.

Feature Image via Pixabay.