AWS re:Invent 2019 is now behind us, personally this was my 7th time attending the annual conference in Las Vegas and I was more thrilled than ever. As pioneers in the consulting partner ecosystem, we continue to track AllCloud’s development within the AWS Partner Network (APN) and this year AllCloud was mentioned twice by Andy Jassy during the main keynotes as an example of a successful born-in-the-cloud System Integrator in Europe. These mentions really recognize our contribution to the overall growth of AWS. It leaves me to wonder what’s next year going to look like for AllCloud and our customers? Here is what I expect to see following re:Invent.
How will the enterprise landscape look in 2020?
The cloud is the new normal and cloud-native is becoming part of every organization’s IT strategy. Just a few years back we were talking about enterprises migrating to the cloud but nowadays we are actually seeing very large organizations proving the business potential of the cloud. They are not only completely moving to the cloud, but also taking the next steps to modernize their platforms and applications by leveraging containers, managed services, and serverless technologies. A great example of this comes from the automotive industry, starting with IoT connected cars to autonomous cars, these massive applications are all cloud-native and wouldn’t be possible by using virtual machines. Another example is the Telco industry, many providers across the globe have already embraced a cloud-first approach and the adoption of cloud services is allowing them to operate at scale, and with a much lower cost of operation.
The key takeaways are:
- Cloud-native is becoming the standard practice in forward-thinking organizations
- Serverless and managed services are driving huge TCO cost reduction
How are organizations executing their transformation?
Enterprise senior leadership teams have acknowledged that moving to the cloud is allowing them to be more focused on their business and less on their infrastructure. These same leaders are embracing the establishment of a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) as the core team to head their IT transformation, adopt modern cloud services and become the enabler to innovate better products and services for their business.
The key takeaways are:
- Senior leadership with a strong executive sponsor is a key factor for the transformation
- Organizations should carefully pick people with a strong ability to learn and adopt new technologies to be a part of their CCoE
How mature are machine learning technologies?
Over the past several years we have been hearing a lot about machine learning and artificial intelligence. We are seeing many customers trying to leverage ML and how to integrate it into their business. I can vouch that companies are already putting machine learning into production for cases like anomaly detection and quality control in manufacturing. This year at re:Invent AWS released 20 new machine learning capabilities that will make it all even simpler using AutoML capabilities and more ready-to-use APIs like Fraud Detection.
The key takeaways are:
- Machine learning is production-ready and being deployed in an increased number of use cases
- Machine learning is a technology to solve business problems, to accelerate the use of it, senior leadership should challenge their IT teams to get them going in that direction.
Where’s the SMB segment heading to?
The cloud is evolving at a very rapid pace, with the use of machine learning optimizing itself over time and increased automation, the entire ecosystem will accelerate and develop more products and services. You’re probably wondering how this affects SMB companies? The answer is very straightforward; SMBs will consume cloud applications. We are seeing a tremendous movement throughout the entire software industry and the ISV ecosystem towards a SaaS model. Some predictions estimate that by 2022 86% of the software will be consumed as SaaS. With the transition to SaaS, SMBs will not have to worry about operating their own infrastructure and will benefit from software running in the cloud.
The key takeaways are:
- The ISV ecosystem is undergoing a heavy transformation and getting ready to deliver their software-as-a-service via the cloud
- The ultimate customer experience is driven by simplicity. Leveraging continuous innovation, easy to understand pricing models and frictionless onboarding will all help narrow down the SaaS selection process by customers.
What is happening to the multi-cloud trend?
Multi-cloud is one of my top interests. It’s true that some organizations wish to have a multi-cloud strategy. However, at the same time, they realize the value of cloud-native services, which in some ways contradict being platform agnostic. I believe that multi-cloud will continue to be an exploration phase for customers, as the technology is really not ready for holistic parallel usage of multiple cloud providers for the same workload. I predict that organizations will choose a primary cloud provider and may supplement services from other vendors based on specific capabilities. As I see the pace of innovation happening (e.g. AWS releasing over 2,500 new features in 2019), I believe customers will seek ways to solidify as much as they can, aiming to build their business as Amazon has.
The key takeaways are:
- Maximize the value you can get from one cloud vendor before starting to deploy a multi-cloud architecture, think about how you would maximize the use of cloud-native services.
- Hybrid-cloud will be going through heavy disruption, cloud vendors are offering customers the ability to deploy cloud-native services such as Outposts and Local-Zones at their premises or very close to them. Stay tuned before making the next investment in your existing data center.
What Will AllCloud’s AWS focus look like in 2020?
Our mission at AllCloud is to help our customers receive maximum value from and accelerate innovation on the cloud. We are focused on helping customers optimize and build new products by providing them with solutions that are based on AWS and Industry best practices leveraging the cloud as their toolbox for staying ahead of the competition. In 2020, our customers should expect unparalleled experience from us, especially in the following areas:
- Enterprise transformation and modernization with a focus on supporting our customers in developing innovative new products and services utilizing AWS services. Specifically, focusing on the ability to leverage managed services, serverless, IoT, data lakes, and machine learning to maximize the value of their businesses.
- Leading the ISV transformation, making sure our technology customers are ready to deliver their software-as-a-service on AWS while still leveraging their existing intellectual property.
- Helping our large mature customer community, which are already heavily relying on the cloud, to optimize their operations along with adopting the most advanced services, acting as their sherpa through Amazon’s best-practices and training them how to Build-like-Amazon.
Last but not least, as an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and a Salesforce Platinum Partner, I am excited about the strengthened partnership between these platforms and expect to see more organizations really leveraging the capabilities and integrations between their cloud systems to accelerate business innovation.