AWS is conducting the 9th edition of AWS re:Invent, between 1 – 17 December (three weeks). In his opening keynote, Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon Web Services spoke about its growth and financial successes, its culture of continually reinventing itself, and announced many new products and services. Customers gave testimonials, and AWS business leaders spoke about the latest developments in their respective domains. Jassy said over 500,000 were expected to register for this three-week virtual event, which has five keynotes and 500+ technical sessions, and this makes re:Invent an “educational and learning conference.” AWS clocks revenue of $46bn with a growth of 29% year-on-year. In the past 12 months, it grew by $10bn – which is the fastest growth ever in its history. As per Gartner, AWS has a 45% market share in cloud and infrastructure services, more than double its nearest competitor. The total amount of IT spending on cloud is just 4% today. Yet, more companies rushed to the cloud in the last ten months as they changed business models due to the pandemic. That presents a massive opportunity for companies like Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google, Alibaba, and others. Jassy explained the reasons for the company’s success and then went on to offer 8 keys for building a reinvention culture.
“Ten years ago, AWS was not on the list of the top 10 IT companies in the world. But in 2020, AWS is the 5th largest enterprise IT company in the world, ahead of SAP and Oracle. That growth is significantly driven by the growth of cloud computing and the infrastructure technology space. In the next 10 – 20 years, the vast majority of computing is moving to the cloud; it means that there is much growth ahead of us. This growth was accelerated during the pandemic — the pandemic accelerated cloud adoption by several years,” said Jassy.
It is really hard to build a business that lasts successfully for many years. And to do it, you are going to have to reinvent yourself, and often multiple times over
— Andy Jassy, CEO, AWS
Jassy said it is “really hard” to build a business that sustains for an extended period of time. He reminded the audiences watching his keynote online from the Fortune 500 companies around 50 years ago, in 1970, only 83 companies or 17% are still on this list today.
“If you look at just 20 years ago (the year 2000), the Fortune 500, only half of them are still on that list. It is really hard to build a business that lasts successfully for many years. And to do it, you are going to have to reinvent yourself, and often multiple times over,” said Jassy.
He said AWS itself did much introspection in the last nine months and “thought a lot” about reinvention.
“Typically, what you see is the desperate kind of reinvention. You see companies that are on the verge of falling apart; some are going bankrupt, deciding they need to reinvent themselves. When you wait to that point, it is uncertain whether you are going to be successful or not. You want to be reinventing when you are healthy — not when the business is in bad shape. And you want to be reinventing all the time.
Some of it is about building the right reinvention culture and some of it is on what technology is available to you and jumping on it to make that reinvention happen,” advised Jassy.
In our next story: Andy Jassy’s 8 keys to building a reinvention culture. Stay tuned for updates.
This reporter was invited by Amazon Web Services to attend and report on re:Invent 2020 (virtual edition). He drank endless cups of coffee and spent several hours online to watch the AWS keynotes and sessions. He also attended virtual Press briefings and did some interviews with AWS executives.