Conference Name Suggests the Events Overarching Theme
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We discussed the name pretty
deeply, he said. The name of the conference is re:Invent. That kind of says
it all. The name intentionally has two meanings to it. The first is regarding
invention. If you look at the whole startup community thats been on AWS and
continues to be on AWSlike the latest round of hot startups like Pinterest and
Instagramthere continues to be truly amazing invention happening on the
platform with new companies springing up. And we want to highlight those kinds
of companies. And we want to teach other companies how people are inventing on
the AWS platform.
The second meaning of
the name is to reinvent or to invent again, Selipsky said. This is
particularly for a lot of our enterprise customers who have been doing IT for a
very long time and are looking at how they can make their IT operations more
capital-efficient, lower cost, more flexible and to allow their IT departments
to say yes to their internal customers. There are a lot of important issues
they need to deal with as they make that transition, such as how to deal with
legacy infrastructures, how to deal with legacy applications, how to deal with
legacy architecture and more. There will be a lot for decision makers of those
companies in attendance to learn about how to reinvent the way they do IT and
what cloud computing can mean to their companies.
Asked about new
competition in the market with Microsoft announcing its infrastructure as a service
(IaaS) play, Google announcing its Google Compute Engine and Oracle and IBM
coming into the fore, among others, Selipsky said AWS welcomes the competition,
particularly from articulate, deep-pocketed companies that can help spread the
word about cloud computing.
I think its pretty
clear that cloud computing is going to be a very large market segment and is an
attractive business and will continue to be so for a long time to come,
Selipsky said. Any time you have an attractive business youre going to have
strong competition. Id be very worried if we didnt have strong competition
because it would make me wonder if other people are seeing things that we
werent. So its entirely unsurprising that there are a lot of competitors
jumping into this area.
Selipsky noted that at
the end of the day there are likely to be multiple winners. "And I think
in a large and attractive market segment, if we can be one of those winners, we
can have an attractive business. And we dont feel like we have to be the only
winner to have a great business," he said. "Our biggest competition today absolutely
remains the server and the disk drivepeople doing IT the way theyve done it for
the last 30 to 40 years. And I think that other companies with strong
reputations and marketing and sales resources that can help educate customers
and get more companies over the hump of understanding cloud computing will help
the whole segment.
However, Selipsky said
that as an early pioneer in cloud computing, having been in the market for six
years now with paying customers and having iterated many times on the platform,
we feel that weve created and are maintaining a significant lead in terms of
breadth of services, the depth of platform, and the history of operating with
the platform.
