The Six Five team discusses AWS re:Invent.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: So I’d like to set a little bit of context and Dan, this might sound a little bit familiar, but we’re 15 years into the cloud and most 15 year olds are not that mature, but they’re out of those gangly 13 year old age that all of us were in. And the great thing is choice that’s out there and the amount of partners that’s out there is immense. AWS has the clear advantage in IaaS, around 50% market share.
There is the past in the SaaS market that other people have as well. Not a whole lot of talk about multi-cloud, but why don’t you give a little bit of editorial. This is less about AWS and more about my belief systems is that multicloud, just like hybrid is not debatable. Companies use multiple clouds for IaaS. In fact, I haven’t talked to a Fortune 1000 CEO that didn’t use more than one cloud vendor for IaaS in past.
So really the only debate is how you manage those that having separate dev sec network ops teams per cloud. You can check out some of the stuff I’ve been talking about on Twitter and LinkedIn about that. But that’s the one area I’d love to see more definitive messaging from AWS. And listen, this is not the chill show. There are pluses and minuses with every show and every vendor. And it’s easier to do this when that vendor has 50% market share. AWS is the market share leader in AI and ML. And I felt that the company’s doing a really good job answering the questions or the challenges of data sprawl, quality, governance, lineage, security, lack of reuse of even AI algorithms and learnings, auditability, complexity, transparency, costs and performance.
I do think they need a little bit more investment in on-prem. You cannot get these services as part of their hybrid solution. AWS and IaaS compute, I mean not only are they the market share leader, but they have the broadest view holistically from left to right and then top to bottom. You want the highest performance, the highest performance per wat. We got it. You want the lowest cost. We got that. A lot of our own homegrown stuff, a lot of different types of compute even though we like to smoosh them together. General compute from a CPU, inference, training and even network offload. They provide their own processing units but also have leading instances from AMD, NVIDIA, Habana and Intel. And I know Habana’s part of Intel, but I don’t want people to confuse that they only use Intel CPUs. Habana is very much an intel owned training part.
Probably most impressive though is what they’ve done with their homegrown silicon. And we had an incredible speaker on The Six Five Gadi, check it out if you can, talking about Graviton, Inferentia, Nitro and Tranium. Dan 10 years ago would’ve never said that a vendor that did anything other than chips could do good chips. But AWS does its own good chips and it’s not just containers, it’s VMs, it’s containers and its serverless. So props to the company on that. It must be very hard to compete with AWS on compute because no matter how you pull this thing, they seem and appear to have the lead. By the way, this is what is making the alternative companies like Ampere Computing so popular with Google Cloud and also with Azure and Oracle Cloud. But again, I’m going to leave. There’s a lot more oxygen I left you in the room Dan.
Daniel Newman: This is one of those topics that we could have done an entire show on. Had we not done seven hours almost of recordings with AWS folks on The Six Five, I would’ve said we should. But instead what we should do is put in the show notes, the links to all of them so you can check them out. Because we did, we talked containers, we talked home grown silicon, we talked sustainability, we talked about AI and ML a lot. And if those are things that you’re interested in, I can’t beat it here in a few minutes. What I will say is there’s a couple of themes that are really important and noteworthy.
The first theme is clouds are not all the same. And there seems to be this overarching desire to make IaaS because to some extent when you’re just talking compute network and storage, you can create what’s called this concept of commodity. And it’s not a commodity. AWS between this, what Pat talked about with this homegrown silicon, with this homegrown silicon, when you talk about with their a AI ML services, when you talk about the overarching services for different instances in compute with their hybrid cloud approach, you get differentiation across the business and that makes the company different than Azure and it’s different than Google, different than Oracle.
And by the way, all kind of approach the pricing different too of consumption and how businesses are going to be able to move to these clouds and stay with these clouds. So noting that AWS has the most comprehensive suite, especially when it comes to the infrastructure itself. But the extensibility, like you said of a AI ML, a lot of people say mention another cloud, which by the way has done a very good job for being the leader in data services and it’s actually not yet.
And we’ll see where that actually lands. The second thing is multicloud is here period. You use this stat a bunch of times in some of our videos pathway. It’s like a hundred percent of big enterprises are multicloud now. And I’m not just talking about multi-cloud because they happen to be using a SaaS application somewhere in the org that sits on another public cloud. Every company is doing some version of multi-cloud for governance, for data residency and sovereignty for redundancy. There’s a lot of resiliency. There’s a lot of different reasons that that’s being done. But it is being done. And I think AWS has arrived there. And that’s something that took a while for the company. It wasn’t fast to get to, it was slow to get to hybrid cloud. It was slow to get to multi because obviously this goes back to the cloud denier era.
And you and I have talked about this quite a bit. There was a period of time where the growth was so fast that people actually believe that every workload would be in the public cloud. And we’re finding out that’s just not going to be the case. And so AWS is doing a good job of building a diversified portfolio. So I want to talk about one more thing Pat because I know you love this topic because I want to talk about sustainability. Sustainability is not only near and dear to your heart Pat, but it’s near and dear to the hearts of most organizations. And it’s worth noting for this everybody out there that I care about sustainability through the lens of economical, meaningful and measurable. So we had a problem over the last couple of years where greenwashing became prevalent. A lot of architect share a lot of talking about green for the sake of using it to drive business momentum.
But what I like about what the company’s done with their water positive announcement and also what the company is doing with their homegrown silicon is they’re actually building technology that meaningfully reduces the utilization of power in the data center, which is going to be massive with the growth of compute. And they’re trying to do something meaningful to the world, which we just left Las Vegas Pat, and by the way, there’s a lake drying up there and it’s a pretty significant problem. We got all these great hotels but we might not have water.
So AWS is doing a lot of things well, it was a great event, high energy, you and I, you couldn’t help but smile seeing all the geeks running around because like the event, like we said, 75% geeks and 25% want to be geeks.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
