AWS CEO Andy Jassy’s Keynote pushed full-migration and transformation as a key theme.

After braving the elements to get to Las Vegas, AWS re:Invent 2019 did not disappoint!

The back to back excitement started with midnight madness on Sunday, and morphed right into Monday with scheduled meetings, impromptu encounters and brainstorming with peers from all corners of the world. We even fit in a few sessions during the week, all of which were professionally delivered by humble, down-to-sharing-all facilitators and speakers. Kudos to the organizers, as satisfying 65,000 tech people is no simple task.

The News

The pace of change in cloud technology is intense 51 weeks of the year, and ludicrous during re:Invent. The string of announcements this week demonstrated that the level of innovation is alive and well at both AWS and the partner ecosystem, which bodes well for 2020 being another very strong year for cloud migrations.

The most pertinent message for us was heard in CEO Andy Jassy’s keynote, which strongly enforced the need for complete application portfolio cloud migrations to unlock innovation in the enterprise.

“If there’s a big change you want to make, you don’t want to procrastinate,” Andy said. “It’s easy to go a long time dipping your toe in the water if you don’t have an aggressive goal. It won’t get easier if you wait.”

We hear you Andy.

It most certainly is pronounced Ay.Em.I It most certainly is pronounced Ay.Em.I

The Expos

From Tuesday to Thursday, the vendor exhibits in the expo areas were busy! What is great about the re:Invent expo is that most vendors have engineering staff or practitioners at the booth, who can really talk deeply about their solutions and cloud practices. The result is we get a ton of valuable cross-partner discussions out of the expo, allowing us to bring our customer’s new solutions more rapidly from face-to-face meetings.

It can feel like a zoo at times, and you won’t see everything. Have a read of our favourite pundits nature-walk through the expo for a brief look of the ecosystem. Hopefully we’ll see you next year too.

The Sessions

With over 3,000 sessions, re:Invent is primarily focused on learning and enablement. I was fortunate enough to catch three sessions, two chalk-talks and one hands on migration workshop. My colleagues caught more, and that pays off when you’re working towards certifications, which can also be taken onsite for a fully integrated learning experience.

You can watch the keynotes, and a lot of the talks, right here on the AWS YouTube channel.

The Momentum

It’s clear that the pendulum has fully swung to public cloud adoption even in non-commercial sectors, with over 7,000 government agencies, 10,000 academic institutions and 25,000 non-profits globally using AWS, let alone Azure or GCP. However, Andy Jassy referenced that 97% of the $4 trillion enterprise IT market is still being spent on-premise, representing a very large opportunity for our consulting partners to help facilitate cloud migration and transformation for many years to come.

Good times.

-David Colebatch
CEO, Tidal Migrations

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