AWS Expands Industrial Offerings
At re:Invent, AWS beefs up its retrofit game
Francis Scialabba
· less than 3 min read
Keep up with the innovative tech transforming business
Tech Brew informs business leaders about the latest innovations, automation advances, policy shifts and more to help them make smart decisions.
Attendees usually must head to the home of The Hangover for Amazon Web Services’s biannual re:Invent conference. This week, the serverless bonanza lived up to its namesake by taking place 100% virtually, in the ☁️☁️☁️.
Before we dive in, a word on the importance of AWS.
- For Amazon: It’s the high-margin crown jewel.
- For consumers: It’s the backbone powering many of your favorite parts of the internet, as we saw in a recent AWS outage.
Now to the news
The re:Invent conference had its usual coder overtures, with AWS unveiling a disorienting amount of specialized software and compute hardware. One surprise: It will rent out M1-chip-equipped Mac Minis to developers remotely building software for Apple products (for a pretty penny).
AWS also beefed up its retrofit game, rolling out five new machine learning services for the industrial sector. These systems could form an all-seeing eye for factory floor managers or oil rig operators. Two examples:
- The Amazon Monitron sensor-AI package keeps industrial machinery humming by flagging funky behavior and predicting malfunctions.
- With AWS Panorama Appliance, AWS provides a brain to dumb cameras, unlocking computer vision capabilities.
- Note: These services won’t include pre-packaged facial recognition, AWS told the FT.
Sound familiar? One could imagine Amazon is simultaneously upgrading and repurposing its own tech into a revenue stream. We're just speculating, but turning cost centers into cash cows is exactly what it's done with AWS, fulfillment, and more.
View from the top
Companies, schools, and your neighborhood utilities still stuck on legacy tech had no choice but to upgrade this year. And that pandemic-era procurement was wind to the cloud’s back.
But critics say AWS is losing cloudshare. AWS chief Andy Jassy addressed those naysayers this week, saying his unit’s revenue grew 29% year over year in Q3 at a $46 billion run rate.
- Google Cloud had ~45% YoY Q3 growth at a $13.6 billion run rate.
- Azure sales grew 59% in Q3. Microsoft doesn’t break out revenue, but it sits somewhere between AWS and GC.
Bottom line: In search of further growth, the pioneer of disruption is going after a relatively undisrupted industrial sector.
Keep up with the innovative tech transforming business
Tech Brew informs business leaders about the latest innovations, automation advances, policy shifts and more to help them make smart decisions.