New AWS CEO Adam Selipsky fired off a barrage of new product announcements in his first AWS re:Invent keynote.
For anyone expecting the new Amazon Web Services’ CEO Adam Selipsky to beat a new path for the cloud behemoth, Tuesday’s keynote address at AWS’s annual user conference would have come as a disappointment. The former Tableau CEO— who returned to AWS earlier this year when Andy Jassy ascended to the Amazon CEO throne—was never going to be charged with setting a drastic new direction for the dominant cloud vendor, which maintains a healthy double-digit market share lead over its rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. However, a pair of pre-conference interviews with Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal hinted at a simplified, industry-focused approach from the new CEO, who held up Amazon’s cloud contact center product Amazon Connect as an ideal example of how AWS could simplify its offerings for less cloud-savvy customers in the future. As Matt Asay wrote for InfoWorld ahead of the show, “It’s a safe bet to take Selipsky at his word and assume the company is going to try to tame its Byzantine service creep (more than 200 services and counting) for customers with vertical industry solutions.” While taming the Byzantine service creep may be forthcoming, it was not on display the first day of re:Invent. Even though he spoke for an hour less than his boss typically used to, Selipsky took a leaf out of Jassy’s playbook by continuing to make a massive number of announcements during his re:Invent keynote, focusing on three key areas: compute, networking, and data, in that order.
