“We will continue to be customer obsessed”

In an interview on the sidelines of the company’s annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Selipsky discussed how customers can gain by moving more of their workloads to the cloud, especially during uncertain economic times. and how AWS is committed to India for the long term. term. Edited excerpts:

How is the economic uncertainty in the United States impacting AWS’ business and how do you plan to remain resilient?

There’s no doubt that we’re going through a period of economic uncertainty, and while we’re seeing some of our customers tightening their belts, the good news is that many of our customers are actually moving faster and deeper into the cloud. . And that’s because they understand that the cloud can bring cost-effectiveness, scalability, and flexibility, especially in the face of uncertainty. Airbnb is a good example. They were already a heavy user of the cloud, and they were far better prepared than many others when the hospitality industry bottomed out in 2020. Airbnb was able to cut cloud spending by 27% and was able to quickly activate the infrastructure. they needed and continue to drive innovation. As we are fully capitalizing on this opportunity, I do not believe the impending downturn will negatively impact AWS’ business.

How do you plan to maintain your leadership in the cloud market given the increased competition from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud?

Our measures of success are about our customers, not our competitors. This is fundamental to the way Amazon thinks through all of its activities. Many other companies have chosen competition-oriented strategies. In contrast, we spend 95% of our time worrying about what customers think, not what our competitors are doing. So our measures of success relate to our customers, how quickly they adopt the cloud, their experiences, what kind of uptime they have, and of course, ensuring they have the highest level of security, cost savings. cost, agility and ultimately, a high return on investment. We will continue to be customer obsessed.

What is the impact of India’s Digital Data Protection Bill, in its current form, on AWS’ business?

We are very committed to India for the long term. We are aware that each country has its own regulations, laws and customs around data and around digital sovereignty. We respect those of each country, and we work both with the government of each country where we operate, as well as with our customers.

We were in fact the first global cloud service provider to be certified in India in 2017 by the Ministry of Electronics and we continue to work closely with the government to ensure we follow these rules. A very recent proof of this is last week when we launched our second comprehensive infrastructure region in India in Hyderabad, and we had already launched our Mumbai region in 2016. With our Mumbai region alone, we have invested $3.7 billion. And with Hyderabad, by 2030 we plan to invest $4.4 billion. Importantly, we expect this new engagement in Hyderabad to result in an increase in GDP of $7.6 billion for India. And the reason we’re building infrastructure in India is because we know there are regulations as well as customs around data residency, and having two separate regions in India not only provides great latency , but also excellent disaster recovery, backup and resiliency capabilities for all kinds of workloads that customers want to keep in India.

Emerging technologies such as AI/ML blockchain, IoT and metaverse would not be possible at scale without cloud computing as an enabler. What are your plans with these technologies moving forward?

We have invested heavily in many of these technologies. Much of the metaverse today relies on AWS. This means that if you look at the big game companies that are part of the metaverse like Riot Games and Epic, to name just two, they are deeply built on AWS. Many of Meta’s AI workloads run on AWS. There are many other examples. And then, you know, all of the extremely powerful machine learning (ML) capabilities that we’ve created – the fact that we have these custom chips that go into specialized compute instances, which allows companies on top of the metaverse train machine learning models and then deploy them to production. So we will continue to invest deeply not only in machine learning and AI, but also in other capabilities that will power businesses operating in the metaverse, including blockchain capabilities.

Regulated sectors such as banking, government, healthcare, etc. have moved some of their applications and workloads to the public cloud, but their core systems remain on-premises?

What I see is that banks are rapidly moving to the cloud. New business models and innovative competition are pushing them to do so. They are quickly moving away from on-premises technology and instead focusing on their banking expertise rather than IT. The cloud offers several business benefits to traditional banking organizations, including increased flexibility, business agility, reduced IT cost, and faster access to innovation.

In India itself, take for example Axis Bank, which is moving more than 70% of its workloads to AWS over the next two years. We work with financial services companies around the world like CommonWealth Bank and NAB in Australia, and JP Morgan Chase to name a few. Another example is one of the largest US financial companies Capital One which shut down all of its data centers and moved to the cloud, they are all in AWS.

Yes, some will operate in hybrid mode when moving workloads from on-premises data centers. Whether it’s healthcare, financial services, the energy industry, telecommunications or other regulated industries, they’re migrating to the cloud and we’re already working with many of them across the world.

Since working with leaders like Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy, ​​how different is your leadership style from theirs?

Everyone has their own leadership style, and it’s a mistake to try to be someone else. You can only be yourself and I believe you will be the best leader you can be if you are authentic and try to be who you are. And they are great leaders, with a lot of incredible qualities. My job is to be the best version of myself possible.

The things that I appreciate a lot are authenticity, empathetic listening and understanding where people are coming from, their thoughts, their discussions. I find that even if we make decisions at the end of the day, with which people don’t agree, they stay on board if they respect the process, and they really feel listened to, with an open mind.

I think Amazon has a lot of resources, a lot of capability, and the ability to invent that few other companies have, and I think that gives us both the opportunity and the responsibility to truly be citizens of our local communities, our national communities and all the way to our global community on issues like sustainability, which is very important to me. And so, I’m very excited to continue to understand how Amazon can be a great citizen on all of these levels.

The writer was in Las Vegas at the invitation of AWS.

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