Andy Jassy, ​​CEO of AWS, about acquisitions: "There is nothing for us"

Amazon.com executives, CEO Jeff Bezos, are famous for refusing to comment on their competitors. Andy Jassy, ​​CEO of the cloud division of the retail giant, Amazon Web Services Inc.

Earlier this month, for example, Jassy (photo) tweeted Larry Ellison, president and chief technology officer of Oracle Corp.In the last episode of "Uh, keep talking," Larry, Amazon's Consumer Activity has disabled its Oracle data warehouse and moved to Redshift …, one of Amazon's cloud databases .

It's a good bet. Jassy will attempt some attempts against Oracle and possibly others during his speech Wednesday morning, but will spend most of his time as he usually does at the closing ceremony of the conference: the launch of a panoply new services designed to keep this competition at bay.

In this third of an exclusive previews interview: Invent, in three parts, Jassy explained how he saw the competition, as well as the issue of potential competition with customers, and how he envisioned another growth path. : acquisitions. As part 1 and part 2 from the exclusive interview that took place Monday and Tuesday, this part is changed for clarity.

Also check out the coverage re: Invent this week by SiliconANGLE in its special report on the cloud, including the ideas of his sister company market research Wikibon. The diffusion studio of SiliconANGLE in particular The cube will be to interview Dozens of AWS and other cloud leaders from here to Thursday, since the show.

Q: How do you see the segmentation of the cloud market? Some, such as Microsoft and Google, include their Office 365 and G Suite revenues, which are in SaaS mode, and not infrastructure like AWS, in the overall cloud revenues.

A: They are not apple apples. It's where I think people are wrong when they look at the relative growth of these companies. First of all, if you look at Microsoft's cloud revenue, its platform type is comparable to AWS, but also to Office 365. And we pay a lot of money to Microsoft with Windows and SQL licenses Server. They also have this income there.

We are the only ones to publish our cloud numbers in a clean way. If you look at the income of analysts in terms of revenue for some of the other providers, let's take what most people consider to be the second largest player in cloud computing. If you look at what they say about their cloud computing platform, I think the latest results have been a 75% growth over a year.

People say, "Wow, 75%. This is a figure above 46%. But the percentage is really only a reflection of the base. When you have a company like AWS many times larger than the next five suppliers, 46% of that base represents a much larger growth curve. If you look at the third quarter, 75% equals about one billion dollars of growth over twelve months. Our year-over-year growth of 46% on our much larger base equates to a growth of more than $ 2.1 billion. So we have more revenue growth than anyone else.

Rivals galore

Q: How do you see the overall competitive landscape, which includes big business, from IBM to Microsoft, to Google and Oracle?

A: For a value proposition as powerful as the cloud for customers, you will still have to rely on a large number of technology companies with significant resources. But at the end of the day, what matters most, what matters most is what customers want, what you want, and the customer experience is right.

There is so much noise and FUD and so many wild claims from many people. And what people sometimes mistaken is that it's so inexpensive and easy to try in the cloud that no matter what people claim at random, people will try it themselves. And users are going to the root of what is much easier in the cloud than in packaged software.

Q: You did not hide the rivalry of AWS with Oracle and you recently tweeted Amazon's mainstream activities, which migrate primarily from the Oracle database to AWS databases You regret this tweet?

A: I absolutely do not regret tweeting this. [Laughs]

When you have a company such as Oracle that so often claims false things, you have to at some point make known the truth. All I was trying to do in this tweet was to react to a number of completely false and completely false statements, and to simply clarify the truth.

Q: Has the migration from Oracle been difficult or easy, and how are you talking about this type of migration with your potential customers?

A: As a company, we spent quite a bit of time over the last two years transferring all of our database loads from Oracle to Aurora and DynamoDB. This is pretty consistent with other customers making this important change. They will tell you that they save a lot of money, they have a lot more visibility, they have more control over their performance and workload, and they feel they are treated with more respect. And they have more portability if they decide they do not want to use Aurora, or want to go back to MySQL, Postgres or other choices.

Q: What do you mean from these Oracle clients when they migrate to Amazon?

A: It's like having a new lease. I think the cost savings because it's one-tenth of the price; operational performance; the ease with which they can actually work; the way they are treated; not being constantly audited and fined or extorted for more business when he discovers a type of violation in the audit. The ease with which this database works with the rest of the AWS platform; not having to worry that at any given time these database providers are raising their prices or telling them that they can not use their licenses on the infrastructure platform they want to use.

Q: Thomas Kurian has just left Oracle in the loophole related to the company. Now he's leading Google and Diane Greene is gone. What do you think of that?

A: I do not know much about the decisions that were made. We do not take a lot of time to ask who is running the different cloud providers, so I do not know much about it.

Q: Would AWS allow other clouds to run its databases? Would you let other clouds run your databases?

A: If we had to create software that could run anywhere, and deliver in this kind of software, of course. To date, this is not how we built our services. We build services that combine software, hardware, and data center services, and I think changing that approach and providing only on-premise software is a really different distribution model, which I would not rule out, but who is not. our goal today.

Q: What is the importance of a customer at AWS? Google told us they were putting huge eggs in a few baskets to win the business market. This seems to improve their position in TensorFlow and AI, for example. Microsoft seems to be doing the same thing. How do you view this competitive stance?

A: If you look at the numbers and, in practice, what happened, we have more than twice as many reference cases and machine learning users as any other provider. We have a very important machine learning business and [customers said] more than what you will find elsewhere. So, people are using us everywhere for infrastructure, for machine learning, for the edge, really in all these areas.

Every customer is important to us. I think you see some of these other vendors trying to buy businesses, to have referrals just because they feel late. But we do not think about our business this way. We believe that every customer we have is important and I think our customers will tell you that we place them at the center of what we do. And we will treat small customers or startups in the same way as large companies and public sector clients. You can not build a business as big as the one we built and where we try to go, and treat only a few customers as important.

In competition with customers?

Q: How do you handle the dilemma of a platform provider who wants to recruit new Amazon-based software vendors, but could these companies worry that Amazon is competing with them?

A: This is one of those topics that seems really interesting and very juicy, but in practice, the detail has not really been a problem. When we launched AWS, we launched EC2 with an instance size, a family of instances, and a data center. Linux only, no load balancing, no persistent storage, no monitoring, no [auto scaling]. C & # 39; was [literally] poor functionality. And some of them naively thought, "We may not need to build it; others will build it. And over time, we found that our customers were saying, "No, no, no; these are things that must be part of the platform. "

I remember when we started surveillance, CloudWatch, people were saying, "Oh my god, this is the end of New Relic." And of course, that was not the end of New Relic. New Relic worked very well, even though we have good deals in CloudWatch. And that has always been the case.

I do not find the case where a company was looking for a solution in an area that was more than a mere wedge, a loose wedge above our platform, where when we launched something that was tangentially in the same space, they lost all our resources. customers or they are not competing. If you have a feature that includes a good set of features and you're doing a good job for customers and you continue to iterate through the platform, you'll always have big business.

Q: The quote I heard was, "I hope Amazon will not become the old Microsoft." Because Microsoft had this kind of strategy.

A: Think of surveillance. Think about Big Data. Think of databases of valuable stores or documents. Remember to connect yourself. These areas are so vast that there will not be one winner. There will be many players who have succeeded. We may have an offer to make because the customers want it and we will be successful, but that will not prevent others from having a lot of success.

More acquisitions

Q: Would AWS consider a major acquisition in the SaaS area or elsewhere in the stack? Maybe Salesforce; they have a big tower in San Francisco. Or other major application providers. It sounds far-fetched, until you think of Amazon buying Whole Foods.

A: There is nothing of the table for us. We think about these things, big and small, all the time. Over time, we made several acquisitions in AWS. Elemental, of course, was an acquisition. Annapurna, the Israeli chip design company in Israel, is one of our most successful acquisitions. It has completely changed the network performance and capabilities of our computing and storage offerings. It's a huge success for us. I think we will continue to make acquisitions.

Q: Mostly hidden, off the radar?

A: It depends. We acquire a group of companies. We are probably doing less of those who are really expensive than others for two reasons. The first is that we tend to be – correct, incorrect or indifferent – probably a little more rigorous analytically as to what we think the recovery is due to this acquisition.

Secondly, we are convinced that if valuations are really heated and many technology acquisitions are very heated, we can build a team to create capabilities that give our customers what we want. And because we have built a lot, we have confidence and we tend to hire builders and be inventors.

I think we will buy more. We may be buying something important over time, but it should be the right offer which, in our opinion, makes sense for the company, a reasonable return on investment and a reasonable price.

Photo: Robert Hof / SiliconANGLE