Last week I attended an event organized by Amazon in NYC with a focus on enterprise customers. Enterprise messaging is an area that AWS has a lot of work still to do. They need to work hard to lose the tag of being relevant only for start ups or the typical web2.0 type stuff. The events like the one they did in NYC are a good start but nowhere near enough. Below are a couple of initial thoughts / suggestions:
1. Talk about “business” or “enterprise” applications or use cases, at today’s event there were 4 customers highlighted:
- Conde Nast
- Nasdaq
- Sony Music
- New York Life
They were pretty cool use cases, but most of them were typical web2.0 type stuff (web app, Ajax, web widget type components) nothing that is truly B2B or business application related, that an enterprise CIO could relate to. The only use case that could have been relevant is the “New York Life” one. Michael Gordon from NY Life did a really good job of covering the rationale of how / why a conservative company like New York Life adopted it. But he didn’t detail the use case specifics. So in summary they need to focus on use cases that would interest an enterprise CIO / IT manager etc. A simple example would do- like running a web warranty application on AWS that is integrated with an “on premise” ERP leveraging the VPC maybe.
2. Packaged Business Application Deployment – Address the deployment of business applications like ERP, BI app’s like SAP, Oracle etc on AWS & highlight the relevant use cases. Like recently at the SAP Teched event the CTO of SAP Vishal Sikka, talked about how 100’s of their customers are using Amazon for hosting their test / development SAP machines including SAP themselves. I think it would be good to highlight more of these and show how the IaaS platform is ready to host these enterprise grade packaged app’s.
3. Move the conversation away from talking about the technical stuff and the evolution of the AWS service (which might make it seem more like a skunk works project within Amazon) to talking about how the enterprise world has changed and & leveraging services like IaaS has become or will become par for the course.Its time to start talking to the CIO & not the developer or CTO they are probably already sold. Michael Gordon from New York Life did a good job of covering this in his talk at the event, but I don’t hear it often enough at AWS events / collateral. The focus should be to do a mindset shift for these CIO’s.
4. Get Steve Riley (he did a good job today with the presentation on security) & his team – The Security guys to talk more to the press, analyst & blogger communities. And have a continued ongoing conversation on security and the measures AWS is taking.
5. Highlight “enterprise grade” partners / advisers / consultants – Execute educational events with them on an ongoing basis.
(Guest post by Prashanth Rai)
