When he first started working at Time Inc., Colin Bodell said that he wanted to earn the company a “big win” right away. According to Bodell, his solution was to get “out of the data center business” and move Time to the Amazon Web Services, Inc. Cloud. Time’s hosting costs, he said, “went from $75,000 to $17,000.” Furthermore, Time saved “6 million dollars,” Bodell stated.

Benefits of Rolling Back Datacenters at Time

When Time spun out as its own company, there were a lot of duplications to remove. The goal was to unite their website and mobile applications on one content management system. It was no small task to go from five major data centers all around the world to the cloud. But Bodell explained that in order to gain “the control that we wanted,” and move away from a system that he considered “too expensive and unwieldy,” Amazon cloud was their best option.

With AWS Cloud, Bodell and his company were able to operate as though they had their own data center. He could “run whatever I want, roll back, patch it in all the ways as I would do with a datacneter,” Bodell explained. Other enterprise cloud options like Windows were not for them because their ecosystem “is Lunix, Unix based,” according to Bodell. Additionally, Bodell explained that AWS was right for Time because it offered cost savings and flexibility for their process of “picking up, moving, and dropping down” their business operations.

For Time, he said, it was the appropriate moment to make some key changes because “the business was going through an evolution anyway.” He was able to bring in new talent, “marry” them with expertise internally, while also tapping into the skills of cloud experts. Many internal engineers at Time were excited about learning new skills and moving forward when it came to cloud. Furthermore, Bodell commented, “it’s been a lot of fun,” which has allowed him to attract new employees.

Uniting Great Tech and Great Content

After working for twenty two years in the valley and a subsequent eight years at Amazon, Bodell remarked that many folks were confused when he went to a media company. His decision to move to Time, he said had a lot to do with his conversation with the recruiter: the recruiter showed him a company with high-quality content and technology that wasn’t at the same level. His goal going in was to “take some of the best content in the world and marry with with the best tech in the world,” Bodell said.

With that guiding principal, Bodell said he’s had a lot of interaction with the journalistic team. His objective is to facilitate their access to ideas and the speed at which they produce content. “The objective,” he said, is to see “how fast can we get it out.” Journalism that used to take “hours, if not days,” according to Bodell, now has a much faster turn around time: “Now, we can turn stuff around in minutes by putting the right tools in the hands of the editorial staff [and] the writing staff,” he said. The ability to optimize content and figure out “the best way to tell a story” is central to Bodell’s mission. Amazon facilitates that mission by enabling Bodell’s team to “bring together a lot of assets [and] put them in the hands of journalists,” Bodell stated.

Watch the full segment below, and be sure to check out more from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS Summit 2015.