UPDATED 13:00 EDT / DECEMBER 02 2016

BIG DATA

AWS culture through the eyes of a partner | #reInvent

Amazon Web Services’ explosive growth over the past 10 years is nothing but remarkable. What is the secret sauce for AWS? Taking an inside look through the eyes of one partner reveals that the company is data driven and extremely black and white when it comes to the decision-making process.

This year’s AWS re:Invent boasted over 32,000 attendees, and the packed crowds primarily consisted of enterprise customers that are taking the leap from on-premise to the cloud. David Richards, founder and CEO of WANdisco plc, was one of the partner attendees at the event, and he spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Jeff Frick (@jefffrick), co-hosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, about his company’s relationship with AWS. (*Disclosure below)

The beginning of cloud 2.0

Talking about the latest trends, Richards said the enterprise is now moving from on-premise to the cloud, which is causing this seismic shift in the marketplace. The first movement included those companies “born” in the cloud, such as Airbnb, Tinder and Facebook.

“What’s now happening clearly is that enterprise is moving to the cloud and cloud 2.0 is really about a different set of requirements, a different set of customers,” Richards said. “There are customers with massive petabyte scale datasets that they can’t really take advantage of and they can’t really scale out. It’s too complex for them to build many of the applications they need to build.” Richards explained that this is why they now have to move to cloud.

Referring to AWS Snowball, a new product that allows users to ship vast amounts of date into and out of the AWS cloud in a secure box, Richards sees some problems. Believing that the enterprise will be moving massive amounts of data over the next year, he feels that many companies will not find this  a viable option.

“If enterprise is moving to cloud, they have to get there without any interruption to service,” he remarked. WANdisco continues to replicate transactional data, and customers have the ability to move data applications without any down time, which he stated is critical to cloud 2.0.

Amazon partners

Many guests over the course of the event commented on their partnerships with Amazon. Richards repeated many of the same sentiments. “Amazon is a phenomenal company. They have to be. They just built the world’s most valuable enterprise technology by a country mile in 10 years. Part of the secret is they base everything on data,” he revealed.

Working with Amazon taught Richards that the decisions they make are fact and figures based, not sentiment. ‘That’s uncomfortable for a lot of people. For us, it’s not. Amazon sets the bar high and made WANdisco products much better,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (*Disclosure: AWS and other companies sponsor some AWS re:Invent segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE

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