Remember when worries about security and uptime dampened conversations about cloud infrastructure as a service? Those concerns that were common just a couple of years ago have nearly evaporated, according to Terry Wise (pictured), vice president of worldwide alliances, channels and ecosystem at Amazon Web Services Inc. Today, customers are more interested in the neat business-differentiating tricks cloud can do, he said.

“The single biggest question I get from enterprise customers is, ‘This is great. Help me move quicker,'” Wise said in an interview at Inforum 2017 in New York. The multiple platforms and services cloud providers like AWS offer have ratcheted up the value proposition, Wise stated. Now the obvious benefits of saving a few dollars over on-premise operations seem quaint compared to the industry-vertical specializations available from AWS partners like Infor Inc.

“Cloud is not just about cheap compute and storage. It’s really about platform and innovation that comes from that platform,” Wise told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Terry Wise in our Guest of the Week feature.

The flywheel effect

AWS has a portfolio of services with which customers can build out innovative products, Wise explained. DynamoDB NoSQL database; Kinesis real-time data streaming platform; S3 storage; Lex natural language interface; and Lambda for serverless compute are a small sample. To help customers derive value from them sooner, companies like Infor are providing the easy button, he added.

“Because they’ve packaged all of this innovation into a set of business applications, they’re actually helping customers move to the cloud quite a bit faster,” Wise said.

AWS Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy has likened AWS’ set of services to a “flywheel” spinning out further innovation and value. Infor’s CloudSuites — industry-specific apps built and run on AWS services — are a case in point. In some respects, the AWS-Infor partnership is “the most mature and strategic relationship we have,” Wise added.

Infor’s new conversational artificial intelligence robot, Coleman, came to life with help from AWS’ Lex, for example. “They really are kind of the poster child for adopting our new services and driving innovation on top of our platform,” he said.

Infor is one of many software companies going all in on AWS cloud. “The vast majority of all software companies we’re engaging with are moving mission-critical enterprise apps to AWS,” Wise said. Some of these apps (like Infor’s) are built natively in software as a service; but even some traditional SAP business applications are migrating over, he added.

IoT edge eats cloud — or feeds it

On-premise infrastructure is not dead yet, however. Far from it by some accounts. Also, some say that latency will choke Internet of Things data on its way back to cloud; therefore, computing data at edge points will be preferable to sending it back and forth. The realities of edge compute needs are not lost on AWS, Wise satted. It has introduced Greengrass software for connected devices and local computing.

But edge purists may neglect to mention limited compute power at the edge tied directly to the limited data there. “To take full advantage of the analytics, you actually have to match that data with all the historical data and other real-time data that’s resident in the cloud,” Wise said. IoT companies will have to strike a hybrid balance. Efficiency, connectivity, locality and latency are important concerns, but must not compromise analytics potential, he added.

Capture points may be diverse, but data itself  will either be “pre-processed or sent natively” to the AWS cloud and a massive data lake, Wise stated. Machine learning, artificial intelligence and predictive algorithms would be underfed on edge data alone, he said.

“They just don’t work effectively if you don’t have massive amounts of data and you continually refresh that data so that the algorithms can continue to learn,” Wise concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Inforum 2017 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Inforum 2017. Neither Infor Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE