Amazon.com Inc.’s shares rose 2.57 percent in February, beating out rival Microsoft Corp. in market value for the first time. With initiatives reaching every corner of the industry from e-commerce to artificial intelligence, how is the tech giant achieving such rapid cloud dominance — and what is it doing to maintain its hold on the expanding market?

Looking to answer these and other questions, SiliconANGLE is at the AWS Summit, currently underway in San Francisco, California, with exclusive commentary and interviews from our roving news desk, theCUBE. (* Disclosure below.)

At AWS Summit, theCUBE will explore how Amazon’s progress in the world of AI and machine learning is contributing to the improvement of the company’s cloud platform — and what those improvements could mean for the future of the market and competitors like Microsoft, IBM Corp. and Google LLC.

Amazon’s growth over the past year has been exponential, with Amazon Web Services Inc. delivering huge returns to its parent company as an increasing number of businesses migrate workloads to the cloud. Though it has only recently surpassing established competitors like Microsoft in terms of market share, Amazon dominates rivals in cloud adoption, with 85 percent of cloud spend going to AWS.

In its quarterly earnings statement Amazon reported that AWS captured $17.46 billion in 2017, totaling a current revenue run rate of over $20 billion for the initiative and about 10 percent of Amazon’s total revenue for the year. Now, Amazon has surpassed Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. in terms of market value. Amazon is now the second most valuable publicly traded company with a market value of $768 billion.

Despite AWS’ strong performance and innovative work in the cloud space, other contenders in the field claim superiority in cost and performance. Oracle Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd recently claimed that his company’s new automated database is substantially faster than that of Amazon’s, making it one-tenth the cost in terms of efficiency.

With Hurd attributing a drop in Oracle’s Q4 earnings to the anticipation of the company’s new database released early this year, it remains to be seen whether Oracle poses a significant threat to the tech behemoth. But with the cloud market only continuing to grow, Amazon is wise to nurture its community with events like AWS Summit San Francisco that offer the opportunity to implement feedback and announce new product initiatives.

Stu Miniman, an analyst with Wikibon Inc. (owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE) predicted the one-day event will provide an exciting opportunity for attendees to experience and be trained on new AWS services. “These regional shows bring in thousands of industry professionals, and Amazon doesn’t wait for its annual show re:Invent to announce new products,” he said.

With news regarding services like SageMaker AI already being rolled out in the weeks preceding the event, AWS Summit San Francisco is primed to provide answers to questions around the company’s developments in AI, upcoming products, and plans to further cultivate its competitive edge.

Keynote speakers at AWS Summit SF Bay Area 2018 include Dr. Werner Vogels, chief technology officer at Amazon.com, and Dr. Matt Wood, general manager of artificial intelligence at Amazon Web Services.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch all of theCUBE interviews that will be taking place at AWS Summit San Francisco, including theCUBE’s dedicated website, Ustream channel and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s event on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE’s dedicated website and Ustream

All of theCUBE’s exclusive interviews from AWS Summit San Francisco will be available on theCUBE’s dedicated website.

You can also watch all of theCUBE’s interviews on its dedicated Ustream channel.

Watch on the SiliconANGLE YouTube channel

All of theCUBE interviews from AWS Summit San Francisco on Wednesday, April 4, will also be loaded onto SiliconANGLE’s dedicated YouTube channel.

Cubecasts

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on both SoundCloud and iTunes, which you can enjoy while on the go.

Guests who will be interviewed by theCUBE at AWS Summit San Fransciso

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE include Charles Crouchman, chief technology officer at Turbonomic Inc.; Sandy Carter, vice president at Amazon Web Services; Chris Wegmann, managing director at Accenture; Bas Kamphuis, general manager of SAP at Amazon Web Services; and Chad Anderson, information technology director of operations at Del Monte Foods Inc.

Other guests to be interviewed by theCUBE include Steve Hall, vice president of partnerships at CloudCheckr Inc.; Andreas Grabner, DevOps activitist at Dynatrace LLC; Barry Russell, general manager of worldwide business development and operations, AWS Marketplace and Service Catalog, at Amazon Web Services Inc.; Manmeet Singh, co-founder and chief executive officer of Dataguise Inc.; and SignalFX Inc. executives Karthik Rau, founder and chief executive officer, and Arijit Mukherji, chief technology officer.

Livestream of AWS Summit SF

If you are unable to attend AWS Summit SF Bay Area 2018 in San Francisco, you can still catch a live stream of the event’s keynotes and sessions from the comfort of your home or office.

A live video stream will take place on Wednesday, April 4th, from 9:30 AM-6 PM PDT.

You can view the event livestream on the official event page.

(* Disclosure: Some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: theCUBE