Two more multibillion-dollar companies have jumped on the Amazon Web Services Inc. bandwagon at the cloud leader’s re:Invent conference this week.

AWS today revealed that insurance giant The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America and online banking provider Open Bank SA have chosen to migrate their operations to its platform.

The announcement brings the total number of major customer wins made public at re:Invent so far to six. AWS earlier announced cloud deals with South Korean flag carrier Korean Air Lines Co. Ltd., biotech firm Amgen Inc., Ellie Mae Inc. and Intel Corp.’s Mobileye division.

Guardian Life is one of the largest customers in the bunch. The privately owned mutual insurance company ranks 239th on the Fortune 500 with 9,000 employees and $1.6 billion in annual operating income before taxes and dividends, as of 2017.

Guardian Life is currently in the process of moving the “majority” of its workloads to AWS. The applications being migrated  include mission-critical systems such as customer portals and internal data analytics environments. As part of the effort, the insurer has built a brand-new data lake on AWS’ Elastic MapReduce managed Hadoop service.

Dean Del Vecchio, Guardian’s chief information officer, said during AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy’s keynote this morning that it has migrated 200 applications, shutting down its last owned and operated data center Nov. 5. “We see AWS as a core competitive advantage for us,” he said.

AWS said the migration will enable Guardian Life to close its internal data centers, while Openbank, the other new customer it announced today, has in turn already fully shifted its operations to the provider’s cloud. Openbank is the online banking division of Spain-based Banco Santander, S.A., the world’s ninth largest financial services firm by revenue.

Going forward, Openbank plans to spread out its cloud systems across more AWS data centers to better protect against outages. Both the bank and Guardian Life indicated that their long-term plans involve harnessing the Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary’s newly upgraded SageMaker artificial intelligence service.

This aspect of the deals underscores how AWS’ AI features are playing an increasingly big role in driving its continued growth. Crucially, machine learning is influencing buying decisions not only at companies that are actively using the technology but also for those that intend to adopt it in the future. According to Gartner Inc., nearly half of enterprises plan to implement AI while only a small fraction of that have already done so.

It’s also notable that three of the six new marquee customers AWS announced at re:invent so far — Guardian Life, Open Bank and  Ellie Mae — operate in the financial services sector. Another Gartner study from 2017 found that cloud adoption in this segment is growing faster than expected. The research firm predicted that 36 percent of financial services firms will shift at least half of their “transactional systems of record” to the cloud by 2020.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE