As Amazon Web Services Inc. continues to roll out new enterprise products and services, it’s tempting to assume that this is yet another tale of a giant tech company gobbling market share and discouraging startup competition.

However, one prominent venture investor doesn’t see it that way when he evaluates the AWS portfolio.

“If you look at that menu of services, each one of those services themselves could be a startup,” said Jerry Chen (pictured), partner at Greylock Management Corp. “I look at that as a roadmap of opportunity for companies to actually go in and create value around artificial intelligence, around data, security, observability because Amazon is not going to naturally win all of those markets.”

Chen spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. They discussed the importance of spotting key trends that  could lead to business opportunities, how Greylock has translated that into investments, and the rise of “DataOps.”

Move from batch to streaming

The key for investors such as Chen is to identify waves or trends that are reshaping the tech landscape within the larger picture of the cloud ecosystem.

One example of this can be found in Greylock’s investment in Rockset Inc., a data processing startup that built its business around a serverless analytics and search platform.

“Moving from batch data to streaming real-time data, that’s a wave that is happening, that’s inevitable,” Chen said. “Rockset is riding that wave, going from batch to real-time and doing analytics on real-time data. You have to look for these macro waves of cloud which anyone knows, but then pick these small wavelets.”

More recently, Chen and Greylock have invested in Chronosphere Inc., a startup founded by former Uber Inc. employees who built the ride-hailing company’s operational metrics database. Chronosphere’s monitoring platform can store and analyze tens of billions of metrics to gain real-time insights.

“They’re going to handle that horizontal amount of data, petabytes and petabytes, cheaper, better, faster at scale,” Chen explained. “As a startup founder or as a VC, you want to pick a wave bigger than you and bigger than your competitors.”

Chen’s position in the investment community has provided him with a vantage point to observe the rise of data operations or DataOps in the enterprise as a progression from the age of DevOps.

“What drove DevOps is speed, and we’re seeing the same trend with DataOps,” Chen said. “Data engineers and data scientists can now have the same speed developers had.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent:

Photo: SiliconANGLE