“If you’re not in the process of figuring out as a company how you’re going to reinvent your customer experience and your product and reinvent who you are, you are starting to unwind. You may not realize it, but you are.”

Speaking from the virtual stage of AWS re:Invent 2020, Amazon Web Services Inc. Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy gave that wakeup call to chief information officers and other executives everywhere.

“If something is good for your customer, they’re going to do it,” said Zeus Kerravala (pictured), founder and principal analyst at ZK Research, affirming Jassy’s statement. “And you can either make it happen, or you’re going to watch it happen and then have the market taken away from you. “There’s got to be this hard willingness to look at your business model and be willing to disrupt yourself.”

Kerravala joined John Furrier and Dave Vellante, hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed the increased imperative for agility throughout the business operational stack. (* Disclosure below.)

Disrupt or die

Fifty percent of 2000’s Fortune 500 companies are now gone, Jassy warned in his keynote. “That’s a pretty shocking statistic,” Kerravala said.

“Virtually every industry is ripe for disruption, and the cloud is the underpinning of that disruption,” Vellante added. He sees the information technology transformation of the past decade segueing into the disruption of business operations with the transformation of culture and processes.

What that means is that the entire operational stack is going to get digitized, Vellante explained. And as businesses step into this next stage of digital transformation, AWS plans to be there to sell them whatever they need.

Thanks to its already broad market presence, AWS has an inherent advantage, according to Kerravala. “They have all those machine learning algorithms built into this stuff that they do,” he said. “So, they can constantly look at these different markets and disrupt, disrupt, disrupt and take more and more share.”

Global enterprise needs multiple cloud providers

Enterprise has proven that a pure cloud model doesn’t work when you have decades, sometimes centuries, of investment in systems and hardware on-premises — not to mention the risk-adversity of companies responsible for data that needs to be kept secure and compliant. Hence the rise in popularity of hybrid and multicloud.

“If you are going to be a customer-service focused company, you need to think of the IT stack and everything from the silicon, the hardware, through the software, and build that integrated experience, so Amazon is giving you tools to do that,” Kerravala said.

One thing is missing, according to Kerravala: a common framework across clouds. “The one thing I hear from customers all the time is they love the Amazon tools,” Kerravala said. “They love the optimization capabilities. But you know, if they are adopting some kind of multicloud strategy, the Amazon tools don’t work in Azure and Azure’s don’t work in Amazon. The same with Google.”

Is an AWS-Microsoft-Google alliance possible?

The big three cloud providers should understand that multicloud is an essential strategy for multinational organizations because cloud providers have different strengths across different regions, Kerravala pointed out.

“Smaller midsized businesses could get away with one [cloud provider], but as soon as you become global, you have to use more,” he said.

“If I were a CEO or a CTO, I’d definitely want to do business with Amazon. … [But] I would want to hedge my bets either with Microsoft if I’m a Microsoft shop. Or with Google if I’m analytics-heavy,” said Vellante, affirming the case for having a primary cloud provider with secondary backups.

But whatever cloud strategy they adopt, the bottom line is that businesses need tools to allow them to adapt and thrive in the complex, hyper-distributed world that is modern information technology.

“The ability to be agile has never been more important,” Kerravala said. “But you’re only as agile as IT lets you be. And that’s what AWS is going to sell, is the ability to do anything you want with your business.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE