The recent re:Invent conference ushered in the next generation of cloud computing, with customer-centric innovation taking the spotlight.

One hallmark of the new era is the rise of the supercloud, where technological transformation merges with business objectives. Building on top of the public cloud, businesses are creating custom clouds to better manage data and meet their digital objectives.

“Customers are expecting brands to know what they like, what they dislike, which products [and] which services they are interested in,” said Ankur Jain (pictured, right), global cloud practice lead at Merkle Inc. “So that requires advanced analytics, machine learning powered solutions. These are big data problems.”

Jain and Tom Miller (pictured, left), senior vice president of alliances and partnerships at Merkle, spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed Merkle’s partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. (* Disclosure below.)

Merkle guides business and IT onto the same digital journey

Reliance on intermediaries, supply chains, and brick-and-mortar sales are being replaced by the direct-to-consumer sales model, according to Jain. This means companies have to know their customers intimately, fulfilling their needs to the point of almost being prescient. This is the focus area of customer experience management company Merkel, which is the technological arm of international media agency Dentsu Global Inc.

“The secret sauce that Merkle brings to the table is that we know the language that IT speaks and that business speaks,” Miller stated.

Partnering closely with AWS, Merkle provides guidance on creating a direct-to-consumer model, roadmaps for modernization and cloud migration, customer identity solutions, and data management for intelligent marketing.

Companies want to transform to provide direct-to-consumer, omnichannel marketing and e-commerce solutions, but they have no idea where to start or what tools they need, according to Jain.

“That’s where Merkle provides consulting services to give them a roadmap, give them recommendations on how to structure these big, large strategic initiatives,” he stated.

Merkle’s customer identity solution Merkury is available via the AWS Marketplace, making it simple for companies to enable first-party, cookieless identity across multiple channels in order to gather data insights on customers.

Clean room technology provides privacy-safe data analysis, with AWS customer data available for deeper insights and greater personalization.

“Bring on your first-party data [and] join it with Amazon’s data to see how those customers are behaving when they are making a purchase on Amazon.com,” Jain said. “[This] gives insight to these brands to reshape their marketing strategy to those customers.”

Data is data, Jain emphasized. “You bring in the data, but what you do with the data, how you ask questions and how you derive intelligence from it, that’s the actionable part,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Merkle Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Merkle nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE