This week, Amazon.com Inc. reported its second-quarter earnings for 2023, returning to double-digit revenue growth — the company’s biggest earnings since the fourth quarter of 2020.

TheCUBE industry analysts John Furrier (pictured, left) and Dave Vellante (right) hopped on the mic to discuss how cost optimizations by Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon, resulted in the company’s biggest profit beat in the past few years.

“This is Andy Jassy’s second year at the helm. You’re seeing his fingerprints are starting to get on things,” Furrier said on the latest episode of theCUBE Podcast, from SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming studios. “He’s cutting to the bone in some areas, killing projects. The numbers came out great.”

Vellante agreed with Furrier while bringing Jassy’s efforts at marketing and public relations to light, noting that “people forget that Amazon has always been the enterprise leader in artificial intelligence with SageMaker and Trainium and Inferentia.’’ However, the company falls short in terms of marketing.

“They’re way ahead of the game [in AI], but they just got out marketed by Microsoft,” Vellante said.

During former CEO Jeff Bezos’ reign at Amazon, he couldn’t be bothered with PR, according to Vellante. “[We will see] more of Jassy grabbing the microphone and going direct,” he said.

With this approach, he plans to control the narrative and set the record straight for his company, Vellante added.

The all-encompassing cloud

SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s Supercloud 4 event is coming up in a couple of months, and Furrier advised everyone to mark their calendars for the last week of October. In case you have some catching up to do, don’t forget to watch coverage from the Supercloud 3 event for breaking news on generative artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.

The role of the cloud in fueling the surge in open-source, software-as-a-service and software development can’t be understated, according to Furrier. Cloud technologies and GenAI are expected to lead to an advancement boom in the tech industry, benefitting major providers, including Google Cloud and AWS.

“This is a party of epic proportions from a business perspective. Think about the growth,” Furrier said. “This is going to be a surge of growth that’ll hit all parts of the ecosystem, not just one category.”

The ecosystem also extends to the people and companies working in the cloud space. Supercloud resonates with the professionals looking at their next career opportunity. Part of the reason it appeals to professionals is that it’s not just an Amazon certification or knowing Azure. It has to do with everything, according to Furrier.

That means virtual machines won’t be going anywhere, because people who were previously a part of it will find the perfect career landing spot in the supercloud. Their roles would involve managing multiple vendors, technologies, data sources, security paradigms and postures inside a company, Furrier added.

Since supercloud will now be a career path, VMs will combine with microservices containers, Kubernetes and cloud-native applications that are all going to be part of this next fabric of generative AI and new data sources, Furrier explained. Coming up on August 22-24 is theCUBE’s coverage of VMware Explore, which will shed more light on the future of cross-cloud computing.

Furrier and Vellante agreed that the cloud’s expansion has declared a new paradigm, where anyone who codes and architects something properly can create great value. The value is scale, which will only become more prominent in the future because, until now, we have never had the level of scale we now have, according to Furrier.

“There’s no historical reference other than metaphors and mental models around what happened to figure out what’s happening,” he said. “I think we are living in an age of scale and data that is going to set up an entrepreneurial surge that’s going to be massive.”

Will remote work be the norm?

One of the main impacts of the pandemic has been the digitization of everything, including work. Vellante discussed an article about how work may have lost its appeal to the younger generation after the pandemic. However, he believes that remote work preferences are mixed.

“I think you have a portion of the young culture that grinds, and I think Silicon Valley represents that culture,” he said. “Then I think you’ve got other people who want more of a work-life balance.”

Furrier agrees with his point, expressing that what’s coming out of the pandemic is “more digital, but less of the pure remote work kind of thing. You’re going see a hybrid for sure, but it’s not going to be like everyone thought it would be.”

Watch the full theCUBE Podcast below to find out why these industry pros were also mentioned:

Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon
Jayshree Ullal, president and CEO of Arista Networks
Jeff Bezos, executive chairman of Amazon
Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS
Matt Garman, SVP of AWS sales and marketing at Amazon
Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare
George Gilbert, principal at TechAlpha Partners
Chuck Whitten, co-COO at Dell Technologies
Jeff Hammerbacher, founder of Cloudera
Amr Awadallah, founder and CEO of Vectara
Jeremy Burton, CEO of Observe
Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO and chairman of Apple
Donald Trump, 45th president of the U.S.
Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission
Bob O’Donnell, president, founder and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research
Dion Hinchcliffe, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research
Holger Mueller, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research
Andy Thurai, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research
Ray Wang, principal analyst, founder and chairman of Constellation Research
Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research
Sanjeev Mohan, principal at SanjMo
Rob Strechay, analyst at SiliconANGLE Media
Hock Tan, president and CEO of Broadcom
Vittorio Viarengo, VP for cross-cloud services at VMware
Amit Zavery, VP/GM and head of platform for Google Cloud
Bruno Aziza, partner at CapitalG
Vincent Hsu, VP, IBM fellow, CTO and VP at IBM Storage
Andrew Walls, IBM fellow, CTO for IBM Flash Storage

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Photo: SiliconANGLE