While each of the major cloud service providers has their own flagship features designed to draw and hold customer interest, simple brand awareness and maintained momentum are showing themselves to be just impactful in cloud marketing as any other sector. While Amazon Inc. has both in strong force, it is also looking to develop further edges on the competition wherever it can.

At the AWS re:Invent 2016 event in Las Vegas, NV, Teresa Carlson, VP of the worldwide public Sector at Amazon Web Services Inc., joined John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about the many things AWS has in development and where it anticipates seeing future growth. (*Disclosure below)

Looking at the event and its attendees, Carlson voiced her pride in what AWS’ customers and partners were accomplishing, particularly in regards to defying expectations of slow growth and activity.

She was also excited by the prospects of AWS’ role in the data of public enterprise. “If you think about vertical markets like justice and public safety, transportation, health, all those touch across every aspect of public sector. And IoT is really big in this business,” she said.

Carlson made clear that she expects much of the data point collective in the future to be comprised of public sector sources, and while handling the millions of connected devices and the interplay of their applications will be a big challenge, it’s one that she’s eager to approach.

Government ties

With the linkage between AWS and the CIA something of a hot topic, according to Carlson, the interview soon turned to examining how Amazon and the government are getting along. Carlson described the AWS/government alliance as being a partnership more than a vendor-customer relationship, noting that AWS has been gaining several advantages from that team up, including quicker accreditation with regulatory compliance and the benefits of association with the intelligence community in dealing with international markets.

Recalling the skepticism Amazon had received when first approaching Capitol Hill, Carlson proceeded to outline how much things had changed since then. “Now, we are shaping technology policy; we are explaining to them how the use of cloud is a different shape of permission, how it creates jobs, how it creates companies, and we can go in and talk to a minister of finance, a congressional leader on the House or Senate, or whatever hill it is around the world, and they get that AWS is a driver of jobs,” she explained.

Future plans

Looking forward, Carlson shared some of the plans Amazon has for the near future, including efforts to tap deeper into the “really young population” of kindergarten through 12th grade with coding academies, focus on women and diversity in tech, and perhaps biggest of all, direct partnerships with countries.

“When you go into countries, they want you to partner with them … they need to understand, ‘What does this cloud thing bring?’ And we’re going to make sure that they understand that it’s the new way of doing business, and it’s a new way to create an economy,” she explained.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE