As the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the world economy more strongly than any event in recent history, companies face many challenges in the struggle for survival. One is the difficult task of preserving capital while maintaining innovation and competitiveness, according to Matt Garman, vice president of sales and marketing at Amazon Web Services Inc.

“Capital preservation is key, particularly if we don’t know if there’s going to be an economic recession, we don’t know how long this is going to take,” said Garman (pictured). “All businesses, whether they’re severely impacted, should be really thinking about that capital preservation. But they’ve also got to be thinking about how they innovate.”

Garman spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Summit Online event. They discussed how the pandemic is changing the demand for customers’ products and services, the challenges of the most affected industries and some new technology applications to deal with COVID-19. (* Disclosure below.)

Crisis will differentiate companies

Two types of enterprises will emerge after the end of this crisis, according to Garman. “You’re going to have some that just go into their shell; they’re just going to say: ‘I’m just going to try to survive,’” he explained. “[And] I think every time you see a crisis, you have businesses that lean into it, they’re smart about it, they think about long term: ‘What are the things that are going to help me compete in this new world?’”

For companies that choose to take advantage of the moment to prepare to gain market share, betting on cloud services is a good option. “What we’re seeing is that those customers that have their business running in the cloud are able to handle that and are quickly able to adapt and change and grow with their changing customer base,” Garman said.

The changes that the crisis has brought to companies are many. Both public organizations and private customers have seen the demand for their services and products change rapidly — up or down. The increase in demand can also be internal, including, for example, the need to expand virtual workstations. In addition, some companies needed to reinvent the way they did business, such as call centers, which quickly had to transform into virtual environments since employees could no longer enter the office.

“Fortunately for us … we’ve been thinking for over a decade about how we really manage that supply chain, how we ensure that we’re able to handle rapidly scaling,” Garman said. “So we’ve really optimized our supply chain and, fortunately, are in a good position where we can continue to operate, continue to scale, and continue to handle the demands of a growing customer base — even unprecedented times like this.”

Pandemic tests cloud elasticity

The increase in customer demands is also a test for the performance of cloud elasticity during stay-at-home mandates. Entertainment companies like Netflix Inc. Electronic Arts Inc. are seeing their sales rise rapidly as people turn to them for increased entertainment. On the work side, remote office tools from Zoom Video Communications Inc. and Slack are on the rise.

“All of these communication and work-from-home capabilities, these are all running on AWS, and they’ve all been able to scale,” Garman stated.

AWS also works with the government, which has faced a major challenge of rapidly scaling its infrastructure to meet the fast pace of rising unemployment claims.

“You think about some of the systems that are trying to send out checks to people, the systems that are trying to send out small banking loans to folks. We’ve been really working deeply with many of those government agencies to try to figure out how we can get the money in the hands of the individuals that need it as quickly as possible and really help those legacy systems,” Garman said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit Online event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Summit Online event. Neither Amazon Web Services, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE