New customers help Amazon showcase its cloud capabilities
Amazon Web Services Inc.’s ongoing customer acquisition spree gathered pace today with the news that Thomson Reuters Corp. and ViacomCBS Inc. have migrated large portions of their information technology infrastructure to its cloud.
Thomson Reuters’ migration to the AWS cloud can serve as a template for companies with similarly large IT stacks, because it managed to move literally “thousands of servers” and “hundreds of revenue-generating applications” five months ahead of its planned schedule, it said in a statement.
It all boiled down to teamwork, with Thomson Reuters relying on AWS Professional Services, AWS Managed Services and various AWS-certified third-party experts from multiple partners to lend their expertise to the task. This enabled it to move many of its applications from its old legacy data centers to the AWS cloud and get them up and running in production in double-quick time. The company also took advantage of the AWS Marketplace and the access it provides to simplified software contracting services to procure and integrate the third-party software it needs within its new AWS environment.
In a press release, Thomson Reuters said it’s using multiple AWS cloud analytics, database, container, serverless, storage and machine learning services to power its digital products and generate more insights.
The company revealed in a blog post that it also built an internal platform that enables it to apply machine learning at scale using Amazon SageMaker, a cloud service for building, training and deploying machine learning models in the cloud and at the edge.
With the platform it developed, Thomson Reuters says, it can leverage Amazon’s Spot Instances, which provide unused compute capacity available at discounts of up to 90% compared to on-demand pricing, and can automatically shut down GPU instances once a training job is complete. Both of these capabilities help it to dramatically reduce the cost of AI model inference, Thomson Reuters said.
“We’re leveraging AWS’s comprehensive set of cloud services to develop insightful new products and services that will help our customers reinvent the way they work and operate effectively in complex arenas,” said Justin Wright, Thomson Reuter’s vice president of architecture and development.
ViacomCBS is another prestigious customer as far as Amazon is concerned. The media firm said today it will migrate its entire broadcast footprint to Amazon’s cloud, an epic undertaking considering it spans more than 425 television channels and 40 global data and media centers.
Amazon said this will be one of the first large-scale transformations in the media and entertainment industry of its kind, and will enable ViacomCBS to tap into some unique capabilities and build an entirely new, cloud-based broadband and media supply chain operating model.
ViacomCBS will tap Amazon’s container, database, serverless, media services, machine learning and analytics tools to help it create new TV channels faster, assemble live content and optimize delivery over any of its distribution channels, and add image and video analysis to its consumer applications. The company has promised that NFL fans will see the benefit of this very soon, delivering “optimized viewing experiences on playback devices” during its Super Bowl LV coverage next year.
“With AWS, we will be able to automate and streamline our processes for content production, licensing, and distribution to consumer streaming services and innovate faster to deliver improved customer experiences,” said Phil Wiser, executive vice president and chief technology officer at ViacomCBS.
Photo: SiliconANGLE
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