Amazon Web Services Inc. has borrowed from the phrase “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” in its quest to enable sustainable digital transformations in enterprises across Europe, the Middle East and Africa by holding their hands in the cloud journey.

The pandemic has forced companies to rethink their digital strategies, and the cloud is emerging as one of the stepping stones toward business reinvention. Top of mind for enterprises is becoming tech companies in the post-pandemic era, and the cloud is coming up as a huge enabler when connecting the dots between business and technology, according to Tanuja Randery (pictured), managing director for EMEA at AWS.

“People are adopting the cloud because of cost, M&A and innovation reasons,” Randery explained. “So it doesn’t matter who you are, help me become a tech company, give me digital skills, and then help me become a more sustainable company.”

Randery spoke with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed how AWS boosts cloud adoption in EMEA and the AWS re/Start program. (* Disclosure below.)

Using data as the first trigger point

The cloud migration in different countries is being made easier because companies use data as the first trigger point. This has enabled AWS to have 100,000 global partners and nearly 325,000 active customers in the Marketplace, according to Randery.

“When you think about data, you can actually start to aggregate all of your data into one area and then start to analyze and unpack that,” she stated. “So I think what I’m seeing for sure is that in those countries, data is the first trigger.”

Bringing industry solutions to any business is critical. This necessitates walking the talk beyond IT by offering specific industry use cases, according to Randery. “For example, the Goldman Sachs Financial Cloud … bring that to the rest of financial services companies in EMEA, or if you take the work we’re doing on industrials and IOT,” she explained. “So it’s really about connecting industry use cases with our technology.”

In EMEA countries, a huge amount of VC funding is channeled toward developers, startups and scale-ups. AWS is fueling an IPO transition, enabling some startups to be born in the cloud, according to Randery.

“Initially, it used to be a lot of M&A and strategic acquisitions, but they have actually bigger aspirations, and they’re going IPO,” she noted. “We’ve seen them through from when they were seed or pre-seed all the way to now that they are unicorns.”

With companies building on AWS, Randery believes partnerships are playing an instrumental role in the evolution of the cloud, prompting more market and innovation opportunities for customers.

“We talk about the power of three, which is you bring in a GSI partner, an ISV partner and then AWS,” she said. “You create that power of three, and you take it to our customers.”

Based on the robustness offered by the AWS ecosystem, Randery trusts that the support systems provided help startups eliminate the fear of failure.

“It’s a real virtuous circle we call ‘flywheel’ within AWS, because a startup wants to connect to an enterprise, an enterprise wants to connect to a startup,” Randery said. “We’ve got something that we kicked off in EMEA called EMEA Startup Loft Accelerator … the idea is to bring startups into our space, virtually and physically, and help them build and make those connections.”

The innovation culture should be incorporated into enterprises, because the difficulty is no longer in technology, but in mindset, leadership, commitment, skills, organizational structure and operating model, according to Randery. Businesses transform by unpacking the problem, and AWS enables this by mapping a migration journey with the clients.

“We look across their core infrastructure, SAP systems, e-commerce systems, and value management systems,” she said. “I think you’ve got to go business by business … and then help our technology enable that use case to actually digitize.”

Despite AWS making significant strides in cloud adoption, Randery believes that a tremendous opportunity lies ahead because only 5% to 15% of workloads have been moved to the cloud.

“That 5% to 15% … we’ve got to go 50%, 60% or 70% and why not 100% at some point?” she said. “I think over the next few years, that’s the acceleration we need to help bring in EMEA.”

As diversity is at the center stage of every company, Randery believes that AWS’ re/Start program is playing a pivotal role toward this objective. She cited the story of Charlotte Wilkins, who left McDonald’s to start a tech career based on this initiative.

“We’ve got our re/Start program where we really help the under-employed and unemployed to get a 12-week intensive course and get trained up on cloud skills,” Randery said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: AWS sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE