The value of a virtualized cloud environment has as much to do with what you put into it as what you get out of it, according to Terry Wise (pictured), vice president of worldwide alliances, channels and ecosystem at Amazon Web Services Inc.

“Cloud is not just about cheap compute and storage. It’s really about platform and innovation that comes from that platform,” Wise said at Inforum 2017 in New York. AWS partners, like Infor Inc., are creating individual solutions from those building blocks, Wise said.

Infor’s penchant for packaging technologies into enterprise-ready applications has made them frequent shoppers in the AWS services aisle. “They’re really ripe to be able to take advantage of all of the innovative platforms and services we’ve built,” Wise told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

During this week’s event, Infor announced an artificial intelligence robot specifically for business users called Coleman. Infor built the Amazon Lex deep learning and natural language conversation interface into Coleman.

Ready-to-wear applications for businesses are Infor’s strength and its key contribution in its three-year-old partnership with AWS, according to Wise. “They’ve always done a great job of pushing us to be more enterprise-centric,” he said.

Cloud customer servants

Infor’s cloud applications give enterprises a gateway to full cloud adoption, and deploying its own mission-critical applications in AWS provides an example to others, according to Wise. “The vast majority of all software companies we engage with are moving mission-critical enterprise apps to AWS,” he said.

This flies in the face of on-premise legacies like Oracle Corp., which has said that cloud is inappropriate for such workloads, Wise states. Amazon tunes out such competitive jostling to win customers by simply giving them what they ask for, he added.

Amazon’s intentions (Wise clarified that the deal is not final) to acquire Whole Foods Market Inc. are an example of this. Amazon is simply catering to customer demand for an online-offline hybrid shopping experience, he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Inforum 2017 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Inforum 2017. Neither Infor Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE