UPDATED 09:00 EDT / NOVEMBER 29 2017

CLOUD

Amazon extends enterprise grip with five new marquee customers

Amazon Web Services Inc. revealed at its AWS re:Invent conference it’s adding four more major enterprise customers to its cloud platform, following a similar deal with the media company Turner Broadcasting System Inc.

Early today, Amazon said it had landed deals with The Walt Disney Co., online travel firm Expedia Inc., the National Football League and financial management software provider Intuit Inc. to move some of their IT infrastructure to its cloud, and to take advantage of its artificial intelligence and machine learning services.

Disney, which has been an Amazon customer for eight years already, said it’s expanding its use of AWS by migrating more of its production workloads to its cloud platform. The company said its Walt Disney Studios, Media Networks and Parks and Resorts businesses currently uses a range of Amazon’s services, including its machine learning technologies.

“Expanding our strategic relationship with AWS and making AWS our preferred public cloud infrastructure provider aligns with our overall technical strategy,” Charles Weiner, Disney’s senior vice president of enterprise infrastructure services said.

Meanwhile, Expedia said it’s going the whole hog by going “all-in” on AWS, and that it would be “standardizing” on the cloud giant’s machine learning technologies.

The hotel and flight booking company said it was moving more than 20 years’ worth of its business workloads, mobile applications and digital properties to AWS. It also said it’s migrating several of its databases from Oracle and Microsoft’s SQL Server to Amazon’s Aurora database.

Expedia said the decision to go all-in on AWS was an easy one, having been an Amazon customer since 2013. Expedia originally used AWS’s services to speed up some of its internal projects and integrate its acquisitions, before moving more workloads to the platform in the last couple of years. The company has also been using Amazon’s machine learning services to power its post-booking recommendations to customers, among other uses.

“We began our cloud journey on AWS with development and test workloads, and experienced so much success that we chose to make an all-in commitment to move our global brands, their websites and digital properties, analytics, mobile applications, and business-critical workloads to AWS,” said Tony Donohoe, Expedia’s chief technology officer.

Intuit is also showing a big interest in Amazon’s machine learning expertise. The company, which provides around 40 artificial intelligence and machine learning features in its products said it has decided to move these workloads to AWS in order to expedite their deployment at scale. In addition, Intuit is also planning to run its companywide data lake on AWS.

“We extended our relationship with AWS to enhance our flagship products and services, including QuickBooks, Mint, and TurboTax, and accelerate our efforts to apply artificial intelligence within our business,” said H. Tayloe Stansbury, Intuit’s executive vice president and chief technology officer at Intuit.

Not least, the National Football League adopted AWS’s machine learning and data analytics services to boost its Next Gen Stats platform, its player-tracking system. The company said it’s aiming to “develop new ways of visualizing the action on the field, uncovering deeper insights into the action on the field, and expanding the fan experience by offering a broader range of advanced statistics.” As part of the deal, AWS also will become an “official technology provider” to the NFL.

Using radio-frequency identification tags in player equipment and the football, Next Gen Stats captures data such as real-time location, speed and acceleration. It’s then analyzed on AWS, creating player and team stats for every game, such as a receiver’s ability to get open and an offensive line’s ability to protect the quarterback.

“Next Gen Stats is already revolutionizing the game of football by exposing a variety of advanced statistics that enhance our broadcasts and other operations,” said Matt Swensson, the NFL’s vice president of emerging products and technology. “By powering Next Gen Stats with AWS, we’ll be able to kick off our 2018 season with even more impactful and meaningful content, uncovering deeper insights into the game of football than we’ve ever done before.”

Image: AWS

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