M+E Connections

While announcing that Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andrew Jassy will be replacing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the company’s CEO this summer, Amazon on Feb. 2 said strong AWS results helped it report stronger results than a year ago in the fourth quarter (ended Dec. 31).

AWS revenue grew to $12.7 billion in Q4 from $10 billion a year ago, while AWS operating profit increased to $3.6 billion from $2.6 billion.

Total Amazon revenue jumped 44% to $125.6 billion from $87.4 billion. Profit increased to $7.2 billion ($14.09 a share) from $3.3 billion ($6.47 a share).

The company’s AWS Q4 efforts included its ninth annual re:Invent Conference, its first done virtually as a result of the COVID-10 pandemic, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said on an earnings call with analysts. “We had over 570,000 registered attendees during the three-weeks-long event,” he said.

AWS “continues to innovate at a rapid clip, announcing more than 180 new services and features at re:Invent across compute, storage, database, machine learning and more,” he told analysts.

Also during Q4, the AWS team announced “significant customer momentum with new commitments and migrations from JPMorgan Chase, Thomson Reuters, ViacomCBS and Twitter, just to name a few,” he said, noting: “We continue to see companies meaningfully growing their plans to move to AWS. In Q4, AWS saw continuation of strong usage and revenue growth. AWS added more revenue quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year in any quarter in its history and is now a $51 billion annualized run-rate business, supporting millions of active AWS customers.”

During the Q&A, while discussing the investments Amazon is making in AWS, he said the company is “supporting an AWS business that is growing at a rapid clip both in usage and in revenue.” AWS is “expanding regions globally and have a lot of upside in that area talking with customers on their transition plans to the cloud, so we definitely do not want to run out of capacity and we work to not do that.”

AWS customer wins in Q4 also included Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Amazon said in its earnings news release.

Meanwhile, five new AWS services for industrial customers were introduced that use machine learning to improve operational efficiency, quality control, security and workplace safety, Amazon said. While Amazon Monitron and Amazon Lookout for Equipment “use sensor data to enable predictive maintenance,” the AWS Panorama Appliance and software development kit (SDK) “use computer vision to improve product quality and workplace safety,” and Amazon Lookout for Vision “uses computer vision to spot anomalies and flaws in products and processes,” it said.

Other new AWS offerings include: Advanced Query Accelerator (AQUA) for Amazon Redshift that Amazon said “provides an innovative new hardware- accelerated cache that delivers up to 10x better query performance than any other cloud data warehouse”; AWS Glue Elastic Views that “lets developers easily build materialized views that automatically combine and replicate data across storage, data warehouses, and databases”; Amazon QuickSight Q that “delivers a machine learning-powered capability for Amazon QuickSight that lets users type questions about their business data in natural language and receive highly accurate answers in seconds”; and Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes that it said “deliver the first storage area network (SAN) built for the cloud, with up to” 256,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS), 4,000 MB/second throughput, and 64 TB of capacity.

AWS also introduced four new container services that Amazon said were designed to “help customers develop, deploy, and scale modern applications in the cloud and on-premises.” They are: Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Anywhere and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere, which enable customers to run Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS in their own data centers; AWS Proton that automates container and serverless application development and deployment; and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) Public that it said “provides developers an easy and highly available way to share and deploy container software publicly.”

AWS also “continued to expand its infrastructure footprint around the world,” announcing the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region, available by mid-2022, and the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region and AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Regions, available in the second half of 2022, Amazon said.

AWS now provides 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones in six more AWS Regions, including regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain, as well as the recently pre-announced regions in India, Switzerland, and Australia, it said.

New AWS Local Zones in Boston, Houston and Miami, meanwhile, “place AWS infrastructure close to end users in metropolitan centers, so customers can access low-latency compute, storage, and database services without needing to provision or maintain datacenter space,” Amazon said.

AWS also announced the availability of AWS Local Zones in 12 additional cities this year: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland and Seattle.

More Details on the CEO Change

Olsavsky stressed that Bezos is not leaving Amazon – just “getting a new job” in which he is shifting to executive chair of the board. His replacement as Amazon CEO, Jassy, has been with the company since 1997 and is “not only a visionary leader — he is a strong operator… and he has got a great track record of developing multiple things and businesses within Amazon, not the least of which is AWS, which is arguably the most profitable, important technology company in the world,” Olsavsky said.

“Andy has a chance to put his imprint on Amazon,” the CFO said, noting Jassy is “certainly going to carry through the culture and the vision and the invention factory that Amazon is and will take that to the next level.”

Meanwhile, Bezos, in his new role, “will be involved in many large one-way-door issues, as we say – one-way doors meaning the more important decisions, things like acquisitions, things like strategies and going into grocery and other things,” Olsavsky said. Bezos has “always been involved with that,” and that will continue to be what he is focused on, according to the CFO, adding the executive changes will happen in Q3.

In the meantime, Amazon “will be working on back-filling the AWS role and we will talk more about that in the future,” Olsavsky added.