Amazon cloud chief Adam Selipsky sees ‘limitless’ alternatives to tailor companies to industries

Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky echoed his predecessor Andy Jassy in his first AWS re:Invent keynote address Tuesday morning, citing vast opportunities for growth as more companies embrace the cloud.

But Selipsky offered another path for achieving that growth, making it clear that AWS is ready to expand further beyond general-purpose cloud technologies into services designed for specific use cases and industries. This is a departure from the strategy pursued by Jassy, who succeeded Jeff Bezos as Amazon CEO in July.

In a two-hour keynote, with a long list of new and updated AWS services and products, plus a history lesson on tech trailblazers, this section amounted to an executive summary of Selipsky’s message:

In the 15 years, since we launched AWS, the cloud has become not just another tech revolution, but an enabler of a fundamental shift in the way that businesses actually function. There’s no industry that hasn’t been touched, and no business that can’t be radically disrupted. And every one of us here today is part of that movement.

But despite what feels like massive adoption, we’re actually just getting started. Analysts estimate that perhaps 5 to 15% of IT spending has moved to the cloud. There’s so many workloads that are going to move in the coming years. Such innovation yet to come; such an opportunity for all of us together.

We’re building ever more powerful capabilities, pushing the edge of the cloud to new places with things like 5g and IoT. We’re driving towards seamless integration of data, analytics and machine learning that will be transformative. We’re tailoring services and applications to specific customer use cases and industries. The possibilities there are endless.

Selipsky had discussed the plan to increase AWS’s focus on industry verticals in interviews leading up to the event. AWS was the first mover and remains the market-share leader in the public cloud, but rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have been more aggressive in targeting industry verticals in their efforts to catch up.

The keynote included examples of new AWS services for specific industries and customer scenarios.

• Goldman Sachs and AWS will develop cloud services for use by financial institutions to organize and analyze data.
• A new service called AWS IoT FleetWise is designed to help automakers shift vehicle data to the cloud.
• Another new service, AWS Private 5G, will help companies establish their own private 5G mobile networks.

In other news, the company announced three new Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances powered by custom Amazon chips, including the newly unveiled AWS Graviton3 processor. AWS also expanded its “no-code” offerings with its new SageMaker Canvas technology for creating machine learning models.

Previously: Amazon preps for a ‘multi-robot’ world: RoboRunner cloud service builds on its own warehouse tech