Cloud AWS re:Invent Coverage | Chris Niederman & Ralph Hengstenberg, AWS

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Chris Niederman

Senior Vice President of Worldwide Alliances and Channels

Snowflake

Ralph Hengstenberg

Director Industry Marketing

AWS

AWS partner innovation aims to drive industry-specific AI solutions

This year’s AWS re:Invent conference has reinforced the level of action, hype and buzz in the industry around AI. But the reality is that AI still nee...

play_circle_outline Focus on practical AI solutions

play_circle_outline Importance of data in cloud for AI success

play_circle_outline Challenges and opportunities in moving to the cloud for customers and partners

play_circle_outline Industry transformations with gen AI

play_circle_outline Challenges faced by customers in moving to the cloud

play_circle_outline Harnessing Gen AI with Industry Experts: Driving Innovation Through Partnership for Workload Solutions

play_circle_outline Industry-specific use cases

play_circle_outline Focus on use cases and industry outcomes

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Chris Niederman & Ralph Hengstenberg, AWS

Chris Niederman

Senior Vice President of Worldwide Alliances and Channels Snowflake

Ralph Hengstenberg

Director Industry Marketing AWS

TheCUBE is hosting coverage in Las Vegas with John Furrier and Dave Vellante for four days of industry insights. The focus is on the growth of AI in various industries and the importance of data in cloud-based solutions. Partnerships with industry-specific experts are crucial for innovation and success in deploying AI solutions to meet customer needs. The key is to focus on industry-specific use cases and tailor solutions to deliver better outcomes for customers. The industry partners bring valuable domain expertise and are essential in driving innovation and... Read more

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What is required to do Gen AI according to the text? add

What is essential for Gen AI that cannot be achieved without data in the cloud according to the conversation? add

What have been some of the highlights of the launches this week that partners have been gravitating towards? add

What industry is seeing the most advancement, particularly in healthcare and life sciences, this year? add

What is the reaction of partners to the trend of companies moving more towards the cloud for on-premise activity? add

What role do partners play in the success of companies in various industries, as exemplified by the collaborations with Comcast, Telefonica, Nokia, GE Healthcare, and Santander mentioned in the text? add

What is the current focus in the industry in terms of driving solutions and partnerships? add

What is the strategy behind AWS focusing on industry-specific use cases and how does it involve customers, partners, and solutions? add

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Chris Niederman & Ralph Hengstenberg, AWS

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>> It's everywhere. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, host of Cube with Dave Vellante here for four days of wall-to-wall coverage. Fantastic event this year. It almost feels like a whole nother growth wave is coming. Gen One Cloud, Gen Two is here. And a lot of action is happening certainly in the ecosystem as part of the hype and buzz in the industry around AI. The reality is it has to be deployed. We're seeing a lot of those practical solutions around there. We've got two great guests here, Chris and Ralph, head of industry solutions. Chris, you're the managing director of industries and solutions globally. Ralph, director of Industry Marketing. Great to have you guys on. Thanks for coming on.

Chris Niederman

>> Thanks for having us.

Ralph Hengstenberg

>> Thank you for having us.

>> Chris, we talk all the time. We've talked in the hallways. We've met one-on-one, just the partner ecosystem just globally within RUBA and the entire organization has seen a massive change in the sense that's almost another level coming of solutions. You're seeing new kinds of partners across the board and an industry where you guys focus on there are known domains. Now, AI loves domain data. So we're seeing AI get a huge lift in industry verticals. Big part of the growth and certainly they got a lot of data and wanted to show topics is the value of data. JP Morgan Chase was on theCUBE here, Lori Beer, she was going all off on like, "Hey, I have all this data and have been using machine learning for a while, but now I'm infrastructure." And so, she's now spent a lot with Amazon and they're very excited. What is the feedback you're getting here this year? What's the industry vibe? It still AI getting ready for AI, they're implementing it, what's your take?

Chris Niederman

>> So John, as always, you got like 10 questions in that one question right there, but talk about data for a second. So you get data and data's not new to us. You think back to, I think it was re:Invent! in 2017 when we had Snowmobile and then Andy. Moving the data to the cloud is super important and has been for us for almost 10 years. And we talk to customers and partners. You can't do Gen AI without what? Without data in the cloud. And when you look at how the data is used and how it's being specifically tied to use cases, it's industry specific. And we're always interested in how do we help our customers achieve the best outcomes. And the best way we can do that is helping them understand industry by industry use case by use case, and then all the solutions per use case, and we're just laser focused on the industry solutions that require the data in the cloud, especially when we're adopting gen AI.

>> Yeah. And one of the things I've seen from some of the industry partners that I've talked to in the hallways and in theCUBE is when you see the announcements, the Tranium2, the S3 Table Buckets for instance, massive innovation, some of the things going on at S3, the enablement that's coming on top of that of already good partners now become great partners. So the good to great is happening and then the great are going to the next level. This has been kind back to the roots for re:Invent! We have this slew of announcements come in, that's floating all the boats. That's the rising tide. Ralph, what's your take on this? And Chris, you weigh in too around the technical enablement here.

Ralph Hengstenberg

>> Yeah, the technical enablement, what we see and what we've demonstrated downstairs in the industry pavilion is really coming to life now. So we've got this year 47 industry-specific solution demos on the use cases. 45 of them are powered by gen AI, have got gen AI deeply in them and all of that we can't do on our own. It has to be with partners, whether that's the Siemens on the automation and the manufacturing side, whether it's Continental on the automotive side. Or very advanced bio-FM models like ESM-III with evolutionary scale who were also on stage and were mentioned. So partners are absolutely critical to us, but what we've seen a lot of traction in is that it's now becoming real. Every single one of our demonstrations has got end customers behind them that have deployed as well as partners as part of the ecosystem.

>> That was the theme of the keynote. Chris, what have been some of the launches this week that the partners have been gravitating towards? What are some of the highlights that they go, "Okay, I'm going to start putting that into action."

Chris Niederman

>> It's been amazing. There's been thousands and thousands of announcements and I am sitting with partners and I'm asking him that same question. Andy, you remember what Andy announced on stage? He hit on everything. But what's resonating the most with me is that as partners, industry-specific, I just met with somebody, Neo4j, and they focus on graph databases. I'm going to kind of add on to what he was talking about and what asked earlier. Graph databases, and they've been around for 14, 14 plus years, but now these announcements are coming toward them. Graph databases have never been more important than a report, especially as they're doing fraud detection for banks and making sure that they can use these and gen AI and AI-ML, it's all coming their direction and all tied to enablement, not just for them, but the whole partner ecosystem.

>> And then Emil at Neo4j, that's one of those companies that has been hit the right-

>> Curve.

Chris Niederman

>> It's just the right time.

>> Poolside. Okay? Poolside, we saw them just come out of nowhere. They hit escape velocity. So you have these kind the rocket ships coming out, but then in the domain verticals, that's been some real innovation going on in these verticals. Is there one industry that you see that's most ... I mean, financial services is probably the most popular since they got a lot more cash to play with, but are there domains that you're seeing getting a real lift this year?

Ralph Hengstenberg

>> Yeah. So we see the most advancement in healthcare and life sciences. We just had the innovation talk earlier on today and when you see how we innovate with the likes of GE Healthcare, partner, but also what companies like Merck and Lilly are doing ultimately across the whole value chain. So from the drug discovery acceleration, all the way to how they take care of patients, and this is really where the partners are critical for us and where we see a lot of traction, especially in the gen AI space.

>> I was talking to A&D on an exclusive. You guys heard about that today. It's going to be published later. One of the things Chrissy mentioned is that there's still about 80% of on-premise activity has not yet moved the cloud. A direct quote, what he said and what he means is that it's going to go to the cloud because you look at what cloud's offering now with the performance gains at the infrastructure level where SageMaker's now sitting and where Bedrock's getting a lot of lift, the stack is starting to be seen. Amazon's playing some of their cards, they hold the cards closer to the vest, but you can start to see the cards, infrastructure advancements, seamless model choice integrated into practical AI. What's your reaction to that? Because a lot of these companies that want to connect to the cloud, they're going to start moving more to the cloud. How are partners reacting to that? Because they're going to be not only part of it, they have customers.

Chris Niederman

>> Well, in some cases the opportunity's greater than 80%. You talking in the US it's probably 80% left to move 20%, 25% whatever. You go to Bangkok where I was three months ago and they're maybe less than 5% move to the cloud. And so, the opportunities are different. But you look at practical AI, you look at other things and it's becoming embedded in every solution. And I had a conversation last night about, all right, are we seeing gen AI create more use cases or are we seeing gen AI start to create more efficiency in the solutions and will we be focusing on Gen ai? Will we be talking about that? I think the ultimate answer is we're going to be outcome-based for customers by industry and even persona-based. The way we position the solution, the outcome, whether we discuss gen AI or not, will be dependent upon are we talking to a line of business executive or are we talking to an IT executive? I think that it could end up being that we may not even be talking about gen AI as when we present it because it could be like EC-II, not like you wake up in the morning and go, "Yay, I'm selling EC-II." It's embedded in the solution. So I think gen AI will get embedded in the solution. We'll continue to focus more on the outcomes and especially by persona.

>> Yeah, Ralph, the challenges that customers face are there, we're seeing it with customers going to the cloud, partners driving the innovation. Two parts to the question, why are partners so important for driving the innovation? And two, what are the challenges of the customers as they face this buy versus build, move to the cloud or build it on-prem. There's challenges there. What are the challenges and why are partners so important to drive that innovation? Yeah,

Ralph Hengstenberg

>> Partners are obviously critical because they quite often over decades have been deeply embedded in the value chains in each industry with our customers. So they know the business processes, they know the data. And hence, for example, we just made the announcement with Comcast on 5G, Telefonica was early on in the year as the very first mobile network, 5G network that migrated to the cloud. Well, that was with Nokia. Right? So you wouldn't do that without a Nokia and their domain expertise. And the same as I said, GE Healthcare from a patient perspective and clinical workflow perspective is absolutely critical. Now, a good example of what matters beyond technology was brought to life with Santander. They were on stage in our FSI innovation talk and they said, look, the technology's great, but what the real differentiation is and what really makes it work for us is how the collaborative approach of the working backwards, the executive visioning and really half of the innovation talk was around how we as AWS support them and cleared partners are part of the ecosystem to that. They facilitate a lot of that.

>> I think in your area in industry, partners are, to your point, they have such domain expertise over decades. It's not like Johnny , "Hey, I want to sell you something." They're deep in process on the end-to-end workload. That seems to be the value. Great call out there. Chris, I want to get to-

Chris Niederman

>> One more point on that one though.

>> Yeah. Go ahead.

Chris Niederman

>> You look at how it's accelerated, what we're doing, the shift to industries, we've evolved to industry starting January this year and sales marketing, pro-serve training. Everybody. Our sales teams now where we were maybe 30, 40% partner attach on our deals, we're accelerating. Some countries are 80, 90% attached. Our sales reps are leaning toward partners. We're never because of that expertise. You've got, Deloitte has 178 years of expertise. Deloitte, Accenture is probably close to a century. They've been going to market by industry for way longer than we've been in existence. And so our reps are going, I need an industry expert. Who do they call? They call them partners now. And so, we're seeing acceleration and uptick in the partners.

>> Yeah, I think mean if you look at process, if you look at Swami's keynote, Swami's day three keynote was all about workflows. And this is where I think this nuance, but it's important to point out that in the domain expert process, the value is going to come from that business code, the knobs and the buttons that needs to be pushed, enterprise as you guys know in the industry, it's very specific. And they're sometimes hardened, but then new things are going to come in. So you got to retrofit with AI the existing known end-to-end workload we have , but also they got to bring in the innovation. The software that yet hasn't been written, whether cue modernize the mainframe code that Andy says is going to happen soon or just new stuff's happening, but the old stuff's getting upgraded like super fast. Again, this puts an exclamation point on the partners.

Chris Niederman

>> Yeah. And stealing a line from Andy from 2015, I think it's applicable today, especially with Gen AI and a number of my conversations. The conversations with customers always start out with, "Okay, how do I drive cost out of the model?" And they go, "Okay, I'm bought into cloud, which workloads first and how fast do we move?" And now it's like, okay, now how do I innovate? How do I transform? And we know a little bit about innovation and transformation and thinking big, and that's actually, we're seeing the same pattern with gen AI as we did when cloud first started getting adopted.

>> Okay. Final word, give each of you a chance to talk to the audience out there, partners and customers. As the industry focus emerges, as you guys roll this out with the new products, it's like a holiday time. Everyone's got their gifts, all the new announcements, but it's clear this is at the beginning. What should they know about the focus? What's the plan? What should they expect? What's coming down the road? Ralph, I'll start with you. What's next for industry partners and customers?

Ralph Hengstenberg

>> So we are continuing to double down on industry solutions and really focusing on the use cases. And I think this is for us absolute core together with partners working backwards, addressing very industry-specific needs. And in my view, generative AI will be ubiquitous in this and especially in and at the edge will absolutely be there and you'll have a lot more there, especially as we are broadening out the ecosystem. For example, with AWS, Bedrock's marketplace style, bringing partners into the ecosystem much easier.

>> Chris?

Chris Niederman

>> Yeah, the use cases, I mean it is all about the use cases. It used to be, let's start with a list of partners and then it could be all over the map. But really now the rallying point is the industry-specific use cases. And you think about it as a flywheel, it all starts with the customer. We work backwards from the customer. We have industry use cases, and then we have maybe multiple solutions to run those use cases. And we could could have, say, for example, Redshift in one solution, Snowflake in a solution for that, or maybe Databricks. We can have multiple solutions per use case. We get it to a consulting partner, they embed more ISVs and technology partners, they bring it to the customer as a SaaS or managed services offering. And we do it over and over and over again. And one example is take auto manufacturing. And by the way, all of our use cases are published if you can go to aws.amazon.com/industries, you'll see all of our solutions and use cases, auto manufacturing, we've identified as-One priority use cases. And it might be working with BMW, or say Aston Martin, at any point in time based on upon propensity to buy models. One or two of those use cases might be applicable. In Aston Martin's case, they wanted to know how to prepare better for new vehicle launches using their data and getting insights, working with a partner called Data Reply and us. They increased the conversion rate to 85% and they were able to predict the customers by 35. So they knew how many cars to build and where to supply them to what dealers with far greater accuracy. And that affects the supply chain. It affects the end user, it affects the customer, it affects the outcome.

>> So your service model then is here's the proven solutions that we have as, I won't say templates, maybe that's a bad word, but here's some use cases. They tailor them to the customer, the partner does and implement it.

Chris Niederman

>> Most, sorry, go ahead.

Ralph Hengstenberg

>> No, I was going to say, so we've got an array of over 40 purpose-built services in our own right.

>> Oh, Purpose-built. Yeah. .

Ralph Hengstenberg

>> Purpose-built, and then over 450 industry solutions that effectively always have some components around partners. But on top of that, we've got four and a half thousand industry-specific partners across 11 competency programs. And so, it's always a combination of them and how we go to market and getting it right.

>> And so, they can turn key products from you and sell their services around it.

Chris Niederman

>> And create, like the Andy concept, take primitives, put them together into productized solutions, create a platform like Deloitte has a platform called Converge Health that might deliver 80% of what a customer needs. Then they can take that, tailor it with 20% of the secret sauce, and then deliver a tailored customer for outcome.

>> Now to put my hat on, but the customer makes money by selling a better product, lowering their cost. Making revenue. The partner makes money for delivering good service. It's a great win-win.

Chris Niederman

>> As long as we deliver a better outcome for our customers. That's the key.

>> Yeah. Profit and distribution. I was going to say, great formula for service guys. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. I know we -

Chris Niederman

>> Thanks for having us.

>> Looking forward to following up on what's going on in the industry. Again, hot air. We've always said domain expertise is the new IP in AI because that's going to be critical. Guys, you guys have demonstrated that. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it.

Chris Niederman

>> Awesome. Thanks for having us.

>> Okay, we are here at theCUBE. Shake your hand, of course. Not live, but almost live. I'm John Furrier. We'll be back with more after the short break.