CLOUD computing company Amazon Web Services (AWS) sees demand for cloud computing technologies will continue to soar during this pandemic time.
Its chief executive officer Andy Jassy, during the re:Invent 2020, said the cloud industry grew during the coronavirus pandemic.
"The pandemic has forced companies to shut down their offices and rely on remote workforces and forced companies to ramp up their cloud usage to support customer surges," he said.
If not because of the pandemic, cloud technologies adoption may not be as fast as today.
"When you look back on the history of the cloud, it will turn out that the pandemic accelerated cloud adoption by several years," he said.
Jassy said in the first nine months or 10 months of the pandemic, every company in the world, Amazon included, tried to save money any way that they can.
"Many of those companeis have gone from talking about implementing cloud to having a real plan," he said.
Growth in cloud
The growth in cloud computing is not just seen by AWS, but the whole industry generally.
According to market research company Gartner, the worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 18.4 percent in 2021 to total US$304.9 billion, up from US$257.5 billion in 2020.
For AWS business definitely grew. The company posted revenue of US$11.6 billion for the latest quarter that ended Sept 30, 2021, up 29 percent year over year for a US$46.4 billion annual revenue.
Besides talking about the increased adoption of cloud technologies, Jassy also advised companies to keep on re-inventing as this would enable them to build a long-term, sustainable business.
He said companies should be reinventing while they're healthy and developing products and services that really solve customer problems.
"In the last nine months, I've thought a lot about reinvention and what it takes to do reinvention well," he added.
He also said that in building the reinventing culture, companies need the leadership will to invent and reinvent.
Helping companies re-invent
In helping companies to weather through the pandemic and re-invent, AWS announced huge number of new products and updates to its existing portfolio of could solutions, in the areas such as Analytics, AWS Marketplace, AWS Well-Architected, Compute, Containers, Customer Engagement, Developer Tools, Front-end Web & Mobile, Internet of Things, Machine Learning, Management & Governance, Networking & Content Delivery, Storage and Quantum Technologies.
Jassy said AWS has been listening to customers and inventing more options for its solutions like instances, containers, and serverless deployments.
"Reducing costs is always a priority as well, and our engineers looked for ways to make common operations more cost efficient," he said.
Despite the accelerated adoption of cloud technologies, Jassy said many companies are still new in the cloud adoption, but he believed that soon most of these companies will eventually adopt cloud.
Customer experiences
AWS's vice president, business application services, Larry Augustin, in echoing Jassy's call for companies to reinvent, said many companies got the chance to reinvent during the pandemic and that the Covid-19 has been the catalyst for this.
"There has been studies that show, for example, that call centre agents can in fact be more productive if they are working from home, in their own environment and they don't have to commute," he said.
Many companies would like to see if this is true, but for many reasons they haven't been able to get there.
"Maybe it's too big a step. They are too worried about potential failure and the pandemic has forced them to try things that they were interested in doing but never had the catalyst to do it. And we've seen now many companies that look at this and said 'now that we've done it, maybe even post pandemic, we want more of our people to work from home'," he said during a live interview session.
"I think this (Covid-19) is going to be a new catalyst to encourage companies to try new ideas and potentially take some risks that they were interested in doing but didn't get the momentum to do it," he added.
Augustin said AWS has seen customers with tens of thousands of agents working in call centres and now working from home because they have to respond to the pandemic.
"AWS's customers like Best Western hotels use call centre in Europe and Fujitsu use Amazon Connect to power their call centres, and all these customers have been able to run their experiment because of the pandemic. There were using the old model before and now they are using the new model and they can compare. I think we are learning that people can be very productive working distributed and virtually," he said.
"We have got many companies who have taken advantage of this app, like Best Western with their Europrean call centres to connect with businesses with 14 languages in 35 countries and they managed to migrate in just a week and we are able to support," he said.
Fujitsu implemented Amazon Connect as a two-month proof of concept, with 150 agents initially supporting 18 key customers from one of its contact centres. In this timeframe, with about 30,000 individual customer interactions, totalling more that 5,100 hours of customer contact, the company made marked improvements in its customer experience. Following the success of this pilot, recognising the benefits that Connect has had on its customer and employee experience, the company is implementing Connect globally.
Ability to scale
"I think if we were to go back 10-15 years, the tools might not have been there to do that," said Augustin.
"Look at the Internet, and the fact that we have voice over IP with relatively high bandwidth halfway across the world, but now we have it and it's able to work. I know that when we make employees work at home, we have enough capacity and we've more and more technologies that are working," he said.
"We've announced, for example, a protocol update to our Workspace, virtual desktop, which is a significant improvement in handling networks that have higher latency and packet loss. Those technologies weren't there 10-15 years ago and we were forced to run the experiment now, and I do think people and companies will use that technology to change, and reevaluate whether they should continue working at home even when the vaccine has come out," he added.
Besides that, Augustin also said AWS's customers like Morrisons, which is one of the largest grocery chains in the UK, used Amazon Connect since 2019 and they moved all of their call centre agents to work from home within a day.
"The ability, agility and flexibility to do that come from the Contact Centre in a Cloud service like Amazon Connect," he said.
"The ability to scale in the cloud from literally ten agents to thousands of agents in days. You can't do that with traditional on-premise legacy call centre solutions. No you have the ability to scale up and also to scale back down.
"Because companies may decide after this they may not need so many agents and want to scale down and they can do so. That is a unique capability for businesses," said Augustin.
"We have another customer, which is a food delivery company in the US called Grubhub, they moved all their 1,200 employees to work from home just two days and their business picked up because everyone is at home and no one goes to the restaurants and orders food remotely. So the cloud brings agility and flexibility, and we were pleased to help those customers," he added.
GrubHub leveraged Amazon WorkSpaces to ensure business continuity and support the safety of its employees by moving all departments to a Work From Home (WFH) model. The company said Amazon WorkSpaces easily accommodated its real-time customer communication and contact channels allowing 100 percent of its workforce and new employees to be WFH, accelerating its BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) strategy.