AWS Chief Jassy: Enterprises Want To Move To Cloud, Partners Are Helping Them Get There

Amazon Web Services says it now has more than one million active customers using its cloud every month. To keep the ball rolling, it's relying on partners to help enterprises and public sector agencies move to its public cloud.

In a Q&A session at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas Wednesday, Andy Jassy, senior vice president of AWS, declined to specify how many of these customers are enterprises.

"Our customer growth is quite substantial, and our enterprise growth is quite substantial," he said.

[Related: AWS re:Invent Kicks Off With Amazon Pledging Greater Support For Partners]

But Jassy did say Amazon believes AWS could eventually become its largest single business, which is quite a claim considering Amazon's retail business currently generates $70 billion annually.

Jassy acknowledged that while many large organizations understand the value to be gained from using AWS, they need help in getting started. He said AWS is providing this in conjunction with "thousands" of system integrator partners that developed expertise in cloud migrations.

These partners assess the customer's enterprise app portfolio, figure out which apps to move to the cloud and help out with architecture and implementation work, according to Jassy.

"That work is really accelerating for our partner ecosystem," he said.

AWS maintains close relationships with enterprises through account management, as well as support functions that give customers one relationship with the technical account manager, Jassy said.

Since enterprises are moving to the cloud at different speeds, the amount of interaction they need from AWS varies quite a bit.

"Most customers have weekly calls, some just are happy to see us a couple times a year," Jassy said.

Enterprises tend to have legacy apps that are tied to their on-premise infrastructure, and some are still using mainframes to power their operations. While the learning curve can be steep, enterprises that make the transition are able to quickly see the benefits, said Jassy.

"There's a certain amount of adjustment enterprises have to get used to in not managing their own infrastructure and giving up control," Jassy said in the Q&A. "It's less of an issue than it used to be but some enterprises are still coming to grips."

As for the competition from Google, Microsoft and others, Jassy said AWS is still taking advantage of its multi-year head start in the public cloud space.

"If you look at the amount of functionality, number of services and features within [our] services, we have a lot more functionality in our platform than any other provider," Jassy said.

PUBLISHED NOV. 12, 2014