This year, Omdia’s Cloud and Data Center Practice team participated in AWS summits in London and Singapore. Discussions were dominated by GenAI, interestingly presented from a local customer’s point of view.
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Summary
AWS Summits are annual large-scale events organized by Amazon Web Services (AWS) around the world, including locations like London, Amsterdam, Singapore, and more, to bring together cloud computing enthusiasts, industry experts, developers, and businesses. These summits serve as platforms for networking, learning, and discovering the latest trends and innovations in cloud technology. Along with these events, AWS gathers industry tech analysts, customers, partners, and the AWS leadership team at the AWS Analyst Forum, usually the prior day to the main summit.
This year, the Omdia Cloud and Data Center Team had a chance to participate in both the London and Singapore editions of this event. As with most events in the last two years, discussions were dominated by generative AI (GenAI); however, they were interestingly presented from a local customer’s point of view.
This analysis aims to provide a brief overview of AWS’s philosophy and practices in EMEA and South-Eastern Asia. It is not an evaluation of its competitiveness or an endorsement of its solution. For an objective assessment of cloud service providers and their offerings, please see Omdia Universe: Cloud Service Providers, 2024.
London Summit (April 23–24): Powered by AWS solutions, European, African, and Middle Eastern organizations are catching up with GenAI
The 2024 edition of the AWS Analyst Forum in London served as a crucial platform for navigating the complexities of cloud adoption amid contrasting perspectives from advocates and skeptics. AWS’s perspective shows that only 20% of workloads are up in the cloud globally, as opposed to 50% recorded by Omdia data. Key takeaways revealed notable post-migration business impacts, including substantial cost reductions (20%), enhanced productivity (17%), increased resilience, bolstered security, improved performance, and heightened agility (43% faster time-to-market). Furthermore, discussions delved into the migration-to-modernize considerations, highlighting the significance of adopting cloud financial management (CFM) best practices and the pivotal role of the cloud operating model in driving success.
Additionally, the growing demand for cloud migration services among partners suggests that enterprises may require assistance rather than handling migrations independently. This highlights the importance of cloud service providers offering support and expertise in facilitating seamless transitions to the cloud. Finally, AWS explored how their industry-specific go-to-market helps with cloud-enabled digital transformation in industries. There is a necessity to effectively communicate with customers in a language that resonates with their specific industry needs, which AWS seems to find as its strength in the market.
AWS also continues to emphasize its commitment to sovereign cloud and AI design principles while acknowledging the importance of adhering to industry standards and reflecting customer expectations. However, according to Omdia’s chief analyst, Roy Illsley, AWS, like most of its competitors, does not address the ownership aspect of sovereignty. However, it is worth noting that this is only significant if aligning with France’s perspective on cloud sovereignty. Following earlier announcements about AWS European Sovereign Cloud commitments, on May 14, 2024, AWS confirmed its plans to launch its first AWS Region in the State of Brandenburg in Germany by the end of 2025. This effort is available to all AWS customers and is backed by a €7.8bn ($8.5bn) investment in infrastructure, job creation, and skills development.
The AWS forum shed light on GenAI’s catalytic role in cloud adoption, emphasizing the burgeoning demand for cloud migration assistance from partners. AWS’s increased focus on board-level presentations regarding GenAI is promising, as educating this audience is crucial for organizations to develop a comprehensive GenAI strategy. Such a strategy begins with understanding data, followed by investing in education and skills before application development.
GenAI deployment is gaining traction in EMEA, as evidenced by Tanuja Randery’s (managing director for the EMEA region) presentation at the AWS Analyst Summit. She showcased compelling examples (Adidas, Philips, NeuroPro, Booking.com, Accenture) of enterprise GenAI deployment in the region, with companies leveraging a blend of Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker technologies. Despite potential concerns, Randery expressed confidence that EMEA is not notably lagging behind other regions in GenAI deployment as she responded to a question from the Omdia team.
Singapore Summit (May 7): Kickstarting the GenAI journey and localizing LLMs in South-Eastern Asia – AWS’s key role in the region’s digital transformation
During the opening keynote of the 10th AWS Summit in Singapore, AWS announced plans to invest S$12bn ($9bn) into its existing cloud infrastructure from 2024 to 2028, which will double its investments in the country to over S$23bn ($17bn) by 2028. The investment will help meet growing customer demand for cloud technology and services in the country. Multiple local case studies, including SingPass, GovWallet, and Grab, were highlighted during the keynote.
The most interesting use case was the Government Technology Agency (GovTech), a statutory body of the Government of Singapore, which showcased its latest progress on its partnership with AWS. As of 2023, over 70% of the eligible workloads have been migrated to the cloud, enabling public officers to access AWS SageMaker for various GenAI use cases since 2023, including fraud detection, multilingual government communications, threat intelligence and response, and compliance checks, in line with the Singapore government’s National AI Strategy 2.0.
GovTech also sees cloud adoption and AI as impact drivers that improve productivity gains for public officers, enhance government delivery capabilities, and create new services for businesses and residents. For example, GovTech partnered with the Ministry of Manpower to develop a GenAI tool built on Amazon SageMaker and Bedrock that enables policy officers to process large amounts of employment-related documents and feedback more efficiently and effectively.
While at the AWS London Summit, Amazon Q was still officially available as a preview only; at the Singapore event, this GenAI-powered assistant was already generally available (the official launch date was April 30, 2024). During a Q&A session in Singapore, AWS shared their aspirations to build a next-generation AI assistant that gets work done, from those working in the legal department (cross-referencing and legal research) to marketing (advert campaign). What was also highlighted was that on subscription costs, Amazon Q has per-user and indexing costs without any cost in managing infrastructure since Amazon Q is built on Amazon Bedrock, which is serverless. AWS also believes that having a robust data infrastructure and mature software engineering would help smoothen the Amazon Q user experience for enterprises. It is, therefore, important for enterprises to undergo data cleaning, especially for unstructured data, before getting on board.
When Omdia asked about the localization of language for LLMs, AWS responded by confirming that it is one of the hot topics of discussion within their teams and that progress on product innovations and partnerships has been encouraging. In November 2023, Amazon Bedrock started to provide Cohere’s multilingual text understanding model that can support over 100 languages with significantly better performance than open-source models. On the other hand, AI Singapore, a national-level initiative to accelerate AI adoption by local industries, has built SEA-LION (Southeast Asian Languages in One Network), a family of open source LLMs that is trained in 11 major regional languages: Burmese, Chinese, English, Filipino, Indonesian, Khmer, Lao, Malay, Tamil, Thai, and Vietnamese. In February 2024, SEA-LION started to become available via Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, allowing businesses to access, customize, and deploy pre-trained models.
Finally, in recent years, AWS has positioned itself as the go-to platform for government agencies, enterprises, and startups to start their GenAI journey, irrespective of where they are at the adoption curve. At the summit in Singapore, they showcased three different solution propositions for GenAI adoption across three sets of priorities:
- AWS Data Strategy, offering peer-level executive guidance to achieve data transformation leadership
- AWS Data-Driven Everything, building organizational vision for data innovation strategy to drive business expansion
- AWS re-imagine Data, assisting with data migration and modernization to enable a strong cloud data foundation
Appendix
Further reading
Amazon Web Services’ secret weapon is its consultative approach (May 2022)
AWS with Amazon Q delivering business outcomes through the use of generative AI (January 2024)
Omdia Universe: Cloud Service Providers, 2024 (December 2023)
Author
Dominika Koncewicz, Principal Analyst, Cloud and Data Center
Siraj Aziz, Analyst, Cloud and Data Center
