12 Dec AWS CTO Vogels: ‘We’re in the pain management business’
AWS CTO Werner Vogels is still a commanding figure on the stage at AWS ReInvent customer and developer conference, gesturing emphatically, intoning cloud axioms with an unselfconscious hint of a Dutch accent and sounding more authoritative because of it.
That he believes in what he’s doing and remains the guiding hand behind Amazon Web Services’ rapid development of new services few would doubt.
The cloud is not just a business but a social good. “The cloud has completely democratized access to IT resources. Everybody has access to the same scale of compute, storage and networking,” he starts out. Established companies with their big data centers have much less of an inherent advantage; a startup with a good idea can launch it and support it for a large customer base quickly, still paying only for the computing they use.
On another point, “Data is the competitive differentiator. The quality of data and the questions you are able to ask of the data have become the major differentiator among companies.