Within Europe, the Benelux is an important region for Amazon Web Services (AWS), we hear from Danielle Gorlick. In a conversation with us, the new (since January 2024) General Manager for the Benelux region explains why this is so. We also elaborate on how AWS wants to help solve the shortage of good staff and look at the state of hybrid cloud and sovereign clouds.
The public cloud is becoming increasingly layered. The simple subdivisions of the past no longer apply. Back then, there were specific pigeonholes into which you could subdivide AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, IBM Cloud and so on. In such a subdivision, AWS was then often the most popular cloud with developers, Azure was labeled SaaS, GCP stood out for its focus on AI, OCI on databases and IBM on specific verticals such as banking.
However, this kind of pigeonholing is becoming increasingly difficult. For example, AI plays a crucial role on all cloud platforms and the verticalization trend is also becoming more widely visible. In addition, public clouds also seem to be drifting closer and closer together. This became clear recently when AWS CEO Matt Garman stood on the stage of Oracle CloudWorld, together with Oracle founder Larry Ellison. This was to announce the strategic collaboration between the two former sworn enemies. Oracle’s databases, which run on OCI, will soon be in AWS data centers in order to better serve joint customers.
Despite the somewhat blurred lines between cloud players, there is still plenty to say about the individual parties involved, of course. That’s why we were happy to talk with Danielle Gorlick. Gorlick has been with AWS for 11 years, but has been the general manager for the Benelux region since the beginning of this year. AWS has several large customers in this region, including ANWB, Booking.com, DPG, Hema, KBC, Nationale Nederlanden, NXP and Rabobank. Reason enough to get an update on developments in the Benelux (and Europe) and AWS’ plans for these regions.
Benelux is important for AWS
There may be ‘only’ so-called Local Zones/Edge Locations in Amsterdam and Brussels available for the Benelux and not a full-fledged cloud region, but that does not mean that our region is unimportant for AWS. On the contrary, “Benelux is one of the larger regions in EMEA. This region is already very far along when it comes to the adoption of cloud services and is ahead of other European regions,” according to Gorlick.
The list of customers we mentioned above also seems to back up Gorlick’s assertion above. That is, if those kinds of companies become customers, they take AWS seriously. And that’s only possible if AWS also takes the region seriously. Of course, those customers can also just go to AWS’ nearest cloud region in Frankfurt or Dublin, especially for workloads that don’t necessarily require the very lowest latencies. They probably do. That is, those customers probably have most of their workloads in Frankfurt and/or Dublin. They only use the Local Zones for specific tasks that require less than 10 milliseconds of latency.
Gorlick sees that Dutch companies, in particular, don’t seem to have a huge attachment to a local cloud region anyway. According to her, this is largely due to the mindset: “Dutch companies tend to think globally.” Then the presence of a full-fledged cloud region in the Netherlands is not that important at all. In other countries, such as Spain or Germany, people think much more within their own borders.
AWS is more than just technology
The main focus of this article is on AWS’ technology. However, the main challenge that AWS sees in the market, especially now with the strong rise of (Gen)AI, has little to do with technology. “When I speak to customers, the obstacles in terms of AI have nothing to do with technology, but with culture,” according to Gorlick. How do you provide the right culture, processes and skills to keep up? According to her, only eight percent of organizations can find the right people.
AWS wants to address the shortage of the right people with the right skills. In 2020, the company announced that it would train/educate 29 million people worldwide for free over five years. In July of this year, it announced that this goal had already been met. 31 million people have already been provided with training over the past 4.5 years.
AWS has reached the 31 million people through multiple programs and initiatives. One is the free courses it offers through AWS Skill Builder. There is also AWS re/Start, a 12-14 week program to help people get their first job in cloud computing. Obviously, this is all about teaching the basics, but it can be just the push people need. Finally, there is also AWS Educate, where people can find hundreds of hours of learning materials to get started at their own pace.
It’s definitely good that AWS, as one of the biggest players, is taking responsibility for not only providing the technology, but also actively working to make sure it has enough qualified staff. It benefits from this too, of course. After all, without the right people, organizations cannot deploy new technologies either. That’s not a bad thing at all and only makes sense from AWS’s perspective. Ultimately, it has to deliver value for AWS, customers and the employees of those customers. That seems to be the case this way.
A sovereign cloud after all
Looking beyond the borders of the Benelux, it is striking that AWS has been investing a lot in Europe lately. The company has made substantial investments in Germany and Spain, among other countries. These are not entirely coincidentally countries that tend to look a bit more within their own borders. In addition, of course, it simply pays for AWS to invest there, because the market there has the necessary potential.
More interesting than the investments in individual countries is the investment of just under $8 billion in a European Sovereign Cloud. A sovereign cloud did not seem to be on AWS’s roadmap for a long time. Two years ago at AWS re:Inforce, Amazon CSO Steve Schmidt said in a conversation with us that sovereign clouds are mostly marketing vehicles. The architecture of the AWS cloud is already sovereign of itself. This is partly due to the way the Nitro hypervisor is built. Once customers deploy it, there is no way AWS can access it. That doesn’t necessarily require the term sovereign cloud, was the point Schmidt wanted to make.
Why a sovereign cloud?
Whether Schmidt was and is completely right we’ll leave for a moment here. In any case, Gorlick repeats the “sovereign by design” claim in our conversation. Nevertheless, there will now be a true European Sovereign Cloud from AWS. Gorlick immediately admits that it has taken a bit longer than other players on the market. According to her, that was because AWS wanted to get it right the first time: “As things became clearer, we were able to give customers the assurance that they could get all the features in the same stable and scalable way.”
So it seems AWS didn’t necessarily want to jump on the sovereign cloud train at first. Ultimately, however, this company does what customers want. Explicit sovereignty may only be needed for a small percentage of customers’ workloads, as Gorlick also points out, but AWS wants and needs to be able to deliver that. “It gives the public sector in particular more options,” according to her. The rise of GenAI also plays an important role in this. More and more organizations want to use that, but it requires a lot of compute. If this can be deployed in a sovereign way, it will be available to more organizations.
Also read: AWS never talks about sovereign cloud, but definitely has it, says Amazon CSO
Many customers still in hybrid mode
During the initial rise of and hype surrounding the public cloud, it seemed like the cloud was going to completely replace on-prem infrastructure. At least that was the message propagated by providers of public cloud infrastructure and services.
AWS, in our view, was the most outspoken about this. At a local AWS event about six years ago we sat down with a spokesperson who indicated that companies could and actually should migrate all workloads to the AWS cloud. The exact quote has escaped us, but the bottom line was that AWS could handle every workload imaginable, except for those required at CERN in Switzerland. The point the spokesperson wanted to make by saying this is that organizations could and should just migrate everything.
Of course, the above claims and statements are in large part marketing statements. That in itself is not a bad thing, it’s part of the game. However, they do give an impression of how a supplier views said game. On-prem was out of date, the message seemed to be. With that, there didn’t seem to be much room for hybrid cloud at AWS, either. While it had and has OutPosts as its technology for on-prem, it generally didn’t get a whole lot of attention. In itself, that made sense, because why pay very much attention to it when public cloud continues to grow very fast?
Hybrid cloud real, but for how long?
Yet Gorlick also sees that hybrid is still the reality: “We see that customers generally choose a primary cloud provider. Those customers then migrate most of their workloads there. But many customers are still in a hybrid mode.” As an example, she cites banks, which still use mainframes.
In the end, it’s all about what customers want, Gorlick points out. If they do not yet want to migrate en masse, then AWS should support that. That can then take the form of connectivity, for example. This will allow customers who still have significant amounts of workloads both in the cloud and on-prem to connect everything together properly.
Gorlick does express the expectation that “in the fullness of time” there will be less need for a hybrid approach. That, of course, is also what AWS wants to see happen. These days, however, we also hear stories from other players on the market who claim just the opposite. They claim that companies tend to go for a repatriation of workloads from the cloud to on-prem these days. This is because the private cloud, as on-prem is also often called, is catching up with public cloud in terms of features and functions. Often the cloud model also plays an important role here, by the way. That is, organizations can acquire on-prem technology and services according to a cloud model. Whether that’s still a truly on-prem offering is of course debatable. It’s definitely hybrid, though.
What can we expect from AWS in the near future?
On-prem may be getting more attention lately, but the public cloud continues to grow. All the figures that are publicly available show that. Of course, this does not mean that there is nothing left for AWS to do. In fact, in our opinion, AWS actually needs to make the necessary moves. It is the largest and most popular public cloud, but it needs to keep moving too.
AWS has always focused primarily on offering as many features and services as possible, but not so much on out-of-the-box products. It has started to focus more on that a few years ago with AWS Supply Chain. That is a solution that basically works out-of-the-box and can be deployed by customers in a specific vertical industry.
“The feedback from customers in recent years is that they want more solutions that are targeted to specific industries,” Gorlick points out. That, then, is what AWS is going to do. “We have 13 teams that each focus on a specific industry and have a lot of expertise. For example, we have people who have 30 years of experience in banking.” In other words, we can expect AWS to come out with more verticalized, ready-made, out-of-the-box solutions shortly. It’s one of the things we will look out for when we visit re:Invent later this year.
AWS in 2024: more in touch with the market than ever
For a long time, AWS had an image with us that it didn’t care much about what was going on in the rest of the market. To some extent, as a first mover in public cloud, that made sense. AWS more or less defined this new movement. The growth was there anyway. Why look outside your own bubble when there was still so much growth to realize inside it? AWS even came across as somewhat arrogant until a year or so ago. Several past statements we have cited in this article support that.
AWS in 2024, however, is substantially different. At least that’s our conclusion based on our conversation with Gorlick and all the other news coverage surrounding AWS. Hybrid cloud is at least temporarily granted a right to exist, a European sovereign cloud is now well and truly on the agenda, and there is more focus on off-the-shelf products that will allow AWS to compete with other cloud players in that area as well.
Add to this the fact that AWS has not only entered into a strategic partnership with Oracle, but is also collaborating and expanding with other (originally on-prem) players such as NetApp, and we are dealing with an AWS that has listened carefully to customers and knows exactly what they want and what is going on in the market. That may not produce the most interesting statements for us to quote in our stories. However, it does produce the best outcomes for customers. And in the end, that’s what it’s all about. Even one of the biggest players in the IT industry needs to listen to what customers want.