Besides the sheer growth of AWS, what do you think has changed the most while you were at Tableau? Were you surprised by anything?
The number of customers who are now deeply deployed on AWS, deployed in the cloud, in a way that’s fundamental to their business and fundamental to their success surprised me. You can see it on paper and say, “Oh, the business has grown bigger, and that must mean there are more customers,” but the cloud and our relationship with these enterprises is now very much a C-suite agenda.
There was a time years ago where there were not that many enterprise CEOs who were well-versed in the cloud. Then you reached the stage where they knew they had to have a cloud strategy, and they were…asking their teams, their CIOs, “okay, do we have a cloud strategy?” Now, it’s actually something that they’re, in many cases, steeped in and involved in, and driving personally.
That’s just indicative of how much so many organizations are using the cloud now in every facet of their business — to run their core IT enterprise applications, of course, to do all sorts of new analytics, many of which involve machine learning now that there were never possible before, and then many, many end-customer applications as well.
It’s not just about deploying technology. The conversation that I most end up having with CEOs is about organizational transformation. It is about how they can put data at the center of their decision-making in a way that most organizations have never actually done in their history. And it’s about using the cloud to innovate more quickly and to drive speed into their organizations. Those are cultural characteristics, not technology characteristics, and those have organizational implications about how they organize and what teams they need to have. It turns out that while the technology is sophisticated, deploying the technology is arguably the lesser challenge compared with how do you mold and shape the organization to best take advantage of all the benefits that the cloud is providing.
https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/aws-adam-selipsky-cloud-reinvent