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Las Vegas bound: What’s ahead for AWS re:Invent 2022?

5-MINUTE READ

November 18, 2022

Just a couple of days after Thanksgiving, I’ll be hopping on a plane to Las Vegas to attend the largest gathering of AWS experts in the world—about 50K people expected at the 11th anniversary of re:Invent. I’m looking forward to being there with some of the smartest people in the industry, engaging with our clients, the soft roar of people connecting once again, and the constant chatter about what’s new in the industry. 

I’ll be there with our Accenture AWS Business Group and wider Accenture team. We all have jam-packed calendars with meetings that start early and end late—meeting with clients, attending keynote sessions with big thinkers and big ideas, seeing eye-popping innovations and getting in about 25k steps a day.

There’s always so much going on at re:Invent, and this year we expect no less. If you’re looking for a way to navigate the conference, here’s a quick list of the hot topics that I think we’ll see and the areas that will get my focus.

Cost reduction and value realization

This year I expect to see companies looking for new ways to innovate and do it faster, smarter, cheaper. In 2020, the driver for business transformation was COVID-19 and now it’s the economy. During COVID-19, companies got a taste of how fast they could transform, and now they see the need to do it across the enterprise to effect total enterprise reinvention. They’ll be looking for value from the continual technology evolution and innovations AWS is known for, and for new tools, applications, platforms, and approaches to help them go further, faster.

Our report, Zero-Based Transformation: The Big Reset, based on a global survey of 2,000 C-level executives across 15 industries, found that leaders are realizing that they can no longer look at costs as just an annual budgeting exercise. By starting with a zero-based approach rooted in technology, leaders can reimagine their businesses, reset their cost bases, and free up funds for strategic priorities that drive growth, build resilience and better meet stakeholder needs. 

But how do companies know they’re getting a great ROI from their cloud investments? How do they ensure they not only yield cloud value from their technology decisions but also from their most important resource: their talent? How do they best change, operate and live in the cloud? 

There’s always so much going on at re:Invent, and this year we expect no less.

In collaboration with our client, life sciences company Merck, we’ll be talking Tuesday afternoon about how to demonstrate the enterprise value of cloud. Merck, Accenture and AWS figured out a way to calculate the value Merck gained by driving their journey to the cloud against the number of applications retired, modernized or migrated. This has reinforced the modernization agenda across Merck and helped to drive new capabilities for business innovation and meaningful patient impact. On Wednesday, we will host a roundtable at the Executive Summit called “Sky high value in the cloud,” where we’ll talk about how to maximize business value by looking at cloud economics beyond cost reduction, including optimization, culture and accountability.

Increasing developer productivity is also a key aspect of efficiency and cost optimization. On that topic, come hear our presentation with Capital One on Wednesday afternoon about achieving greater productivity across the software engineering organization. We’re helping Capital One unlock productivity and reduce costs across their company by aligning software development to business goals and budgets. This has the additional benefit of speeding development of new customer features.

Industry-specific solutions

You’ll see more pre-built industry solutions from Accenture and AWS that accelerate a company’s ability to transform and yield value more quickly. These solutions help our clients realize new efficiencies, new sources of revenue leveraging data, AI and ML innovations, new agility from the Edge, and new customer experiences. We are doubling down with investments in the traditional IaaS space and also partnering to offer pre-built solutions for specific industries and functions across the Cloud Continuum. For example, on Tuesday afternoon, we’ll be presenting our “intelligent underwriting” solution for the Insurance industry. By delivering powerful industry-contextualized features embedded in AWS services, we’re opening up new sources of value for customers, agents, brokers and carriers.

Sustainability

Industry solutions can be a catalyst for enabling better sustainability impact. Increasingly, sustainability is becoming table stakes for our clients, for our own business, for communities and for the world at large. It is a personal interest of mine and one I believe will receive a great deal of coverage this year. We see developers beginning to make sustainability-conscious decisions about the systems and applications they are building. They’re trying out new approaches to cloud architectures that optimize for the needs of the planet as well as the needs of end users. 

We’ll also be co-presenting on Wednesday afternoon with Ecopetrol, a Colombian energy company, on their first-of-its-kind digital water management solution. This solution focuses on maximizing the reuse and recirculation of water to decrease overall usage. It also optimizes energy consumption and costs related to water management and predicts the supply and demand of water within operations.

Summing up

As you can see, there is so much to expect from AWS re:Invent this year. Now you know what I’m looking forward to, but what about you? What are you most looking forward to? I’d love to hear from you. You can contact me through LinkedIn or you can look me up in Vegas! 

P.S. If you don’t find me where I am supposed to be, it’s because I have snuck away to watch Ghana play at the FIFA 2022 World Cup! #blackstarsalltheway

WRITTEN BY

Andy Tay

Global Lead – Cloud First