Four times Andy Jassy went for the jugular at AWS re:Invent

Old favourite Oracle was joined by Microsoft, Donald Trump and even some partners in the CEO’s firing line at this year's event

Amazon Web Services (AWS) held its annual re:Invent conference this week in Las Vegas and CEO Andy Jassy didn't hold back during his numerous appearances through the event.

When discussing modernisation during his keynote, Jassy took the opportunity to make a few jabs at its rivals IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, the latter for which he reserved his biggest gripes.

We guide you through the recipients of the CEO's most jagged barbs.

Microsoft

Satya Nadella's ears must have been glowing red when Jassy berated the tech titan during his opening keynote.

While discussing modernisation, Jassy talked about commercial-grade databases, throwing an expected insult at Oracle, but really letting loose on AWS' closest competitor in the cloud market, Microsoft Azure.

"We don't meet customers that aren't looking to flee Oracle, but one of the things that we've seen over the last couple years is [that] people are trying to get away from SQL Server pretty quickly as well," he told his audience.

"One of the reasons is that you see this return to the ways of old from Microsoft, where they're not prioritising what matters to you guys and to customers.

"For many years, you were able to take the SQL Server licences that you bought yourself and run it where you wanted to. One day, Microsoft decided that they didn't want to let you do that. Was it good for you? Hell no. Is it good for Microsoft? Maybe."

He used the opportunity to tout Amazon Aurora, which allows users to run databases on open engines and is comparable to commercial-grade counterparts. Aurora was launched in 2015 and continues to be the fastest-growing service in Amazon's history, Jassy added.

"People are sick and tired of being pawns in this game and it's why they are moving as fast as they can to the open engines like MySQL and MariaDB," he declared.

"To get the performance that you need for these open engines that compares well to these commercial-grade databases is hard and takes a lot of work. It's why you asked us…to give you a database option that works on open engines and is comparable to the commercial-grade databases."

But it was when talking about Windows migration to Linux operating system that Jassy really let loose on Microsoft.

Citing statistics from IDC suggesting that by 2020, 80 per cent of workloads will be deployed on Linux and that it's growing four times faster than Windows, the chief exec offered his thoughts on why this may be the case.

"First, people don't want to pay the tax anymore for Windows, particularly when they know the price goes up frequently," he stated.

"Second, there is such a vibrant community around Linux that all the features happen much quicker there.

"Finally, people aren't so keen to have one owner of an operating system, especially when they are prone to raise prices - which happens a lot - or change the licensing terms."

This was a veiled reference to Microsoft changing its rules earlier this year to state that users could be punished financially for choosing to run Windows Server in non-Azure clouds if they purchased software licences after 1 October 2019.

"Fifty-seven per cent of Windows in the cloud runs on AWS. Now the company that owns that operating system maybe is not so crazy about that, so they just decided to change their licensing rules and said new versions of Windows cannot run on dedicated instances in other cloud providers - they are trying to stranglehold those workloads back to their platform," he said.

IBM/Oracle

When organisations decide to undertake a whole business transformation, it is often the chance for them to overhaul everything - including the technology and suppliers they use, according to Jassy.

"When you're making this transformation and you make the decision to make this big move…there's another thing you have to think through: What are the things you're going to take with you and what are the things you're going to leave behind?" he asked the audience.

"When you make that decision to modernise, you have to decide for yourself what you're going to bring and it's a little like moving from home."

He then projected a slide of a moving van full of Amazon Prime boxes, with boxes labelled ‘Oracle' and ‘IBM' discarded beside the vehicle.

"It turns out that when companies are making this big transformation, what we see is that all bets are off - they reconsider everything," he said, not referring to the vendors by name.

"Companies are trying to move away from mainframes as quickly as they can because they're expensive, slow, complicated and hardly anyone has mainframe skills anymore."

Donald Trump

The long-running saga concerning the $10bn (£7.6bn) Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) contract with the Pentagon in the US took another turn last week.

IBM and Oracle were both ousted from the race earlier this year, each taking legal action to challenge the decision. In October, Microsoft Azure was chosen over frontrunner AWS for the contract, leading the latter to also take legal action to contest the decision.

During a press conference at re:Invent, Jassy was outspoken as to why he believed the market leader lost out to Azure, stating that "significant political influence" was involved in the decision.

"I think it's fairly obvious that we feel pretty strongly that it was not adjudicated fairly," he told reporters.

"If you do a truly objective detailed apples-to-apples comparison of the platforms, you don't end up in a spot where that decision was made."

Though he did not name Donald Trump, he directly referred to the ongoing feud between the US president and Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Wall Street Journal, which is often critical of Trump.

"We have a sitting president who is willing to share openly his disdain for a company and the leader of that company," said the CEO.

"It makes it really difficult for government agencies including the Department of Defence to make an objective decision without fear of reprisal."

Partners (kind of)

Speaking to global channel boss Doug Yeum on stage the following day, Jassy reiterated his comments from the previous day that transformation must be lead from the top, and that is as true for partners as it is for customers.

He said that partners have to make "prioritisation" key to their processes and that being a jack-of-all-trades is no longer sufficient in an increasingly fragmented industry and that partners need to decide what they are going to specialise in and implement that policy at all levels of the business.

"If you want to do something well and [be] one of the best in the world, you can't do everything," he told the audience of partners.

"When people present you a choice of ‘do you want to do these three or four things equally' and you say yes, you're not making a choice. In fact, the prioritisation decision you're making is not to prioritise.

"If you try to be good at everything, you usually end up being mediocre at everything."