'Public cloud is now more a question of how, not why' - AWS bosses on UK growth

AWS returned to London to host its 2022 summit

"It's great to see the community come back together", is how one partner described AWS' first London conference since coronavirus hit the UK in early 2020.

Indeed, the atmosphere was vibrant, with thousands of people packing into the ExCel centre to hear what AWS is doing to benefit partners and customers around the globe.

Attendees got the opportunity to take part in breakout sessions discussing a range of topics such as how to build a business for the cloud, while there were opportunities to speak to vendors and partners who had set up stalls at the event.

"It's great to be back together," Tanaz Gould, consultancy practice director at Claranet, a Premier-level AWS Consulting partner, told CRN.

"It's great to see the community come back together and meet people that we haven't seen for a couple of years. The energy is good and we are really enjoying it."

Keynotes were held during the morning, with analytics and business intelligence VP Dr Matt Wood and vice president of AWS UK and Ireland Darren Hardman among those giving speeches.

The discussions revolved around how AWS is helping its partners and customers as more people move to the cloud. As Wood put it, today conversations are about "how do I move to the cloud" instead of "why should I".

And Wood said that to meet the needs of people, AWS has over 200 services available, ranging from compute to storage to databases.

"The reason we do that is, once you're in the door at AWS, you really don't want any barriers between your idea which could be the next transformative idea for your organisation, or the next transformative idea for your own customers," he said.

"As we grow the AWS capabilities, one of the things we hear time and time again is that customers base their decision on cloud platform deeply on the broadest and deepest service capabilities.

"This broad set of capabilities allows you to just follow your nose, it allows you to satisfy your curiosity as to whether your idea has legs quickly, cheaply, and then take it out to whatever size scale your customers demand."

Hardman added that AWS plans to invest more than £1.8bn in the next two years to build and operate data centres in the UK.

He said: "This includes investments in skills and training and sustainability areas that are increasingly relevant for customers in the context of cloud adoption.

"This investment is important because we know there's a huge opportunity for businesses to embrace the benefits of the cloud and to level up cloud adoption across the country.

"For example, if we could boost cloud prevalence in the northeast to match that in London, we would help increase local productivity and wages to the tune of £1.4bn and that's just one region."

Hardman added that AWS is committed to investing hundreds of millions of dollars to provide free cloud training globally.

"This includes a number of programmes, such as AWS educate, AWS Academy at AWS restart," he said.

Gould said that AWS is "undoubtedly" one of the top three global hyperscalers and plays an important role in Claranet's operations.

She said: "We are fully aligned with the direction AWS is going and we are quite excited about the things that are coming up.

"I think for us it is really interesting to go a bit deeper in some specific vertical areas. We have had really good conversations with AWS around particular solution areas that I'm certain we will further invest in. What we have also seen is that there is quite a bit of interest around green ops which is something we are working on launching in the coming months.

"AWS is undoubtedly one of the top three global hyperscalers and we are a company that supports customers on their transformation journey and AWS is a super important part of that."