McCoy at AWS Re:Invent 2015 in Las Vegas

As we announced in earlier articles, McCoy has sent a decent delegation to the United States to attend several of the biggest IT tech conferences in the world. After attending a couple of meetings in the Bay Area, we arrived at Las Vegas on Monday morning to register and to check into Amazon Web Services Re:Invent 2015.

On Tuesday we first attended the AWS Global Partner Summit. This event was meant to help partners understand the strong ecosystem even better and to further enable them in using, applying and of course selling AWS services to their customers. AWS has tens of thousands partners at the moment and it was really a surprise to see that McCoy was one of the very few to have proficient knowledge of ERP landscapes and Enterprise IT transformations. This is a key component to help organization transform their on premise and complex system landscapes to a simplified cloud architecture.

After the Global Partner Summit it was time for the real deal: almost 20.000 people were ready for the first key note of the conference. SVP Andy Jassy came on stage and welcomed us. He acknowledged partners and welcomed several customers to the stage. Huge companies like GE presented their strategy to go all-in with cloud and AWS, and Capital One (one of the biggest credit card providers and online banking companies in the US) explained how the cloud is more secure for their customers than previous on premise solutions.

The second keynote was hosted on Thursday and it is always a pleasure to see fellow Dutchman Dr. Werner Vogels keep a crowd of 20.000 people engaged for two hours. His energy and presenting skills are a guarantee for a great keynote. Of course all the huge announcements that Jassy and Vogels did were the main cause for everybody to leave the keynote room completely dazzled and happy. With 21 official new services and products, that are all available now or very soon, AWS is differentiating itself from other big IT players who often announce early and deliver a lot later.

We will get into detail of all the new services in a deep dive blog post later, but we are very excited by announcements like the new X1-instance type, the Database Migration Service and the very cool AWS IoT service. To conclude, we think it’s a big compliment to AWS that SAP decided to reveal their new solution called Cloud for Analytics (project Orca) earlier, because AWS stole their momentum with the amazing new product release of AWS Quicksight during Re:Invent 2015. With self service and intelligent visualization possibilities, an own in-memory engine (SPICE) and connectivity to several data sources this is a huge product release for AWS. More details and first hands-on experience to follow soon on this website.

All in all we were very impressed by Re:Invent 2015. Next to the 21 announcements and partner recognition, we attended a lot of the 250+ sessions and networked with global peers on cloud computing. We are directly applying our new knowledge at several customer projects and re looking forward to further enabling cloud transformations by using the AWS services.

Save the date: we will host a special event on December 1 st, where we will present more details about the topics we saw at Re:Invent 2015. We will welcome speakers from Amazon Web Services, McCoy & Partners and Software AG. So stay tuned for more details or send me a message if you would like to pre-register for the event.