OREANDA-NEWS. October 23, 2015. The cloud gives businesses “freedom and control over their own destiny.” That’s what Andy Jassy, senior vice president, Amazon Web Services (AWS), told 19,000 participants and 38,000 streaming video viewers at the recent AWS re:Invent 2015 conference in Las Vegas.

This freedom translates into AWS’ ability to enable developers to build applications “unfettered,” with greater speed and agility. AWS offers access to a thousand of its servers in 11 global regions, with two new regions to be announced next year. And AWS adds new capabilities every year, including more than 500 new features in 2015. It’s really no wonder that AWS holds nearly 30% of the cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market.

We had a number of our Solutions Architects (SAs) on the ground at AWS re:Invent attending sessions, talking to customers, and witnessing the positive reaction to the Equinix/Nimbo announcement of AWS Direct Connect Converged Infrastructure bundles and Equinix Cloud Exchange enablement solutions. Pragnesh Panchal, our SA from the San Francisco Bay area commented on the increased number of companies coming to our booth this year from last, and immediately recognized us saying, “I know Equinix. Please help me solve my scenario.”

Here are some more takeaways from the conference:

Tobias Quaranta, our SA from New York City, reported from the AWS partner keynote that the funding and benefits to the AWS partner ecosystem will double. However, these benefits are not totally “unfettered.” AWS is adding third-party audits to its Managed Service Program to insure that its partners are offering higher-level services. Nimbo, our cloud professional services arm, was cited in this session as a superior AWS partner ̶ without their help the Hess Corporation cloud deployment would not have been so successful.

Klaas Mertens, our SA from Germany, attended a session on AWS Channels and Alliances, which focused on quick-start templates that can bring up services such as various Microsoft offerings (i.e., SharePoint, Exchange, etc.) in minutes. The Equinix/Nimbo AWS Direct Connect bundles were mentioned in this session, causing the lines of attendees to the following AWS Direct Connect session, given by Matt Lehwess an AWS Solution Architect, to stretch down the hallway. According to Klaas, Lehwess’ session was totally packed. Lehwess used Equinix most often in his partner examples and described best practices for AWS Direct Connect, including eliminating single points of failures and using multiple AWS direct connects to connect to multiple cloud instances.

Gene McColm, our SA from Seattle, attended sessions where customer use cases illustrated how enterprises are going all-in with AWS and phasing out corporate data centers. General Electric (GE) CIO Jim Fowler talked about going down from 34 to four data centers. The four data centers will only house their “secret sauce,” including data and intelligence that will be supported by a hybrid cloud. GE runs 50% of its core applications on AWS today and has seen a 52% reduction in its total cost of ownership. Moving forward, GE will be moving 60% of its global workload to AWS in order to scale and deploy its applications much quicker.

That brings us to the Internet of Things (IoT), where AWS sees the future. Our SAs attended multiple sessions where AWS technical leaders introduced many new IoT solutions, including the AWS IoT cloud service that supports billions of connected devices and simplifies building IoT apps. AWS sees IoT as a game changer for mobile, enterprise, big data, marketing, life sciences and health, but adds that it won’t be successful unless businesses can securely consume, analyze and market IoT data.

Watch this space for a follow-up to this AWS re:Invent wrap-up, in which Equinix Solutions Architect J.P. Doolin will discuss Amazon CTO Werner Vogels’ presentation, “6 design laws Amazon’s CTO thinks you should know.”