Video: How major cloud vendors stack up in 2018
At its recent AWS Summit in San Francisco, Amazon Web Services (AWS)[1] announced a series of new services and made a few services from Re:Invent Generally Available (GA), but the theme coming out at the conference was clearly on broadening its ability to accelerate your organization's digital innovation strategy[2].
While the core of this theme has been a key focus of AWS[3] since its beginning, what changed at the conference was the breadth of services it is offering that enable new innovations without having to train your staff on new, emerging skills[4], and its acknowledgement of the challenges CIO[5]s face in transitioning their staff to drive these innovations.
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These new aspects of this value theme came out strongly in CTO Werner Vogel's keynote speech, where a series of AI services were announced or GA'd that make it possible to pull insights from your data without having to write or even learn new algorithms, let alone focus on data deployment, scale, or management. Matt Wood, the AWS[7] GM for artificial intelligence[8], showed off several of the pre-trained models they announced at Re:Invent that automatically analyze data sets for location, name, language, and other factors. Two of these, Transcribe[9] and Translate[10] (English to Spanish), are now GA. Tools like these, when combined with their BI tool, QuickSight, enable rich data analysis with nearly no ML skills needed. Its ML family embraces data stored on AWS[11] or accessible via Direct Connect links,