In order to build the right innovation and reinvention culture, Andy Jassy who is the CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is offering five keys to help enterprises unlock digital transformation and begin their Cloud journey during the pandemic. The first, according to him, is that you have to have the leadership will to invent and reinvent.
“People often say invention is inventing a new product or service and reinvention is reimagining an existing concept. But if you’re going to reinvent and reimagine, there’s a load of the invention in there. Just look at what Airbnb has done in the hospitality space,” Jassy said during the keynote that kicked off AWS re Invent 2020 virtual conference on Tuesday.
The second key is to acknowledge that you can’t fight gravity. If you step back and have the conviction that something is going to change because it’s a better experience for customers, it is going to change no matter what.
“If you look at what Reed Hastings and Netflix did several years ago, where they cannibalize their own DVD rental business because they saw where it was headed with streaming, I think that turned out to be a pretty good decision for them,” Jassy mentioned.
According to him, the third key is that you got to make sure you have talent that’s hungry to invent.
“You have to make sure that you’ve got builders who are curious about learning, who are excited about leaning forward and inventing and reinventing their customer experience,” he said. The fourth key is to have people who actually solve problems.
“If you look in the enterprise technology space, there are some players who are competitor-focused. They look at what their competitors are doing. They try to fast follow one-up them,” Jassy said during the digital keynote.
“Then you have a number of other providers who are product-focused”. The fifth key is speed.
“Speed disproportionally matters at every stage of your business, and in every sized company,” the AWS CEO noted.
One of the enemies of speed is complexity. “You have to make sure that you win over complexity,” he added. Jassy said that whether it is computed, storage, database, analytics, machine learning, IoT, or robotics, “you get a lot more functionality natively on AWS than anywhere else”.
“We have a much broader partner ecosystem than other players,” he added.
