Dubai: The most disruptive businesses in the Middle East are powered and built up from the cloud, Dr Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com, said in his keynote speech.
“Digital acceleration can create new opportunities and extolled entrepreneurs to work on things that truly differentiate their businesses,” he said.
He quoted examples of Careem, Anghami and Fetchr in the region and highlighted the Amazon.com story — how a company grew from a bookstore to one of the world’s fastest growing enterprise IT provider.
- Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com
“The advantages of moving to the cloud are agility, cost savings, breath of services, secure and global infrastructure,” he said.
Vogels said he was excited to announce that the company was building a presence in the Middle East, which would allow it to harness the power of technology to create a rich featured infrastructure platform for start-ups and big businesses in the region.
Today, he said, Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides the broadest range of cloud instance types to support a wide variety of workloads.
“Customers have the ability to choose the right instance for the right workload and it enables them to operate more efficiently and go to market faster, which is why we continue to innovate to better support any workload,” he said.
AWS is adding new capabilities daily. He said that in 2016, Amazon added 1,017 capabilities compared to 722 in 2015 and 516 in 2014.
“We have been doing machine learning for a long time and many of our customers are doing it. There will not be many organisations that do deep learning themselves. It is science and require specialists. Voice is going to become the most important interface for digital systems,” he said.
Many of our customers will be consuming AI services for higher-level services, he added, and we see a great demand for these services among our customers.
