Las Vegas bound: What’s next for AWS reInvent 2022 in Las Vegas?

A few days after Thanksgiving, my flight to Las Vegas will take me to the largest gathering of AWS professionals in the world. There are approximately 50K people attending the 11 th anniversary celebration of re:Invent. I look forward to meeting some of the most intelligent people in the industry, engaging in conversation with clients, and hearing the soft roar of people connecting again. I will be there along with the Accenture AWS Business Group, and other Accenture employees. Our busy schedules include meetings with clients, keynote sessions with big thinkers, taking in eye-popping innovations, and getting about 25k steps per day. There is always so much happening at reInvent and we expect even more this year. Here’s a list of hot topics I expect to see at re:Invent and areas where my focus will be. Cost reduction and value realization I anticipate companies seeking new ways to innovate this year, and doing it faster, more efficiently, and cheaper. The economy is now the driving force for business transformation in 2020. COVID-19 was the catalyst for this change. COVID-19 gave companies a glimpse of how quickly they could transform and they now see the need for enterprise-wide transformation to achieve total enterprise reinvention. They will be searching for the constant technology innovation and value AWS offers, as well as new tools, platforms and approaches that can help them get further and faster. Based on a survey of 2,000 executives from 15 industries, our report Zero-Based Transformation: The Big Reset found that leaders have realized that costs are not just an annual budgeting exercise. Leaders can start with a zero-based technology-based approach to reimagine and reset their cost bases. This will allow them to free up funds for their strategic priorities, drive growth, strengthen resilience, and better serve stakeholder needs. How can companies ensure they are getting great ROI on their cloud investments? How can they make sure they get the most out of their cloud investments? How can they make the most of cloud computing? We expect a lot more this year at reInvent. We’ll be discussing Tuesday afternoon, in collaboration with Merck, a life sciences company, how to show the enterprise value cloud. Merck, Accenture, and AWS came up with a way to calculate Merck’s cloud-based value by dividing the number of applications that were retired, modified, or migrated. This has strengthened Merck’s modernization agenda and allowed for new capabilities to improve business innovation and patient impact. We will host an Executive Summit roundtable called “Sky High Value in the Cloud” on Wednesday. This roundtable will discuss how to maximize business value through cloud economics beyond cost reduction. It will also include optimization of culture and accountability. Efficiency and cost optimization are also key aspects of increasing developer productivity. Come hear Capital One’s Wednesday afternoon presentation on this topic. It will discuss how to increase productivity within the software engineering department. Capital One is using our software development services to align their software development with business goals and budgets. We are helping them unlock productivity and lower costs. This also speeds up the development of customer features. Solutions specific to your industry Accenture and AWS will offer more pre-built solutions for industry that can accelerate a company’s ability to transform, and increase its value. These solutions enable our clients to realize new efficiencies and new revenue sources leveraging data, AI, ML innovations and agility from the Edge. We are increasing our investments in traditional IaaS and partnering with other companies to offer pre-built solutions that can be used for specific functions and industries within the Cloud Continuum. On Tuesday afternoon, for example, we will present our “intelligent Underwriting” solution to the Insurance industry. By delivering powerful industry-contextualized features embedded in AWS services, we’re opening up new sources of value for customers, agents, brokers and carriers. Sustainability For a better sustainability impact, industry solutions can be a catalyst. Sustainability is an increasingly important topic for clients, our businesses, and the wider world. This is an area that interests me personally and will be covered extensively this year. We see developers beginning to make sustainability-conscious decisions about the systems and applications they are building. They are exploring new cloud architectures that optimize both for the planet and the end users. Ecopetrol, a Colombian oil company, will also be presenting with us on Wednesday afternoon. They are demonstrating their digital water management system. The solution is focused on increasing water reuse and recirculation to reduce overall consumption. It optimizes energy use and water management costs and predicts water demand within operations. Summarising You can see that AWS Re:Invent has a lot to offer this year. You know what I am looking forward to. But what about you? What are you most excited about? I would love to hear from your. You can reach me via LinkedIn, or you can find me in Vegas!