Amazon eyes industrial IoT to lift its cloud service

AWS architect Dr Werner Vogels sees IoT for the enterprise as the next multi-billion-dollar opportunity.

Amazon chief technology officer Dr Werner Vogels.

Refrigerators, toothbrushes and thermostats connected to the internet may be harbingers of the Internet of Things, but Amazon.com’s chief technology officer Werner Vogels is more excited about the impact of the trend in the enterprise space.

“Consumer IoT is getting a lot of attention, but the one thing that’s about to explode is industrial IoT, where enterprises are instrumenting every possible part of their organisation,” Dr Vogels said in a recent visit to Australia.

“Factory floors, supply chain, trucking, everything is becoming a data source and can be ­analysed.”

The end result of this level of connectivity is greater efficiency and, according to Dr Vogels, almost every company is becoming a software and analytics company. That trend implies a greater dependence on the cloud, which is music to the ears of Dr Vogels, the key architect of Amazon Web Services.

According to the latest research from IDC, AWS has not only held on to its position as the top infrastructure-as-a-­service provider in Asia-Pacific, but also managed to extend its lead over Microsoft, China’s AliCloud and Salesforce in the region.

AWS may have the first mover advantage, but public cloud is no longer a one-horse race. And with Oracle set to join the fray, the competition is heating up. The dawn of the IoT age means the market is big enough to sustain a number of big players, but Dr Vogels doesn’t see anyone catching up to AWS in a hurry.

He is confident that Jeff Bezos’s hit cloud play can’t be replicated by the likes of Microsoft and Oracle. While the technology can be replicated, Dr Vogels says AWS’s appeal is built on the way it pushes the boundaries on customer outcomes. “We are not worried about the one, two, three spots — if we can keep doing what we are doing with helping businesses move to the cloud, the rest will take care of itself.”

“In terms of growth of the cloud, I don’t think we have hit the hockey stick yet and even with some organisations opting to keep some things on premise the two, private and public cloud worlds, will coexist effectively,” Dr Vogels added.