To kick off the largest cloud conference of the year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Adam Selipsky delivered his opening keynote at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. Selipsky welcomed 50,000 in-person attendees and 300,000 virtual attendees from around the globe. He encouraged enterprises to move to the cloud, citing the dramatic cost savings it offers, which is critical in today’s world of economic uncertainty.

“The cloud is more cost-effective, and many customers are saving 30% or more,“ he said. “In times of uncertainty, it actually can be tempting to cut back and slow down, but when it comes to cloud, many of our customers know that they should be leaning in precisely because of economic uncertainty…if you’re looking to tighten your belt, the cloud is the place to do it.”

Selipsky gave some examples of companies that saved money by moving to the cloud. Carrier saved 40% in costs by migrating to AWS Cloud. Gilead saved $60 million, and AGCO has 78% lower costs in the cloud. He also mentioned how Airbnb was better able to weather the downturn in demand in the hospitality industry during the COVID-19 pandemic because they were an early adopter of the cloud, which allowed them to operate more efficiently and be more agile.

Selipsky went on to talk about more of the outcomes of moving to the cloud aside from the cost savings aspect:

“We are so passionate about what we do at AWS because we see what you are doing with the cloud,” he continued. “Enterprises look to the cloud to innovate in ways they haven’t been able to do before. Entrepreneurs bring their dreams to the cloud and change the future. Governments rely on the cloud to provide critical services to constituents. Financial services and pharmaceuticals, researchers and retailers, freight carriers, phone carriers, NGOs, energy firms, entertainment studios, the list goes on and on.”

Here are some of the big announcements that CEO Adam Selipsky made in his re:Invent keynote:

1. Amazon Redshift Integration for Apache Spark

If you are using AWS analytics and machine learning (ML) services—such as Amazon EMR, AWS Glue, and Amazon SageMaker—you can now build Apache Spark applications that read from and write to your Amazon Redshift data warehouse without compromising on the performance of your applications or transactional consistency of your data.

Read more about Perficient’s Amazon Redshift offering at Amazon Redshift Delivery Services / Perficient, Inc.

2. New Healthcare and Life Science Services

Amazon Omics is a new purpose-built service that helps healthcare and life science organizations store, query, and analyze genomic, transcriptomic, and other omics data and then generate insights from that data to improve health and advance scientific discoveries.

Learn more about some of the AWS Cloud use cases and solutions that Perficient already offers healthcare and life science organizations, AWS Cloud Solutions: Use Cases in Healthcare – Perficient Blogs

3. Amazon Aurora zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift

Amazon Aurora now supports zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift, to enable near real-time analytics and machine learning (ML) using Amazon Redshift on petabytes of transactional data from Aurora. Within seconds of transactional data being written into Aurora, the data is available in Amazon Redshift, so you don’t have to build and maintain complex data pipelines to perform extract, transform, and load ETL operations.

With near real-time access to transactional data, you can leverage Amazon Redshift’s analytics and capabilities such as built-in ML, materialized views, data sharing, and federated access to multiple data stores and data lakes to derive insights from transactional and other data.

4. Announcing Amazon OpenSearch Serverless

Amazon OpenSearch Service now offers a new serverless option, Amazon OpenSearch Serverless. This option simplifies the process of running petabyte-scale search and analytics workloads without having to configure, manage, or scale OpenSearch clusters. OpenSearch Serverless automatically provisions and scales the underlying resources to deliver fast data ingestion and query responses for even the most demanding and unpredictable workloads. With OpenSearch Serverless, you pay only for the resources consumed.

5. New Amazon Connect Features

Selipski had two announcements for Amazon Connect. First, Contact Lens for Amazon Connect now provides a set of agent performance evaluation capabilities that enable contact center managers to create evaluation forms with criteria (e.g, adherence to talk scripts or compliance with sensitive data collection practices) that can be scored using Contact Lens’ ML-powered conversational analytics. Managers can assess agent performance alongside contact details, recordings, transcripts, and summaries, without the need to switch applications. These capabilities allow managers to assess more agent/customer interactions while reducing the amount of time they spend identifying performance issues and coaching agents to perform their best.

Secondly, Amazon Connect agent workspace now provides a step-by-step experience that guides agents by identifying customer issues and recommending subsequent actions. With Amazon Connect, you can create workflows that walk agents through custom UI pages that suggest what to do at a given moment during a customer interaction. Detailed step-by-step guides increase agent productivity and decrease training time.

Interested in learning more about Perficient’s Amazon Connect capabilities, learn more at our web page Perficient Amazon Connect / Perficient, Inc.

6. AWS Sustainability

Selipsky highlighted Amazon’s sustainability efforts as well, sharing that Amazon is now the world’s largest purchaser of renewable energy with a goal of being 100% renewable by 2025. He also mentioned Amazon’s goal of being water positive by 2030 – i.e. returning more water into the system than Amazon consumes.

Perficient + AWS

Perficient is a certified Amazon Web Services partner with more than 10 years of experience delivering enterprise-level applications and expertise in cloud platform solutions, contact center, application modernization, migrations, data analytics, mobile, developer and management tools, IoT, serverless, security, and more. Paired with our industry-leading strategy and team, Perficient is equipped to help enterprises tackle the toughest challenges and get the most out of their implementations and integrations. To learn more, check out our AWS Partner Page Amazon Web Services Trusted Partner / Perficient, Inc.