AWS re:Invent—Innovation versus overload?: This week saw the Las Vegas Strip taken over by Amazon Web Services' re:Invent conference, which drew more than 40,000 attendees over several days of keynotes, sessions and in particular a slew of news announcements.
The company issued nearly two dozen press releases related to re:Invent, some of which covered multiple new services. And nearly all of AWS's new services for machine learning, container orchestration, databases and many other areas are available in preview, at a minimum. AWS may have its critics, but it would be hard for them to say it is selling vaporware.
AWS is delivering new features at a staggering speed in a bid to maintain its lead over Microsoft, Google, IBM and Oracle in the cloud. One question re:Invent 2017 seemed to raise is how much customers can comprehend, let alone consume.
Then there's the overall focus of the event's content. The past couple of re:Invent conferences heavily featured marquee customers such as General Electric discussing their journey to the AWS cloud. This year's edition featured some of that as well, but the emphasis seemed more on messaging to developers than painting a broad vision for enterprise IT leaders, notes Constellation VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller.
Still, on other fronts AWS used re:Invent as a launch pad for efforts aimed at getting a bigger piece of the enterprise pie. It previewed Enterprise Contract for AWS Marketplace, which is described as follows:
Enterprise Contract for AWS Marketplace is an agreed upon standardized contract template between enterprise software buyers and sellers that resolves challenging terms including liability, dispute resolution, IP protection, warranty, and more across multiple vendors. Participating customers using Enterprise Contract for AWS Marketplace are able to eliminate lengthy procurement negotiations that can delay projects for months.
The contract will be generally available in the first quarter of next year. Companies that are participating in the preview include AppDynamics, CA Technologies, NetApp and Trend Micro, among many others.
While AWS's partner program is growing quickly, and customers are certainly using ample amounts of third-party products on its platform, re:Invent's main focus was on AWS's own services. The key for AWS is to not just continue its torrid pace of innovation, but to make sure its new services work holistically and smoothly, lest customers who came to the cloud in search of simplicity and lower cost find themselves tangled in a kettle of "services spaghetti," as Constellation VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen puts it.
IOTA launches IoT data marketplace: There are hundreds of cryptocurrencies in existence today, but IOTA's entry is one of the most popular, with a market capitalization of about $3 billion. That may help explain why 20 prominent industrial and technology companies have joined up with blockchain startup IOTA on its new marketplace, which is aimed at monetizing data generated by Internet of Things devices. IOTA founder David Sønstebø paints a dramatic vision for the project:
While every filament of our digital zeitgeist is unequivocally telling us that data is the fuel of the future, there is an important distinction: unlike oil, which is finite and whose properties are well known in terms of what it can produce (and pollute), data is for all practical purposes limitless.
On the one hand, data wants to be free in the sense that its storage and transmission costs less and less over time; on the other hand, large quantities of data are extremely valuable and are not free to generate. These diametrically opposed conditions cause a gridlock that needs to be broken in order for Big Data to become truly big. A major cause of this is the fact that, while data sharing is becoming cheaper from a technological perspective, it is prohibitively expensive to sell fine, granular data in real-time due to intermediary fees — not to mention all the red tape one has to cut through in order to complete a single data purchase. These conditions make real-time data trade all but impossible.
IOTA's cryptocurrency technology, Tangle, is similar in theme to a blockchain distributed database, but has a different implementation approach. The company is banking that IOTA can support a marketplace where IoT data can be sold securely, quickly and cheaply. Microsoft, Fujitsu, Accenture, Bosch, Orange and Schneider Electric are among companies who have signed up for a pilot program that will run over the next two months.
Privacy would seem to be a major stumbling block for any large-scale IoT data marketplace. IOTA's announcement only briefly touches on this aspect:
The final result of the data marketplace will be a public report including several case studies that go into detail on the potential and the barriers we will face when rolling out a marketplace in full-scale production. Major emphasis will be dedicated to the impact of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on the planned future live data marketplace.
GDPR is a sweeping consumer data protection measure. It has serious teeth and will surely put IOTA's plans to the test. Watch this space.