Google outlines performance of Willow quantum chip, highlights roadmap

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Google launched its latest quantum chip called Willow with strong error correction improvements and outlined its roadmap for quantum computing.

In a blog post, Google outlined Willow, which can reduce errors as it scales up using more qubits. Google called the advance a breakthrough that will make quantum systems more reliable.

According to Google, Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under 5 minutes and outpaces today's fastest supercomputers by "10 septillion years." Google rated Willow on the random circuit sampling (RCS) benchmark.

Willow is part of Google's 10-year effort to build out its quantum AI operations. The company said Willow moves it along the path to commercially relevant applications.

Google's news is just part of a flurry of announcements that have landed in recent days.

• IonQ outlined a rewrite of its original quantum operating system with IonQ Quantum OS and a set of hybrid services.
• AWS announced its Quantum Embark Program, an advisory service to help customers get ready for quantum computing without long-term commitments.
• AWS also said it is better integrating its Braket quantum computing platform with Nvidia's CUDA-Q platform. The effort between AWS and Nvidia is aimed at hybrid systems that include classical high-performance computing and quantum computing.

Google said its approach is to focus on the quantity of qubits while scaling.

• Quantum Computing Platforms
• Quantum Computing Software Platforms
• Quantum Full Stack Players

"We’re focusing on quality, not just quantity — because just producing larger numbers of qubits doesn’t help if they’re not high enough quality. With 105 qubits, Willow now has best-in-class performance across the two system benchmarks discussed above: quantum error correction and random circuit sampling. Such algorithmic benchmarks are the best way to measure overall chip performance."

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• Quantum computing all in on hybrid HPC with classical computing
• Classiq CEO Minerbi on the intersection of quantum computing, HPC and use cases
•  IonQ’s bet on commercial quantum computing working, acquires Quibitekk | IonQ's quantum computing bets: Quantum for LLM training, chemistry and enterprise use cases
• IBM upgrades IBM Quantum Data Center with Heron
• IBM Boosts the Software Side of Quantum
• Quantinuum, Microsoft claim quantum reliability breakthrough
• Microsoft claims hybrid quantum breakthrough with Quantinuum, partners with Atom Computing
• Quantinuum raises $300 million, valued at $5 billion
• Quantum Brilliance, Oak Ridge National Laboratory aims to meld quantum computing, HP

 

Rivals up pressure on VMware for enterprise migrations

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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The list of VMware rivals trying to poach workloads is swelling and recent days highlight how vendors are stepping up the pressure.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri said that customers are interested in its HPE VM Essentials product line as they look to manage virtualization across HPE, VMware and other players.

"Customers are also asking us to help them simplify their VMware private clouds and optimize their virtualization costs. At HPE Discover Barcelona 2 weeks ago, we launched HPE VM Essentials, which enables customers to manage their virtualization states across HPE VMware and many others," said Neri, speaking on the company’s fourth quarter earnings call.

Neri's comments landed a few days after Amazon Web Services' re:Invent 2024 conference kicked off. AWS launched Q Developer features that enable an enterprise to automate much of their VMWare migration.

With Amazon Q Developer, a customer can move away from VMware with more ease. Amazon Q Developer can automate and complete tasks including analysis, planning, code generation and testing. Amazon used Q Developer to convert old versions of Java to Java 17 and saved 4,500 years of development work.

The bet is that AWS can give customers the Q Developer tools to transform legacy infrastructure and migrate workloads to the cloud. Executives said customers who were dependent on VMware vSphere are looking at other options since Broadcom has changed its pricing strategy.

In addition, Red Hat this week also posted a walkthrough on migrating VMware vSphere customers Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.

As previously reported, Nutanix has been among the biggest beneficiaries of the VMware turmoil. Nutanix recently reported a strong first quarter and fielded multiple questions about VMware.

• Nutanix lands larger deals in Q4, ups outlook, plays long game vs. VMware
• Broadcom CEO Hock Tan aims to woo VMware customers with private cloud, simplification pitch
• Nutanix product additions, partnerships designed to capitalize on VMware customer angst
• Nutanix winning deals vs. VMware, but Broadcom punching back with pricing

Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said the company has ramped up a partnership with AWS to move workloads from VMware to its NC2 platform on AWS. He said:

"As part of this collaboration, customers will gain access to promotional credits from AWS to support customer migrations and proof of concept trials as well as Nutanix licensing promotions. Customers can also gain access to promotional credits for migrating VMware Cloud on AWS workloads to NC2 on AWS through the AWS VMware Migration Accelerator program."

Ramaswami added that the VMware installed base continues to look at options. He added that typically VMware migrations also revolve around hardware upgrade including Nutanix converged systems with Dell.

"It's a dynamic market in the sense that sometimes we'll see aggressive behavior from Broadcom as well to keep those customers, especially the very large ones," said Ramaswami.

Although VMware migrations were a big story in 2024, Ramaswami noted that the trend will go for years. He said enterprises that are tethered to vSphere and willing to replace hardware can swap quickly--perhaps within a month or two.

Public cloud migrations off of VMware are also relatively simple. "A lot of that is automated as well," said Ramaswami. "VMware Cloud on AWS is also easy to migrate onto a Nutanix offering."

The big accounts--like the enterprises VMware is trying to keep--have more complicated migrations.

Ramaswamy said:

"These large customers that use multiple VMware products with massive estates. And there it can be many years, it can be three years to do a migration just because they can't migrate all of it at once, there is a requirement for professional services engagement to convert over some of their more complex custom scripts that they have written and custom investments they've made on top of the VMware portfolio. So those migrations tend to be more complex, require professional services and take a few years.

Nutanix is also leveraging its channel partners to take VMware workloads. Given VMware has tried to go direct with its largest accounts, channel partners are coming to Nutanix. "We are not trying to work around them or shut them out of any of the deals. We've seen a significant increase in channel partner engagement with us over the last year or two," said Ramaswamy.

BT150 Spotlight: Centurion Health's Johnny Wu on delivering healthcare in prisons

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Centurion Health Chief Clinical Officer Johnny Wu is used to technology workarounds in healthcare since his company is focused on serving patients in prisons.

I caught up with Wu at Constellation Research Connected Enterprise to talk shop. Here are some of the takeaways from Wu, a BT150 member of the 2024-2025 class.

The role. Centurion Health provides healthcare inside of prisons and part of Wu's role is delivering care when it has to work around technology restrictions. "We provide care inside of prisons and it's challenging due to the limitations of prisons--concrete, rebar, lack of being able to bring in cell phones--but we are trying to provide care by going directly to patients," said Wu. "We have a captive audience, but sometimes we don't have access to them."

Technology workarounds. Wu said the company is starting to use tablets and use telehealth inside prisons. "I provide direct patient care and oversee that, but the IT department is constantly building datasets so we can provide better care in real time," he said.

There are no electronic health records that are standardized across states. Wu said:

"There's a lot of jurisdictions that we have to deal with. Each state has its own prison health system. There's also the federal system, and then the county jails, and they don't communicate. They have different budgets. You could be working in a system where they have very robust resources and electric health records. Some are actually still working on paper."

Multiple requirements and regulations. Wu said each contract in the prison system has different contract requirements and regulations. Centurion Health is a centralized group that attempts to standardize across the US, but often there's a consultation with the local level on how to make things work.

What Wu would fix? Wu said:

"We need to just move away from the mindset that we have to do things the way we've always been doing it, and then adding technology. We just need to start fresh. I would like to be able to have mobile technology, be able to have Wi-Fi or cellular service inside the prisons. I have folks who I can't even communicate with because there's no way for them to have a cell phone inside the prison while they're working."

Telehealth. In prisons, telehealth is typically a standalone machine sitting in front of a patient with a chaperone. On the other hand, the provider could be remote in another location. Wu said:

"However, the software that goes through the internet is very limited, very impersonal. We're moving towards to be able to have using peripherals where we've actually gotten permission to collect data. We can collect heart rates, sounds of their hearts, their lungs, and in real time the provider at the other end can hear this and adjust treatment plans."

Wearables. Wu said Centurion Health has been looking to use wearables, but "security trumps everything." He said:

"Wearables are made to be too small and for consumers. For our world, a wearable could be swallowed or hidden. It poses a challenge to have permission to use wearables. We have to rig and make our own type of wearables, which is not always ideal, but we do what we can. We're looking at using sonar to be able to collect some information, but we're working in the house of custody where we don't own the physical plant or office space. We can't make changes that easily."

How things have changed. "The client understands that there's an obligation to provide health care and you have to make sure each side is supporting each other. When I started my career in correctional medicine I was working in a broom closet or sometimes a jail cell. Today new prisons have medical people involved with the design," he said.

Rewarding part of job. "Patient care is rewarding," said Wu. "A lot of times it's as simple as going into a facility and talking to people. They remember me and it's just rewarding to know that people appreciate what we do," he said.

BT150 interviews:

• BT150 Spotlight: Insight Global's DeWayne Griffin on HR, AI and Humans in the Loop
• BT150 Spotlight: MultiCare Health System's Laurie Wheeler on optimization, change management and healthcare transformation
• BT150 Spotlight: Jewelers Mutual John Kreul on Human-Centric AI, CX, Returns and Future-Proofing
• BT150 member Dr. Jonathan Reichental: How autonomous vehicles could change how cities are designed
• Peraton's Cari Bohley: Why internal talent recruiting and retention is critical
• SuperNova Award interview with Joe Prota: How IBM used Adobe Firefly to speed up ideation and iteration
• BT150's Ashwin Rangan on CIO evolution, technology curves and what it means for genAI deployments
• BT150 Spotlight: Sunitha Ray on the difference between enterprise AI and genAI

HPE Q4 strong as server revenue surges due to AI

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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HPE reported better-than-expected fourth quarter results as server revenue surged due to AI demand. HPE also said that it expects its acquisition of Juniper Networks to close in early 2025.

The company said it has a backlog for AI systems orders to more than $3.5 billion.

HPE reported fourth quarter earnings of 99 cents a share on revenue of $8.5 billion, up 15% from a year ago. Non-GAAP revenue in the fourth quarter of 58 cents a share.

Wall Street was expecting HPE to report fourth quarter earnings of 56 cents a share on revenue of $8.26 billion.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri said the company's portfolio of hybrid cloud, AI and networking was paying off. HPE is also seeing strong traction in Greenlake adoption. 

• HPE acquires Morpheus Data to round out HPE GreenLake features
• HPE unveils Private Cloud AI, broad Nvidia partnership aimed at genAI workloads
• HPE to acquire Juniper Networks for $14B: What it means
• HPE launches AMD powered AI system and highlights broader strategy
• On-premises AI enterprise workloads? Infrastructure, budgets starting to align

Server revenue in the fourth quarter was $4.7 billion, up 32% from a year ago. Intelligent edge revenue, which includes Aruba gear, was $1.1 billion, down 20% from a year ago. Hybrid cloud revenue was $1.6 billion, up 18% from a year ago.

As for the first quarter outlook, HPE projected non-GAAP earnings of 47 cents a share to 52 cents a share. Revenue is projected to grow at a mid-teens percentage clip.

For the year ended Oct. 31, HPE reported earnings of $1.93 a share on revenue of $30.13 billion.

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said:

"HPE had a very good quarter with servers leading the way fueled by the AI demands of enterprises. Had the networking segment not stalled, it could have been a record quarter for HPE. Costs grew as well, but overall results got bumped by gains on equity sales,  which doubles profits and EPS. The soon to be commencing addition of the Juniper business will give HPE another 4 quarters of favorable YOY comparisons, so things are looking up for HPE." 

Speaking on the earnings conference call, Neri said the following:

• "Our AI systems demand remains strong. We have received new orders bringing AI systems backlog to over $3.5 billion. Our traditional server business also continues to reflect the improved market dynamics. Hybrid cloud revenue grew 18% year-over-year and 21% sequentially, resulting in revenue of $1.6 billion, with increasing revenue for HPE Private Cloud and continued growth in HPE Storage."
• "Customer adoption of our HPE Alletra Storage MP solutions continues to rise at an accelerated pace. Since launch, we have sold approximately 3,000 systems."
• "We see the enterprise AI pipeline continue to grow steadily. There are hundreds of customers on that pipeline. There are some very interesting large-sized deals in the pipeline, and they are doing proof-of-concept. We announced the co-engineered solution with NVIDIA in June, and we made it available September 9. We had 7 weeks to be able to collect orders. We already collected orders in enterprise AI and we already closed deals in enterprise AI."
• "Customers are also asking us to help them simplify their VMware private clouds and optimize their virtualization costs. At HPE Discover Barcelona 2 weeks ago, we launched HPE VM Essentials, which enables customers to manage their virtualization states across HPE VMware and many others."

AWS Marketplace adds 'Buy with AWS' as it expands reach, woos procurement departments

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Amazon Web Services has added new features to AWS Marketplace that will resonate with enterprise procurement teams, grow the cloud provider's reach and bring Amazon's commerce knowhow to partner websites.

At re:Invent, AWS fleshed out its AWS Marketplace strategy with three launches:

• Support for granular purchase orders across all product and pricing types. This move enables spend tracking, expedited payment processing times, post purchase PO updates and pay-as-you-go pricing as well as flexible payment schedules.
• Multi-currency private offers and non-USD bank account support. This addition to AWS Marketplace eliminates currency fluctuations and risk for buyers and adds support for EUR, GBP, AUD and KRW at launch.
• Buy with AWS, which gives partner websites the ability to transact with AWS Marketplace listings. Think of Buy with AWS as AWS Marketplace to go. Buy with AWS is an effort to take AWS Marketplace everywhere and enable purchase on independent software vendor sites, power distributor cloud marketplaces and give channel partners the ability to host curated storefronts and resell AWS Marketplace listings.

AWS Marketplace momentum

AWS Marketplace has quietly built momentum in recent years and it's clear that the effort has gained in importance. For enterprise buyers, a more frictionless purchasing experience is critical because CxOs already limited time is gobbled up by contracts, legal teams and haggling. One of the big benefits of AWS Marketplace is that it standardizes contracts to a large degree and compresses contacting cycle time by as much as 50%.

At re:Invent 2023, AWS reduced listing fees for AWS Marketplace. Today, AWS Marketplace features more than 5,000 sellers from 39 different countries selling products across 70 categories. There are 2.5 million active subscriptions from AWS Marketplace.

A few more recent items:

• Salesforce, Databricks and CrowdStrike were among the large enterprise software players noting that they were closing big deals on AWS Marketplace.
• Marketplaces are part of an overall shift in enterprise software purchasing as vendors are shifting to new models and enterprises are looking to consolidate and simplify.
• Enterprises need to accelerate cloud and artificial intelligence adoption and see marketplaces as a way to integrate vendors and foster collaboration.

Speaking at Constellation Research's Connected Enterprise, Phil Potloff, GM of AWS Software Marketplace, said the company is focusing on the buyer experience. "Customers have moved more of their IT infrastructure to the cloud and that's where they're running third-party software," said Potlaff. "We look at upfront discovery. Buyers want to evaluate software without a sales pitch. We focus on time to value. We look at IT buyer and procurement friction. We're a way to control spend with standardized contracts."

Navigating a sprawling vendor landscape

While AWS Marketplace features software from IBM, Salesforce, ServiceNow, CrowdStrike and others, it has become a channel for startups. AWS cited Orca Security as a startup that has leveraged AWS Marketplace to drive 800% revenue growth. Another startup, Drata, derives 40% of its revenue from AWS Marketplace deals.

Chirag Mehta, Constellation Research analyst, said enterprise buyers have three types of marketplaces. The most high profile marketplaces are from hyperscale cloud providers. Business application marketplaces are also prominent. Data and AI marketplaces are also emerging for enterprises.

Each of those categories have established vendors and new entrants for enterprises to consider. "It's incredibly difficult to discover, try and buy so customers are looking to reduce friction, enable employees to use tools and have governance," said Mehta.

• Research: Building Vibrant Marketplace Ecosystems for the Future
• Big software deals closing on AWS Marketplace, rival efforts
• IBM, AWS expand partnership, watsonx headed to AWS Marketplace
• Enterprise software 2025: Three big shifts to watch

The plan for AWS Marketplace is to expand choices on its own platform and extend it into channel partners via Buy with AWS. Via Buy with AWS, customers can request demos, get custom pricing and procurement while using AWS accounts. That avenue can expand partners' ability to sell custom applications.

IBM has expanded the availability of its software portfolio on AWS Marketplace to 92 countries with its AI and data technologies serving as the headliners. IBM is offering its software directly on AWS Marketplace as well as via partners. More than half the deals closed on AWS Marketplace in 2024 were new clients for IBM.

AWS CEO Garman Q&A: Model choices, competition and AI's future

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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AWS CEO Matt Garman at re:Invent 2024 elaborated on the company's strategy to serve up foundational building blocks, Intel's future, model choices, sustainability and why storylines about Trainium competing with Nvidia are misplaced.

Most of Garman’s comments were follow-ups on the happenings at re:Invent. Here’s the news stack:

• AWS unveils next-gen Amazon SageMaker in bid to unify data, analytics, AI
• AWS aims to make Amazon Bedrock your agentic AI point guard
• Amazon Bedrock vs. DIY approaches benchmarked (full report)
• AWS adds capacity sharing, training plans to SageMaker HyperPod, marketplace for Bedrock
• Amazon Q Business gets a story at AWS re:Invent 2024
• PagerDuty integrates with Amazon Bedrock, Q Business: Will it boost large enterprise traction?
• AWS launches Amazon Nova foundation models in commoditization play
• AWS aims to make Amazon Bedrock your agentic AI point guard
• AWS revamps S3, databases with eye on AI, analytics workloads
• AWS scales up Trainium2 with UltraServer, touts Apple, Anthropic as customers
• AWS outlines new data center, server, cooling designs for AI workloads
• AWS re:Invent 2024: Four AWS customer vignettes with Merck, Capital One, Sprinkr, Goldman Sachs
• Oracle Database@AWS hits limited preview

In a Q&A with analysts, Garman covered the following points:

Customers leveraging foundation models. Garman said customers will build, buy and fine tune a wide selection of models. Garman said:

"Customers are going to use a wide range of models, and they'll fine tune some of the models in Bedrock, and they will build their own. The answer is evolving. You'll find it easier to build a model from scratch with your own proprietary set of data. There’s going to be a lot of customers who are continuing to do that on SageMaker. We're seeing no amount of slowing down of customers doing that."

Nova models .AWS launched its new Nova models to replace Titan. "Nova will be replacing the Titan model as it's such a leap forward from where we were and wanted a whole new brand around them."

Intel. Garman said that manufacturing in the US is critical and he's hopeful that the company can get to being a leading foundry. Garman said:

"They're incredibly important to the country, and so I think I'm hopeful that they get to a good place. Not sure that I would like to fund them, necessarily, but I think it's super important. I'm hopeful that that Intel can get back to being a leading foundry.

"I think having all of the leading edge foundries in one location in Taiwan is probably not the best for just the global supply chain."

Power and sustainability. Garman said AI will need a lot more electricity and power, but hyperscalers will have to become much more efficient. Garman said:

"The compute is getting much more efficient. Every cycle of compute today is getting more and more efficient. I would love for the computers get as efficient as the human brain. We haven't invented that technology yet. In the meantime, we're planning for the electricity needs for the next decade that we project. It's not just us. There's much more demand for power.

It's important for us to keep pushing towards carbon zero power. And so, we continue to make really large investments in renewable energy. We're making investments in nuclear. It's just a part of the portfolio of power that we're going to need."

Garman noted that Amazon has commissioned multiple renewable energy projects.

The balance between abstraction and primitives. Garman said AWS will aim to improve compute, storage and database as well as the abstraction layer. Garman said:

"I don't think that it's either or. I think we're absolutely focused on the primitives and improving things like storage and database. We think there's tons of innovation and custom silicon and compute and networking. I think inference is a core building block. We're investing a lot in services that are more abstract and help customers be more efficient in their jobs. We'll do both of those things. And I think there's a there's enough room for innovation across all those different levels."

Cybersecurity approach. Garman was asked why AWS doesn't try to monetize cybersecurity. He said AWS spends billions of dollars on cybersecurity that's hopefully invisible to most customers. "There's a lot of great partners out there and they do a fantastic job," said Garman. "We're happy to partner with them."

Product approach. Garman was asked about AWS' approach between product teams to create different building blocks. He said that approach has driven innovation because teams aren't interdependent on each other. "If you have 50 teams that all have to be in lockstep to deliver something you're going to move slow," said Garman. "Our strategy has been to let those teams invent and move fast. I appreciate that approach introduces some complexity for customers and we're moving to cover that."

He noted that SageMaker Studio is an example of an effort to bring those building blocks together seamlessly. "SageMaker is an elegant example of making it easier to operate with a whole set of tools on common data sets," said Garman. "We can do that because we have all these core components behind the scenes. We will keep innovating."

Simply put, there won't be fewer services from AWS-like ever.

GenAI model choice. Garman said choice is important to AWS, but the company will have "to keep getting better about helping customers choose the right thing."

"We'll have to figure out new ways to help and thinking about model routing, thinking about how you do AB testing and which model is giving customers better outcomes," he said.

Garman was asked about Amazon's Anthropic investment and he noted that the companies are close partners that learn a lot from each other.

Amazon Q. Garman said that Amazon Q can have a wide reach from a more neutral position. "The real power with Q Business is this Q Index that can index data across your different SaaS providers. AWS has recognition as a trusted source there and bringing data together," he said.

Garman said that Amazon Q can democratize data and analytics for business roles as Q Apps serve as an abstraction layer.

The false narrative of Trainium vs. Nvidia. Garman was asked about competition with Nvidia and he noted that there wasn't any story there. He said:

"It's about more options for customers. If we can lower costs and more inference is done it's not going to be at Nvidia's expense. Nvidia is an incredibly important partner. I think the press wants to make it us vs. them but it's just not true."

Garman also noted that Graviton didn't take workloads from Intel or AMD.

On-prem AI workloads. Garman said the scale of genAI requires the cloud because the systems become so complicated quickly. He said:

"I think the scale required means AI is a cloud workload. You can take these smaller models and run them on premise today, and I do think that there's maybe some interesting things there. If you think about distilling smaller models or running inference at the edge, I do think that that is an interesting idea. But kind of training big models and things like that is a cloud centric thing. It's just not practical."

AWS adds capacity sharing, training plans to SageMaker HyperPod, marketplace for Bedrock

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Amazon Web Services added capacity sharing and training plans to Amazon SageMaker Hyperpod and added Lumi AI and Poolside models to Amazon Bedrock's selection of third party models. AWS also launched Amazon Bedrock Marketplace.

The news was announced at a re:Invent 2024 keynote by Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of AI and Data at AWS. AWS add-on to the previous updates to SageMaker and Bedrock.

• AWS unveils next-gen Amazon SageMaker in bid to unify data, analytics, AI
• AWS aims to make Amazon Bedrock your agentic AI point guard

• Amazon Bedrock vs. DIY approaches benchmarked (full report)

With Amazon SageMaker HyperPod, AWS added the following:

• Capacity sharing and allocation and governance tools so enterprises to share large pools of compute, set priorities for teams, projects and tasks and schedule them based on priorities.
• Training plans so customers can optimize genAI models based on hardware, budget, timelines and region constraints. Training plans will automatically move work across availability zones.
• Recipes for data scientists and engineers to start training and fine-tuning popular foundation models in hours. These recipes are curated for training and ready to use for popular models. These recipes can be set up to swap hardware to optimize performance and lower costs.

For Bedrock, AWS added new models from Luma AI, a specialist in creating video clips from text and images, and Poolside, which specializes in models for software engineering. Amazon Bedrock has also expanded models from its current providers such as AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral, Stability.ai and Amazon.

The addition of Amazon Bedrock Marketplace will give customers the ability to try models and balance cost and performance. Amazon Bedrock Marketplace has access to more than 100 emerging and specialized foundation models.

Sivasubramanian said:

"With Bedrock, we are committed to giving you access to the best model for all your use cases. However, while model choice is critical, it's really just the first step when we are building for inference. Developers also spend lot of time evaluating models for their needs, especially factors like cost and latency that require a delicate balance."

Bedrock also was updated with intelligent prompt routing, which will automatically route requests among foundation models in the same family. The aim is to provide high-quality responses with low cost and latency. The routing will be based on the predicted performance of each request. Customers can also provide ground truth data to improve predictions.

More from re:Invent:

• Amazon Q Business gets a story at AWS re:Invent 2024
• PagerDuty integrates with Amazon Bedrock, Q Business: Will it boost large enterprise traction?
• AWS launches Amazon Nova foundation models in commoditization play
• AWS aims to make Amazon Bedrock your agentic AI point guard
• AWS revamps S3, databases with eye on AI, analytics workloads
• AWS scales up Trainium2 with UltraServer, touts Apple, Anthropic as customers
• AWS outlines new data center, server, cooling designs for AI workloads
• AWS re:Invent 2024: Four AWS customer vignettes with Merck, Capital One, Sprinkr, Goldman Sachs
• Oracle Database@AWS hits limited preview