Our growth is unparalleled - AWS UK boss Jackson
UK managing director Gavin Jackson opens AWS Summit with bold claims as cloud provider hosts its largest-ever European event
Amazon Web Services' (AWS) growth is unlike anything seen in the tech sector before, according to UK managing director Gavin Jackson.
Opening the AWS Summit in London, with around 6,000 attendees expected to come through the doors, Jackson boasted of the cloud provider's $14bn (£11bn) revenue run rate and 43 per cent year-on-year growth for the first quarter of 2017.
"It's unprecedented for a company with limited tenure like AWS, at just 11 and a half years old," he said.
"It's unparalleled as a paradigm from any other technology shift we've ever seen in history, so it's a pretty good indicator that cloud is the new normal."
Aside from measuring AWS' revenue, Jackson pointed to the tech firms using AWS' cloud architecture, claiming that eight of the top 10 tech growth companies are using its platform.
"This should be a really clear indicator as to how people are thinking about their investments in technology," he said, "but also as a clear indicator as to how people are thinking about investments in talent and skills, with the centre of gravity really shifting up towards these cloud companies."
Following Jackson's keynote, CTO Werner Vogels took over and rattled through AWS' ever-growing portfolio of cloud applications, pausing as tech leaders from BP and Deliveroo took to the stage to explain how AWS has improved their performance.
Vogels paid particular attention to AWS' artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, explaining that technology used on the Amazon retail website is now being moved to AWS.
"We've been doing AI for 20 years," he said. "AWS is the centre of gravity for AI because of all the services you can use, whether it's the hardware, the software or high-level services.
"The good thing is that we've been doing this for 20 years. If you've been visiting the Amazon.co.uk web page, you've been exposed to AI for 20 years or more. Your recommendation engine is machine learning. 'Customers who bought X or bought Y', is machine learning.
"We've been doing it for such a long time and we have thousands of engineers working on it. You're now seeing this experience that we have in that world go into AWS."
Closing the keynote, Vogels made sure to emphasise AWS' commitment to partners and customers, while stressing that AWS will continue to innovate aggressively.
"If you're successful, hopefully we're successful with you," he said.
"We're investing in your success. We don't just want to sell to you; that's the old world. We want to make you successful using our services.
"It's hard enough because we have also said that if we stop innovating we will be out of business in 10 to 15 years. We need to continuously focus on innovation."