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AWS' Ruba Borno tells CRN about the hyperscaler's European strategy and sustainability approach

CRN's Mark Haranas has been reporting live from the vendor's annual conference in Las Vegas this week

AWS' annual partner conference has been running live in Las Vegas this week.

Earlier in the week, the vendor's channel boss Adam Selipsky made his pitch to partners, claiming 'You'll have a much larger set of opportunities with us than any other cloud provider'.

And you can see a round up of the top announcement's form the tech giant's conference here.

CRN US reporter and assistant news editor Mark Haranas also asked AWS senior VP and general manager of Global CX Centres, Ruba Borno:

Is AWS doing in the European market? Is there anything in Europe that your doing differently for channel partners there?

"One of the things that we're seeing an increased emphasis on in Europe is sustainability. We're seeing this globally.

"This isn't just a topic that matters to customers and partners in Europe, but we are hearing it as an increased emphasis."

Borno said partners and customers are now also asking the vendor specifically for help on how to become more sustainable in the market.

"One of the things that we're really excited about is we have research showing that AWS data centers running in the cloud are 3.6 times more energy efficient than running in an average enterprise datacentre.

"So there we start off with a measurable impact on sustainability. And then we work with our partners and our customers to think through the full lifecycle—from beginning to end—of what it takes to have a more sustainable business.

"It's not just IT efficiencies gained by moving to AWS, customers can also use additional cloud technologies such as AWS Lake Formation and Amazon SageMaker, to better understand their operations and areas where they can lower their overall impact and support sustainability goals.

"One thing that I'm really excited about is in 2019, Amazon co-founded the climate pledge, which is a commitment to be net zero carbon across our business by 2040—ten years ahead of the Paris Agreement.

"Today, we have over 300 pledge signatories, including many global partners and partners in EMEA to support that pledge. So we're working with our partners in sustainable ways.

A case study

Borno added:

"I'll give you one example. We worked with IBM and Oris to build a platform by using a series of containerised applications using Amazon EKS.

"This enabled Oris to support road projects across Azerbaijan, France and the United Kingdom. This allowed them to reduce overall road project costs by 30 per cent.

"They were able to decrease overall carbon emissions by 50 per cent. And lower the use of natural resources by 80 per cent -tripling road lifespan.

"So here, we brought multiple partners to support these impactful customer outcomes that are also focused on sustainability.

"Oris can actually calculate the total carbon emissions of a road construction project.

"They can predict future maintenance costs and even recommend locally available and sometimes recycled materials from a database of more than 30,000 suppliers.

"I mean, this is partnership, this is innovation and it's sustainable impact to our planet."