Specialist
Former SaaS Business Lead at Amazon Web Services Inc (AWS)
Agenda
- AWS’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) operating environment for its cloud data management business, including Redshift and related offerings such as DynamoDB
- Competitive landscape across major data management vendors, including Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), Google GCP BigQuery (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and Microsoft Azure Synapse (NASDAQ: MSFT), as well as additional notable players and market challengers such as Databricks and MongoDB (NASDAQ: MDB)
- Strategy related to Redshift’s integration with other AWS solutions and enterprise data migration dynamics
- Resilience against newer scalable and flexible approaches to data management
- Go-to-market strategy, market dynamics, pricing and customer segmentation, plus macro headwinds and tailwinds and H1 2023 outlook
Questions
1.
Could you start by describing the current suite of AWS’s cloud database management solutions, walking us through the core products, with a focus on Redshift, as well as other relevant offerings such as DynamoDB?
2.
What’s the revenue contribution of the five core offerings, which you just mentioned? Are there any other relevant offerings?
3.
What progress has Redshift made to become better integrated across AWS solutions? You mentioned a large number of solutions, and, no doubt, AWS is doing a good job at developing a lot of different innovations in different areas. Are there any serious gaps or pain points that still need to be addressed, given the legacy architecture that Redshift is operating on vs the flexibility and scalability of players such as Snowflake or other companies with cloud-native offerings?
4.
To what extent do you see serverless changing the competitive landscape for data warehouses? How are hyperscalers positioned with this shift?
5.
What timeline would you expect for widespread adoption of serverless across enterprises, given that this is mostly being driven behind the scenes?
6.
Who might be well-positioned to make the move to serverless? Is AWS doing well here? Is there any notable advantage that a competitor might have over the company?
7.
What is AWS’s current positioning across its AI and machine learning capabilities? How are these capabilities being brought to Redshift through features such as the recent integration with Apache Spark?
8.
What timeline might be relevant to AWS for developing more out-of-the-box solutions? I would imagine its go-to-market team is very important for verticalised solutions. Could you elaborate on that?
9.
How are AWS’s various solutions positioned vs those of Snowflake? Have the recent innovations we’ve just discussed had a material impact on its competitive positioning and differentiation vs Snowflake, or is AWS, and Redshift in particular, still really winning on price or on its sizeable install base?
10.
You mentioned Redshift customers moving to Snowflake. Could you quantify the motions that happen around that? What cost or churn rate is associated with that switch?
11.
In opposition to the multi-cloud trend, post-pandemic we’re seeing a lot of large platform solutions such as Amazon saying that “Actually, these enterprises have 30 solutions cobbled together, and at this point they’re trying to make it a little less complex and they’re trying to really standardise on one platform.” We have these two different trends that seem to be butting heads, and we’ve heard that it might take 5-10 different solutions on Redshift to reach capability parity with Snowflake. While the platform proposition is clearly helpful in some ways, perhaps there are drawbacks. What is more difficult from an enterprise buyer’s perspective – standardising solutions on Amazon AWS or cobbling together solutions in multi-cloud?
12.
Could you discuss the non-relational database management vendors such as MongoDB or Databricks? Do AWS and Redshift view these vendors more as an opportunity to drive consumption, or as a potential threat? Conversely, how are MongoDB or Databricks viewing AWS?
13.
How do you see AWS and Redshift positioned vs Azure and its suite of offerings? It seems Azure has been innovating fairly rapidly, developing a number of adjacent offerings. In a situation where they’re existing together, is there anything critical that’s going to pull usage towards one of these two competitors?
14.
You mentioned pricing differences such as the separation of compute and storage. What recent trends are affecting AWS’s pricing strategy?
15.
What is AWS’s positioning vs Google GCP’s or anything that might be relevant around Oracle’s OCI product?
16.
Do you see data warehouses that are leveraging AWS compute in a better competitive position over the next few years, given AWS’s chip designs with Graviton for better cost performance vs other chips in the market?
17.
What’s your view on AWS’s acquisition opportunities? You mentioned that it’s acquiring people rather than customers or technology. What type of company profile might represent an attractive M&A target and why?
18.
What’s your growth outlook for AWS’s Redshift and its associated products? Do you have any thoughts on reduced consumption amid a potential recession in 2023? You mentioned the company is struggling on enterprise deals. What could it do better?
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