Attending any large, multi-day conference packed with more sessions than you can fit into a day and with more guest speakers than you could possibly listen to is both amazing and stressful; now multiply that by a factor of five, and you have AWS re:Invent. Hours of keynote sessions, product update talks, and an incredible buzz from 60,000 attendees (more than three times as many as last year!) can make it tough to keep track of the biggest developments.
If I had to pick a consistent theme that wove through AWS’ numerous announcements of new products and enhancements to their existing suite of services, it would be “Data... more data... and did we mention data?”
You could argue that every year AWS makes a significant number of data-related announcements because their business is data management, but this year it just seemed different. AWS seems to really be putting a focus on having the richest and most robust set of services available for customer data management.
So what were the big takeaways?
Amperity announced as leading AWS Marketing and Advertising Partner
For us here at Amperity the big excitement was around the announcement of AWS for Advertising and Marketing, and AWS Clean Rooms. We were thrilled to be announced as one of AWS’ industry-leading Marketing and Advertising partners, recognition for all the work we’re doing to simplify integrating consumer brands’ first-party data with Amazon Marketing Cloud and Amazon Ads, as well as for being a trusted partner in helping our customers prepare, clean, and use first-party data within the systems they deploy through AWS.
Amazon Sagemaker improvements
Another announcement that caught my attention and got me excited about the possibilities for our customers was the news that Amazon Sagemaker was getting a slew of new features to make life for data scientists not only easier but more productive. This stands out to me because the unified customer profile Amperity creates helps data scientists by reducing the time and effort needed to create an input to model creation, and now AWS is arming them with more tools to be able to do more in less time to increase their success in creating personalized experiences for customers.
Customer experience power-up with AWS Connect
The announcement of new features coming to AWS Connect opens up the potential for better customer experiences. This is exciting from my perspective here at Amperity because it means marketing and operations teams at brands can make better use of the unified customer profiles we create to identify and serve consumers when they contact customer support. We’ve been working for the past few months to establish an integration with Amperity and AWS Connect in anticipation of this kind of functionality — I believe these new features coming to AWS Connect will elevate the platform and make it a more viable tool for brands.
Data flow improvements for Amazon Redshift
The Amazon Redshift team announced three new capabilities that will simplify moving data into Redshift. I’ve talked to Ampmerity customers over the last few months and I’m learning that more and more of them are looking to add Redshift to their tech stack as their data warehouse or their operational data store, and if our customers can simplify the integration of the Amperity customer profile along with the raw data, then they’re better able to create those personalized experiences that consumers are looking for.
AWS knows that the future is all about first-party data: how to manage it, how to secure it, how to share it, and how to take action on it, and this was all on display at re:Invent this year. For a full list of release notes, see the official AWS News Blog on product releases.