Teresa Carlson, vice president-worldwide public sector at Amazon Web Services (AWS), applauded the Defense Department’s (DoD) pace of cloud service adoption, and said AWS services are sufficiently secure so that “there are no barriers” for DoD to use them.
“It’s crazy how fast they are moving to the cloud,” Carlson said of DoD during a keynote address AWS’s Public Sector Summit today. She did not make a specific pitch for AWS’s bid to win the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) contract, but Carlson did say that the contract “speaks to” DoD’s interest in the technology.
“We stand ready” to help DoD and the intelligence community with “their mission around the world,” Carlson said.
In a separate address, Kenneth Bowen, CIO for Special Access Programs at DoD, said that cloud service “is the rocket we need” to speed innovation in the military, and that business process improvements that spring from using cloud service induces are the “fuel” for success of the larger mission. The end result, he said, is that projects that once took years to complete can now be handled in a few months, or even a few days if necessary.
Elsewhere during her keynote speech, Carlson said AWS has about 10,000 public sector customers worldwide, and that number is growing. AWS has users in 152 countries, and “teams on the ground” in 35 nations to serve that worldwide customer base.
That worldwide customer base, she said, “demonstrates the global opportunity of cloud computing.” She added, “cloud is the new normal, it’s the thing that customers are going to.”
On the business front, Carlson said the AWS business is generating $31 billion of annual revenue on a run-rate basis, and 41% year-over-year annual revenue growth.
“Our customers adopt cloud to innovate, and to drive down costs,” she said. She also said that 95% of the company’s “roadmap” is driven by customer feedback. “We innovate on your behalf,” she said. “We give you the freedom to use the tools for every imaginable workload.”
Carlson said this year’s event will draw more than 18,000 attendees, versus the 50 people that came out for AWS’s first public sector meeting ten years ago.
