Serimag had the opportunity to attend the AWS Summit organised by Amazon Spain to promote its services in the cloud. The annual event took place in the Kinépolis cinemas in Madrid. There we came across numerous companies that were already using the services and those that were beginning to show an interest. And it was certainly a complete success. As Adrian Cockcroft, Vice-president of Arquitectura Cloud, said in his keynote speech, they had to open the adjoining auditoriums to accommodate all the spectators. We were lucky enough to be in the main auditorium!
Waiting for Adrian Cockcroft’s keynote
The various conferences were distributed throughout the Kinépolis auditoriums, in addition to the interesting stands that the partners had set up in the central aisles, the Market-place area and the Partner Theatre. All this resulted in a very dynamic atmosphere, implying that companies are understanding that their future lies in the multiple uses that can be obtained from cloud services.
Each one of the conferences was set out in two parts. In the first, Amazon introduced the product, its potential and benefits. This was followed by a company that related its experience in a real environment. Thus Wallapop demonstrated how they had managed to control the sale of arms, drugs and prostitution on their platform through Artificial Intelligence processes (training and implementation). And Atresmedia explained how it was capable of offering a sufficiently scalable VOD (Video On Demand) service so that a Barça-Madrid match in 4K was not a problem for them.
Technologically, everyone was talking about the importance that Machine Learning (and Artificial Intelligence in its different variables) will have in business and industrial processes of the future as a simple matter of efficiency. This is the back-end. At the front-end, a generation is arriving that grew up in an environment full of Artificial Intelligence: they speak to Echo and Alexa answers them, they buy according to recommendation systems, they get around according to what Google maps tells them, and so on.
AWS layers structure for Artificial Intelligence
And all this needs a structure to support it: the Cloud. The benefits of scalability and immediacy are the first advantages with respect to the traditional data centre. But for project management it is vital that you are aware of the direct cost of your processes, that you’re going to invest in exactly what your business requires. And from there the new trend: Serverless Applications. At the beginning, there was a move towards the cloud in the form of static servers (installing my server in the cloud). Later it was extended to flexible servers, which grew as your process required, but there were still dedicated machines for this. The Serverless concept broke away from this approach, so that the customer does not need to know if they have 1 or 100 machines: the customer has a process to execute, the platform decides how and with what it is executed.
To sum up, IT processes are geared towards a future where Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence will be key factors. For companies to be better and more competitive involves the implementation of Machine Learning processes. And for these to function efficiently, they need a lot of data which today is within our reach: social networks, the IoT (Internet of Things), process digitalisation, etc. But all this is not viable if there is not an adequate structure that can process it. And that is where the cloud opens up a world of possibilities.
The technology gap in companies is starting to open. Where do you want to be?
