All Eyes on Generative AI at AWS, Accenture, Google Cloud, Rackspace
Look for news, too, from Vultr and CloudBolt in this week’s cloud computing roundup.
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Amazon Web Services is going all-in on generative AI — to the tune of a $100 million investment.
On June 23, the world’s largest public cloud computing provider said it’s opening the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center. The center, however, is a program rather than a place, as the company told CNBC. The Generative AI Innovation Center gives partners and customers resources for for building and deploying generative AI services and platforms.
Generative AI has become all the rage in 2023, after Microsoft’s ChatGPT hit the masses. But, as AWS executives emphasized at this month’s cloud-security-focused re:Inforce event, AWS is no newcomer to generative AI.
“The reality is, we’ve been doing AI, ML, [reinforcement learning] … for decades,” CJ Moses, AWS chief information security officer, said at a press-only briefing on June 13.
Even so, AWS did launch Bedrock after rivals Microsoft and Google Cloud revealed their own takes on generative AI. (Bedrock, though, serves as a developer, rather than consumer, tool.) In the press release announcing the innovation center, AWS said it’s been involved with AI technologies for more than two decades.
“Amazon has more than 25 years of AI experience, and more than 100,000 customers have used AWS AI and ML services to address some of their biggest opportunities and challenges,” said Matt Garman, senior vice president of sales, marketing and global services at AWS. “Now, customers around the globe are hungry for guidance about how to get started quickly and securely with generative AI.”
Up next, more details on AWS’ Generative AI Innovation Center.
The new AWS center, Garman said, will offer “flexible and cost-effective” generative AI services as well as a team of experts, including strategists, data scientists, engineers and solutions architects. Organizations also can work with their AWS channel partners on any applicable generative AI efforts. As such, the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center will feature no-cost workshops, engagements and training.
“Together with our global community of partners, we’re working with business leaders across every industry to help them maximize the impact of generative AI in their organizations, creating value for their customers, employees and bottom line,” Garman said.
To that point, AWS envisions scenarios where healthcare and life sciences companies, as one example, use the new program to accelerate drug research and discovery.
AWS already has been working with end users including Twilio, Lonely Planet, Highspot and others.
In AWS CEO Adam Selipsky’s view, now is the time for organizations (presumably including channel partners) to embrace generative AI.
“AI is going to be this next wave of innovation in the cloud,” he told CNBC this week. “It’s going to be the next big thing that pushes even more customers to want to be in the cloud. Really, you need the cloud for generative AI.”
Independent cloud computing provider Vultr has debuted its own Cloud Alliance.
However, rather than serving as an industry discussion forum, the initiative brings together plug-and-play, pre-integrated services from various contributors, providing a marketplace for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions.
Vultr says the Vultr Cloud Alliance also gives users, including enterprises, digital startups and developers, a single control panel for deploying infrastructure and adding services. And, organizations may scale their Vultr cloud services up or down without worry of vendor lock-in or long-term contracts, the company said.
“[W]e are committed to giving our customers access to … technology, tools and services to empower them to easily build and scale their cloud native operations,” said J.J. Kardwell, Vultr CEO. “We’ve created a digital ecosystem of partners that seamlessly integrate, so everything just works.”
Vultr is billing the Cloud Alliance as “an affordable alternative to Big Tech cloud offerings.”
Your customers still need help managing their cloud expenses and resources.
CloudBolt Software — a FinOps software provider — just released a report that shows organizations, while making strides, still have a long way to go.
For example, a lot of end users remain stuck on the very basics of cloud management. Many haven’t even gotten to essential practices including cost allocation, chargeback implementation, automated remediation and anomaly detection, CloudBolt writes in “The Real State of FinOps.” Even though more people are involved in FinOps these days (82% of respondents have a formal FinOps team, CloudBolt says), we surmise that channel partners could offer more assistance in this arena.
“FinOps has rapidly evolved from a niche concept to a critical discipline embraced by organizations worldwide,” said Kyle Campos, CTO of CloudBolt Software. “While there are challenges to overcome, the growing adoption of FinOps teams and the increasing recognition of its strategic importance demonstrate the market need and potential.”
CloudBolt’s report comes as the latest installment of its annual CloudBolt Industry Insights series. Wakefield Research conducted surveys of 500 executives, engineers and developers in companies with more than 5,000 employees in the United States, Canada, the UK and Australia to help CloudBolt reach its findings.
To Adam Selipsky’s point about generative AI requiring cloud, and thinking about CloudBolt’s new FinOps research — cloud costs stand to soar as organizations run more generative AI in their environments. So, it seems a bit imperative that IT experts do all they can now to learn to configure generative AI in ways that keep expenses under control.
Global managed service provider Rackspace will help customers and partners do just that with its Foundry for Generative AI by Rackspace (FAIR). The Texas-based company positions FAIR as an effort to help various industries adopt secure, responsible and sustainable generative AI solutions. As such, it’s pairing its own intellectual property with its multicloud capabilities to back the FAIR.
“We are committed to pushing the boundaries of what is possible with generative AI,” said Rackspace CEO Amar Maletira.
We’re with you: All this generative AI hype is becoming overwhelming. But we’re bringing you another update on this front because, well, generative AI isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
This week, behemoth consultancy Accenture extended its partnership with Google Cloud with (what else?) generative AI in mind. The announcement follows on the heels of very similar ones in recent weeks throughout the cloud sector. The Accenture-Google Cloud deal calls for Accenture to invest a “significant” amount of money — and people and tools — into Google Cloud-based pursuits. From there, the companies will work together to develop solutions for organizations capitalizing on generative AI.
“Generative AI has the ability to help businesses fundamentally improve how they operate, whether it is optimizing supply chains to be more sustainable or mitigating cybersecurity threats based on information from billions of security events,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “Together with Accenture, we will provide businesses with the advanced technology and expertise they need to help transform their organizations and realize value from their generative AI deployments.”
Generative AI engineering experts from both companies will be available in Accenture Innovation Hubs in locations including Bangalore, Dubai, Dublin, London, Melbourne, Milan, Munich, New York, Paris, San Francisco, São Paulo, Singapore and Sydney. Accenture and Google Cloud also are creating new training and certification around generative AI.
Earlier this month, Accenture said it’s pumping $3 billion (yes, billion) into generative AI efforts.
We’re with you: All this generative AI hype is becoming overwhelming. But we ’re bringing you another update on this front because, well, generative AI isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
This week, behemoth consultancy Accenture extended its partnership with Google Cloud with (what else?) generative AI in mind. The announcement follows on the heels of very similar ones in recent weeks throughout the cloud sector. The Accenture-Google Cloud deal calls for Accenture to invest a “significant” amount of money — and people and tools — into Google Cloud-based pursuits. From there, the companies will work together to develop solutions for organizations capitalizing on generative AI.
“Generative AI has the ability to help businesses fundamentally improve how they operate, whether it is optimizing supply chains to be more sustainable or mitigating cybersecurity threats based on information from billions of security events,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “Together with Accenture, we will provide businesses with the advanced technology and expertise they need to help transform their organizations and realize value from their generative AI deployments.”
Generative AI engineering experts from both companies will be available in Accenture Innovation Hubs in locations including Bangalore, Dubai, Dublin, London, Melbourne, Milan, Munich, New York, Paris, San Francisco, São Paulo, Singapore and Sydney. Accenture and Google Cloud also are creating new training and certification around generative AI.
Earlier this month, Accenture said it’s pumping $3 billion (yes, billion) into generative AI efforts.
Perhaps we should apologize up front. Much of this week’s cloud computing news roundup involves — you guessed it — generative AI. We know this topic seems to be hogging all the channel conversation right now. And yet, if it wasn’t a transformative technology, whether that’s the case right now or more what generative AI will become, it wouldn’t be consuming all the attention. So, understanding that the discussion around generative AI is a lot, we still need to bring some news to your screen.
Let’s start with Amazon Web Services. The cloud giant is funneling a lot of money (but not actually as much — in terms of a one-time investment — as one of its partners, also in this roundup) into generative AI. The first two slides take a look at that development.
After that, take a short reprieve from generative AI news with indie vendor Vultr’s “Cloud Alliance” announcement. Then we bring you some outcomes from CloudBolt’s newest report on FinOps, which is vital to any thriving cloud computing practice.
Finally, we conclude this week’s roundup with two more pieces of generative AI news — one from Rackspace, and one from channel partner Accenture and provider Google Cloud.
You can’t have generative AI without the cloud (hey, we didn’t say it — AWS’ Adam Selipsky did. See slide 2.). As such, we predict that we’ll all just keep hearing more about generative AI. Brace yourself and click the image above to get the latest.
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