Amazon CEO Andy Jassy Touts AWS Innovation
One week after Amazon announced 18,000 layoffs, CEO Andy Jassy took to LinkedIn Friday to tout how AWS innovation is helping Amazon and its customers.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy took to social media Friday to tout the innovation coming out of its cloud computing business Amazon Web Services.
This week, sources told CRN that AWS—which is Amazon’s massively popular $80 billion cloud computing company—would not be impacted by Amazon’s layoff round this month of more than 18,000 employees.
Jassy was the longtime CEO of AWS before replacing former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in 2021.
On LinkedIn, Jassy touted AWS’ machine learning-based monitoring service Amazon Monitron and the AWS cloud, which help Amazon’s massive fulfillment centers sort and deliver packages on time to millions of customers.
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Jassy said he recently visited one of Amazon’s Sort Centers where customers’ packages go before they are sent out. At the centers, Amazon Monitron and AWS help track countless packages that travel miles on conveyor belts. Amazon Monitron detects potential issues with Amazon’s fulfillment and machinery before costly errors occur.
“The orange sensors continuously collect temperature and vibration measurements and send these metrics to the AWS cloud to be analyzed in real time using machine learning modeling that can predict when a part might stop working,” said Jassy, who was CEO of AWS from 2003 until 2021.
“Amazon Monitron alerted the team that one of our induction belts (critical for sorting and moving packages) might fail soon. Our team was able to safely plan a time to look at it and perform predictive maintenance, saving hours of downtime and ensuring customer deliveries were made on time,” Amazon’s CEO said.
After successfully using it internally, AWS built Amazon Monitron into a turnkey offering for other companies. The end-to-end system uses machine learning to detect abnormal conditions in industrial equipment and enable predictive maintenance.
Jassy said Amazon Monitron has reduced unplanned downtime by 70 percent at Amazon sites where it’s used and is gaining acceptance from industrial customers.
AWS Top Of Mind For Amazon
Last week, Amazon said it would be laying off 18,000 employees out of its more than 1.5 million head count.
In a letter to employees, Jassy said the majority of layoffs would be in Amazon Stores and PXT (People, Experience and Technology) organizations within the coming weeks.
Sources told CRN that AWS employees would not be significantly affected by the layoff round at Amazon.
AWS is the market leader in cloud computing and currently has an annual run rate of over $80 billion.
During Amazon’s recent quarterly earnings report, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said AWS is a top priority for Amazon and the company will continue to invest heavily in it.
“We continue to ramp up our investments in AWS, adding product builders and sales and professional services head count to help customers save money, invest more quickly in their businesses and transition to the cloud,” Olsavsky said in November.