Triumph Tech CEO: AWS Will Win ‘AI War’ Vs. Google, Microsoft

‘If I look at why my generative AI bet is with AWS it’s the customization and the granularity that you can get with AWS. You can’t get that with the other cloud providers,’ says Triumph Tech CEO Victor Raymond.

Amazon Web Services all-star partner Triumph Technology Solutions believes AWS will win the current “AI war” around generative artificial intelligence between the biggest players in the world: Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

“What generative AI feels like to me—it feels like the infancy of the internet. It feels like this is where the real change is going to happen,” said Victor Raymond, CEO of award-winning AWS partner Triumph Tech.

The Philadelphia-based AWS Premium Partner grew annual AWS revenue by 398 percent in 2022. This year, Triumph Tech is projecting to grow AWS sales by over 100 percent thanks, in part, to the cloud giant’s channel partner and AI strategy.

“There’s an AI war between the three major public clouds that we all know is happening right now,” said Raymond. “Instead of just putting something out there immediately, the thought process for AWS was, ‘How do we do this in a way that’s really going to make an impact on our customers?’ Instead of, if you look at what Google did, their first iteration at it didn’t work quite right.”

Generative AI Battle: AWS, Google, Microsoft

Raymond had the foresight to invest in generative AI last year, knowing it was going to be an important technology for customers and a great market opportunity for Triumph Tech.

“If I look at why my generative AI bet is with AWS it’s the customization and the granularity that you can get with AWS,” he said. “You can’t get that with the other cloud providers.”

Microsoft-backed OpenAI launched the popular generative AI conversational chatbot ChatGPT, which took the world by storm last year. Both Google and AWS have been rushing to catch the generative AI wave ever since, with both companies launching a slew of new innovation.

For example, at Google I/O 2023 this week, the focus was generative AI launches. Google unveiled Duet AI for Workspace and Google Cloud, as well as improvements to Google Bard to better compete against ChatGPT.

AWS has been launching its own AI innovation with plans to democratize access to generative AI for customers on a global basis, thanks to new solutions such as Amazon Bedrock and free access to Amazon CodeWhisperer. “We’re really excited about how AWS is now democratizing access to foundational models and generative AI for customers,” AWS’ Ruba Borno, vice president, head of worldwide channels and alliances, told CRN this week.

In an interview with CRN, Triumph Tech’s Raymond explains why he believes AWS will win the “AI war” around generative AI against Google and Microsoft.

Why are you picking AWS to win this highly competitive battle for generative AI leadership?

OpenAI was first to market in how search is being revolutionized.

But from an AWS perspective, if you look at Amazon Jumpstart for SageMaker, being able to use these base models to build on top of—that’s where I think AWS really is winning now and it’s going to win in the future—being able to take advantage of these large language models with your own data. Where OpenAI doesn’t give you that opportunity.

That’s where AWS always wins, being able to get granular with what you want to do. It’s very customizable, where some of the other solutions that are out there from our competitors—Azure, Google—they’re not as customizable compared to what is available on AWS now.

With the recent releases of Titan and Bedrock, it’s going to make things super customizable for our customers. And that’s what they want.

The last thing you want to do as an organization is start using this AI and your data gets out there. How can you put it on a closed loop and it would be your data that you’re running all these models against in real time against these large language models? That’s where AWS is going to win.

Can you double down on why AWS will reign supreme in generative AI versus Microsoft and Google?

If I look at why my generative AI bet is with AWS it’s the customization and the granularity that you can get with AWS. You can’t get that with the other cloud providers.

When we made the decision years ago about what cloud provider we were going to go with, it was a combination of those two things: customization and granularity. We were working with all the cloud providers at one point, but we made a bet and we went all in with AWS because of that customization that you can do.

There’s an AI war between the three major public clouds that we all know is happening right now.

Instead of just putting something out there immediately, the thought process for AWS was, ’How do we do this in a way that’s really going to make an impact on our customers?’ Instead of, if you look at what Google did, their first iteration at it didn’t work quite right.

Google threw a lot behind [Bard]. I think it wasn’t really well thought out. It was just, ‘How do we beat Microsoft?’ AWS’ approach is certainly a well-thought-out plan.

What AWS is doing on the AI and ML front is very interesting because the biggest thing is how you can customize these solutions and use your own data.

Give me an example of how generative AI is revolutionizing search.

I did this thing last week called ‘Suit Up’ with high-school kids in [Washington,] DC. They were tasked with creating a new product for AWS. It was like a mock trial, like [the TV show] ‘Shark Tank,’ where AWS and us judged to see who had the best one.

I was one of the coaches with the kids. We had to put together a business plan. I wanted the kids to understand what’s the addressable market of this product that they came up with. I said, ‘Hey, you guys need to find out this information: Google it.’

They went and Googled it, but they weren’t getting the information they wanted. One of these kids in 10th grade says, ‘Hold on, let me check OpenAI.’ They went on OpanAI [ChatGPT] and searched for the same thing they looked for on regular Google. And they got the information they wanted in real time.

AWS will have that solution as time goes on.

Generative AI definitely revolutionizes search. That’s the biggest thing and that’s why you saw Google trying to really hit it hard. You see Microsoft with Bing putting OpenAI in there. It changes how we search the internet.

Talk about AWS’ scalability advantage in the market.

AWS’ scalability is infinite.

I always talk about, ‘Is a customer built to scale? Are they building for the future?’ That’s what AWS is doing and that’s what we do for our customers—we make sure that our customers are built to scale.

What’s that catalyst that makes a company go from zero to $1 million overnight? Can they scale cost-effectively? And can they actually get there? Because the worst thing that a company can do is have that exponential growth overnight, but then they’re not prepared. For example, a customer comes to their application or their website or whatever it is, and they can’t get there. You lose that customer.

If you’re architected properly, you’re architected for scale, and you’re ready for that growth—you always capture that customer. That’s what Triumph pitches. That’s what AWS pitches and that’s what customers need.

The benefits that customers can realize by coming to the AWS cloud, they see an immediate savings right when they come here, in most cases, and they see an even more significant savings when they modernize.

From a channel partner standpoint, what is AWS doing right in 2023 that gives partners a leg up over the competition?

From a channel standpoint, AWS certainly got a fast start this year with alignment of their field sales teams and their customers. In typical years, it didn’t happen as quickly.

AWS takes a startup mentality. AWS is definitely the largest startup ever. That’s what I really like about working with AWS— that no matter how big they’ve gotten, they still maintain that startup mentality. And how do you pivot quickly, and in a very well thought out manner, to deliver exceptional results for the customers.

Also, AWS’ alignment with partners this year is phenomenal. The partners are getting significant, constant communication, working with the service teams and the product teams.

We’ve always been involved in partner roundtables and things like that through the years, but this year they did a global Partner Summit in Seattle. It was very impactful for the channel, not just the more mature partner like us, but up-and- coming partners. It was about understanding what AWS is rolling out and when they’re going to roll it out. There were opportunities to understand new services that were coming out, new partner programs that were coming out, and really getting executive alignment for the rest of the year. AWS keeps getting better and better.