AWS' cloud strategy continues to court Global 2000 companies

AWS has recently locked up several prominent enterprise customers, but IT teams should still carefully evaluate their cloud needs to make sure Amazon is a good fit. At its recent re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Amazon unveiled that Turner Broadcasting System chose AWS as its "preferred cloud provider." Turner, which controls networks like TBS, TNT and Cartoon Network, said it would migrate decades' worth of content to the AWS cloud, including CNN's 15 petabyte video archive, one of the biggest in the world. Turner also plans to move thousands of VMs to AWS, and it intends to use a wide range of Amazon AI technologies to better analyze and extract video metadata. Turner hopes to provide better personalization to its viewers, as well as better real-time analysis to advertisers. Turner is the latest addition to Amazon's customer list -- which now also includes Hess, Capital One, Kellogg's, Siemens, Adobe and Comcast -- to suggest that AWS' cloud strategy attracts not only startups, but enterprise buyers as well. It makes sense for these Global 2000 companies to use AWS, considering its lofty position in the cloud market, and I suspect AWS has locked up many other large companies but is unwilling to discuss details.