An example of a continuing trend: infrastructural surveillance
4 December 2020 (Chania, Crete) – One of the “must go” tech events for me every year has been Amazon Web Services’s biannual re:Invent conference. But in January I hung up my conference dashing shoes and said goodbye to the conference circuit, only leaving room for the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. After 15 years it is a tough one to let go.
But then the world went topsy-turvy and “virtual” was the name of the game. And this week re:Invent lived up to its namesake by taking place 100% virtually, in the cloud. It runs for three weeks (see link above for details) so herein a few notes from the opening days. And before I dive in, a few words on the importance of AWS:
• For Amazon: It’s the high-margin crown jewel.
• For consumers: It’s the backbone powering many of your favorite parts of the internet, as we saw in a recent AWS outage.
The re:Invent conference had its usual coder overtures, with AWS unveiling a disorienting amount of specialized software and compute hardware. One surprise: it will rent out M1-chip-equipped Mac Minis to developers remotely building software for Apple products (for a pretty penny).
AWS also beefed up its retrofit game, rolling out five new machine learning services for the industrial sector. These systems could form an all-seeing eye for factory floor managers or oil rig operators. Two examples:
• The Monitron sensor-AI package keeps industrial machinery humming by flagging funky behavior and predicting malfunctions.
• With Panorama Appliance, AWS provides a brain to dumb cameras, unlocking computer vision capabilities.
• Note: These services won’t include pre-packaged facial recognition
Sound familiar? One could imagine Amazon is simultaneously upgrading and repurposing its own tech into a revenue stream. Just speculating, but turning cost centers into cash cows is exactly what it’s done with AWS, fulfillment, and more.
Companies, schools, and your neighborhood utilities still stuck on legacy tech had no choice but to upgrade this year. And that pandemic-era procurement was wind to the cloud’s back.
Critics have said AWS is losing cloudshare. AWS chief Andy Jassy addressed those naysayers this week, saying his unit’s revenue grew 29% year over year in Q3 at a $46 billion run rate.
• Google Cloud had ~45% YoY Q3 growth at a $13.6 billion run rate.
• Azure sales grew 59% in Q3. Microsoft doesn’t break out revenue, but it sits somewhere between AWS and GC.
Bottom line? In search of further growth, the pioneer of disruption is going after a relatively undisrupted industrial sector. If you look at manufacturing and industrial generally, it’s a space that has seen some innovations, but there’s a lot of pieces that haven’t been digitised and modernised. There’s a ton of data in a factory, or manufacturing facility, or a supply chain. It’s just locked up in sensors, locked up in machines that a lot of companies could get a lot of value from. Amazon said it had installed 1,000 Monitron sensors at its fulfilment centres near the German city of Mönchengladbach, where they are used to monitor conveyor belts handling packages. If successful, the move would help Amazon cement further its position as the dominant player in cloud computing, in the face of growing competition from Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud, and a prolonged run of slowed segment growth.
And what we are talking about here is predictive analytics which goes way beyond the factory floor. It can go into a car, on to a bridge, or on to an oil rig. It can cross fertilize a lot of different industries.
And the accolades flowed. A number of companies had already announced they were trialling AWS Panorama. Siemens Mobility said it would use the tech to monitor traffic flow in cities, though would not specify which. Deloitte said it was working with a major North America seaport to use the tool to monitor the movement of shipments.
There is of course “the concerns”. Amazon’s own use of tools to monitor the productivity of employees has raised concerns among critics. Throughout the pandemic, the company has used computer vision to ensure employee compliance with social-distancing guidelines – and a lot more. And that’s just the tip. I could write a whole blog post on all the externalities Amazon causes.
But it also gets into the growing trend I have written about before as regards the futility of data privacy initiatives: growing infrastructural surveillance. It contributes to the ongoing debate on the commodification and platformization of life, the under-explored infrastructural requirements of certain digital technologies, rather than its business model. It is the logical outcome of the accelerated move towards digitalisation as a transformative ecosystem that combines Big Data and Cloud, virtualization and augmentation, automation and intelligent machines, distributed computing and artificial intelligence, and insights from data that is generated by billions of connected devices.
It is not going to be stopped. And Amazon has just demonstrated it is at the head of the pack.