Last week the Newvem team participated in the first Amazon AWS re:Invent Conference. According to some leading analysts and bloggers, this was one of the most momentous technology conferences in the last few years. For Newvem it was the second most important milestone since the company was born.

Newvem was a gold sponsor of the show and the team worked around the clock a few weeks before the event. Our main goal was to bring Newvem analytics to the light, making a statement that cloud usage analytics is a crucial component in the equation for the ideal cloud. It is the component that finally ensures that the cloud’s underlying layer is tied to the business.

Over the last month we announced a vast amount of new features and partnerships. The show was a great opportunity both to expose these to our customers and potential new users and to get face-to-face feedback from AWS users. Our Business Views’ functionality received the following one word reaction from our users: “Amazing”. Our new offering to the AWS system integrators (SI) was led by our announcement of partnership with Datapipe, providing a private label for the “AWS cloud hub”. This made many AWS resellers come to us to learn more about how they can achieve a similar offering. The iPad/iPhone Smart Meter captured the imagination of prospects in less than 30 seconds.

We met some of our largest customers, gaining their appreciation, trust and the respect. A system admin from a great online service that use Newvem service walked up to our booth and said:

“I realized that I do not need to work all day doing system admin busy work – I can leave that to Newvem and become an account manager for my users.”

Hitting Your Cloud Sweet Spot Session

Over 80 attendees came to Newvem’s breakout session titled “Hitting your cloud sweet spot” to hear from a panel of cloud experts on the status, challenges and gaps in their cloud operations. Our panel discussion began by defining the “cloud sweet spot”, followed by deeper dialogue on cloud advantages and challenges of cloud. The panelists emphasized the growing internal demand from the CIO for better visibility both into cloud operations in terms of availability, security, utilization and financial efficiency, and into the business side of things, seeking a better understanding of how cloud operations aligned with business goals and which portion of their monthly cloud spent is accounted for every participating cost and profit centers.

Conference Sessions

The conference “in class” sessions were great. Most were presented by customers relating their actual experience in migrating to, adopting, and using the AWS cloud. One particularly interesting panel was the “Enterprise IT Customer Panel,” where four technology leaders discussed their experience using the AWS cloud to power their Enterprise IT. The panelists described their organization’s journey to the cloud, where cost and elasticity were the main drivers to move to the cloud. Once in the cloud, all panelists noted the agility of the IT operations in the cloud as one of the main benefits. While traditional IT are busy with day to day management of scarce resources, in the cloud the IT teams are moving away from daily maintenance tasks and moving toward serving as business expansion enablers.

When asked about their recommendations to IT organizations adopting the cloud, they cited the importance of making a shift from the paradigm of elaborate planning before implementation, moving fast using tools that allow IT teams to analyze and optimize their cloud usage, and continuously iterating and improving.

The Exhibition

Our team put on an outstanding showing at re:Invent this year. Our booth and staff attracted a tremendous amount of attention over the two and half day event. One of the main achievements on the floor was Newvem’s first annual golf classic. Re:Invent attendees that signed up for Newvem during the conference competed to win a set of Ping i20 custom fit graphite shaft golf clubs. The competition ran over an 18 hole course, with each hole indicating a cloud usage insight (i.e., open IP port security vulnerability). Andrew Kenney from Acquia won the tournament, along with several other skin tournament winners.

 

 

The Social Conference

In this social era, the conference takes place not only on the floor but also on twitter. The social media rocked. We had our online social accounts shouting out our impressions of what we saw and learned. Online twitter discussions were all over dealing with a wide range of issues, starting from this disruptive cloud revolution through the new AWS announcements, all the way to the little details of a specific best practice and AWS features. 

Via twitter and together with Newvem’s honorable partners, we buzzed out our new partnership program and all the other announcements I already mentioned above. Newvem community and followers enjoyed a steady stream of real time updates from all the conference venues, starting from the expo hall to the sessions and the keynotes. We invite you to follow and enjoy Newvem twitter updates.

Werner’s Keynote

The most inspiring keynote session was presented by Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO. In his presentation, Vogels described the new cloud disruptive paradigm, free from the traditional constraints:

“There are not servers anymore… They don’t hug you back… Your world is where you actually can build architectures that are really focused on your business,” he said.

In his keynote, he hosted Matt Wood, Chief Data Scientist at AWS, who demonstrated a tool that shows the link between the image processing system and the underlying cloud resources utilization.

“In a programmable business focused environment, we can start to relate these infrastructure metrics back into our business metrics,” Wood said.

Wood showed a graph that illustrated the decrease in costs after optimizing an image processing algorithm. The focus of the keynote moved from security and generating a resilience operation to the optimization of usage and costs. Werner finalized the keynote saying that you need to “put everything in logs” so “you can do the analytics on them” and make sure to “turn off the lights”. We were stunned to hear Werner actually pitch Newvem’s mantra that the cloud must be tied to the business, making sure that there is no waste.

Final Words

At AWS re:Invent, Newvem team had the opportunity to take an active part in discourse on the IT world’s tumultuous processes. Werner’s presentation strengthened our vision. With a great sense of ambition and renewed energies, we will continue to learn our users’ needs, extend our offering and make sure that your cloud and your business are one.

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Newvem enables CIOs, CTOs, IT managers, Operators, and Developers to profit from the cloud by syncing cloud deployment with business performance. Helping AWS users ensure that their cloud grows with revenues and shrinks with decreasing demand, “Newvem Analytics” analyzes AWS cloud behavior, reveals insights related to costs, assets and risks, and recommends solutions to manage their cloud more efficiently and effectively. The service is available as a web and native iOS app.  Create Your Free Account Now

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About the Author

Ofir Nachmani is Chief Evangelist and Community Leader at Newvem. On his previous adventure, he led ClickSoftware’s Cloud adoption initiative. He also held several positions at Zarathustra SaaS development including ContractorOffice.com product manager and company CEO. In 2009, ClickSoftware acquired the AST group and Zarathustra as part of it. Check out his personal cloud computing blog at http://www.iamondemand.com

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Keywords: Amazon web services, Amazon AWS console, Amazon cloud computing, Amazon re:Invent, AWS reinvent, IT Events, Profit from the cloud, Cloud usage, Cloud usage analytics, Cost, Security, Enterprise Cloud,

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