Have we been dying to tell this to you: we’re pleased to welcome Dr Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, to take the stage at Slush 2018. Vogels is best known for being the visionary and architect behind Amazon Web Services, the world’s leading cloud service. CTO of the company for 13 years, Vogels is pretty much the epitome of what Slush program of 2018 is all about: if someone has a good close-up of his company’s product and infrastructure, it’s Vogels. We’re proud to host his – according to our current knowledge – first visit to Finland, taking place at Slush on December 5th.
Amazon, an e-commerce and cloud computing company was founded back in 1994 by Jeff Bezos. The long journey of Amazon has made Bezos one of the world’s wealthiest people. It’s not long since Amazon reached $1 trillion market cap for the first time, as a second company after Apple to do so in the US. We can’t wait to dive deeper into learning how does Vogels keep an overview of the rapidly expanding cloud business and juggle priorities within Amazon’s offering. Oh – this one’s for you number geeks out there: Amazon’s cloud unit AWS has grown to over $6B in revenue in Q2 this year and continues to grow at an impressive, 40+% rate, constituting over 10% of Amazon’s revenue.
Also interesting is the number of acquisitions Amazon has made over the past few years, many of them technical. How does Vogels assess technology-based M&A cases, and how does he go about integrating acquired companies into the Amazon tech stack?
The crowds venturing up North this year are coming to us to get the concrete advice they need, from the people who know the drill. Vogel’s long career spent having broad responsibilities within one of the most influential companies and most valuable products in the world – in addition to his diverse life’s work as an academic, researcher and engineer – makes him exactly that, through and through. Welcome to the North, Werner! We’re glad to have you.
