The big 3 cloud suppliers (AWS, Microsoft, Google) all reported revenues recently, and the word on every cloud executive’s lips was optimization. To wit, “Clients continue to evaluate ways to enhance their cloud costs in response to these difficult economic conditions.” That was from AWS’ incomes call. From Microsoft, “Clients continued to work out some care as optimization … trends … continued.” And Alphabet/Google participated in the chorus of “slower development of usage as consumers optimized GCP expenses reflecting the macro background.”
You can be forgiven for rolling your eyes at this “optimization” euphemism. In previous economic crises we were a bit more simple: Customers are cutting costs in the face of unpredictability. Except, according to these very same execs, consumers aren’t cutting their net cloud invest. Instead, they’re cutting in some areas so that they can increase costs somewhere else. And which “somewhere else” is seeing disproportionate interest? Artificial intelligence.Reallocating resources to new consumer experiences We might not remain in a main economic downturn, but you ‘d never ever know it from listening to Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet stroll through their profits. The business continue to grow rather than contract, despite the fact that they’re growing at remarkably slow rates. AWS spluttered to 16 %development, however Microsoft Azure (27%)and Google Cloud(28%) didn’t fare better, growing on much smaller income bases. These are all method off these companies ‘metronomic growth in past quarters.What’s to blame? Optimization.That’s the word each company used throughout their revenues calls to describe customer behavior.
These business are strong rivals
for cloud workloads, however they appeared to be colluding on classification. Amazon used the”O” word 12 times during its call; Microsoft, 15 times, and Google, 12 times.Of the three cloud suppliers, Amazon was perhaps the most emphatic about the optimization trend. According to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, “Clients are quite explicitly informing us that this is
not a cost-cutting effort where [they invest] less cash on technology or on the cloud. “Rather, he continued, “This is [business] reprioritizing what matters most to [their] company … and trying to reallocate resources so [they] can develop brand-new client experiences.”This has long been the guarantee of cloud: making it possible for enterprises to move with higher dexterity as they build brand-new applications to look after their consumers. Because of this, as I highlighted in June 2022,
CIOs will cut spending in many locations, however cloud is somewhat recession-proof. The cost of remaining potential development and digital improvement far surpasses any short-term benefit from conserving up cents and pennies.Among different usages of this optimized cloud spend, one particular location stands apart. As Jassy stressed:” Few folks appreciate how much new cloud company will happen over the next numerous years from the pending deluge of artificial intelligence that’s coming.”Survival of the cloudies I’ve hypothesized that the huge clouds progressively see large language models (LLMs), specifically, and AI, generally, as a battlefield for new workloads. This week the cloud CEOs verified it. The only word used more than optimization on the calls was AI, with Alphabet pointing out AI 52 times, Microsoft using it 36 times, and Amazon 12 times (however when was rather long, as Kif Leswing
mentions ). Since of the
potential consumer interest in AI, each of the cloud giants is investing enormous piles of money to develop their capabilities.The capital expenditures necessary to fund LLMs and AI are so big that this isn’t a location where we’re most likely to see startups disrupt the big vendors. The closest thing to a start-up in the area is OpenAI, however it’s backed by billions of dollars from Microsoft and others. Enterprises looking tocatch the AI wave are likely going to require aid from the big cloud vendors. “We will continue to invest in our cloud facilities, particularly AI-related invest, as we scale to the growing need driven by customer improvement,”Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella noted.”And we anticipate the resulting profits to grow with time.”Do not expect those financial investments to pay instant returns, Jassy cautions.”
Those [AI] tasks … take some time to build. “There’s a gestation duration, he goes on, when companies must not only specify what they want to construct, but also prepare where they can shutter or deprioritize some existing work.”Folks don’t recognize the amount of nonconsumption today that’s going to [become consumption] and be spent in the cloud with the introduction of big language models and generative AI, “he recommends. Those work aren’t going to operate on properties. Not most of them, anyway.Think of our present recessionary environment as the optimization calm prior to the cloud costs storm. Enterprises are in experimentation mode, cutting back in some areas while placing their AI bets for future development. Now, as ever, is a great time to be using or selling cloud. Copyright © 2023 IDG Communications, Inc. Source
