A Few Case Studies 0n How Top MNCs are using AWS.

Let’s have a closer look at some of AWS’s biggest clients:

Unilever

Unilever North America, the U.S. branch of the venerable global-scale manufacturer of food, household, and other consumer products, found that its time-to-market (crucial in the consumer goods industry) was being held back by the lack of standardised technology among its on-premises IT facilities and websites.

Unilever conducted an exhaustive review of the available cloud-based options, and finally chose to migrate to AWS, using a full range of AWS services to support 1,700 digital marketing web properties on a worldwide basis.

For Unilever, the advantages include increased speed of rollout for a website (now two days, rather than the pre-AWS average of two weeks), and the increased speed at which changes to a site or a marketing campaign can be made. Unilever also uses AWS for comprehensive backup and disaster recovery, and for rapid deployment of standardised infrastructure.

GE Oil & Gas

The oil and gas division of General Electric has migrated 350+ applications to AWS, cutting the average cost of ownership by over 50%, according to their own estimate. For GE, the migration process is ongoing, with constant review of on-premises applications and services to see which ones are the best candidates for transfer to the cloud.

The ability to monitor the use of cloud-based applications is important to GE’s IT team, since it allows them to accurately gauge expenses and savings, to determine when services should be active (and thus billable), and when they should be turned off.

AWS’ capacity for handling large amounts of data is important to GE as well. The oil and gas division needs to be able to process enormous volumes of mission-critical automated pipeline inspection data. It is using AWS technology to store and transport the data, and for data analysis and processing, saving time and improving the quality of the results.

Kellogg’s

The Kellogg Company, or Kellogg’s, a familiar breakfast-table name, is a company with a long history (founded in 1888), with worldwide operations. For Kellogg’s (as is the case throughout the breakfast-cereal industry), product promotions are all-important.

The Kellogg company had been relying on an on-premises database for modelling marketing campaigns and analysing promotion and sales data, but the system, which could run no more than a single simulation per day, was no longer able to keep up with the company’s needs.

As a replacement, Kellogg’s chose a SAP promotion planning and simulation application. At the same time, they chose to run the SAP application on AWS, rather than on-premises. The decision to go with AWS was motivated by a number of factors, including speed and overall capacity. (The system handles 16 TB of weekly sales data, with several dozen marketing simulations on a weekly basis.) AWS also offered high availability, reduced cost, and flexibility in IT planning. The combination of SAP and AWS (with its support for SAP software) has given Kellogg’s a significant advantage in a very competitive market.

Did You Know?

By now, you should have a better understanding of who uses AWS and how. However, what else sets AWS apart? Here are some interesting statistics about the cloud platform.

Revenue

Since launching in 2006, AWS has expanded exponentially, with Statistica stating that net sales were $25.5 billion in 2019; a significant growth compared to the $17.5 billion it made a year before.

Users

Of course, AWS wouldn’t be able to achieve such impressive revenues if it weren’t for a growing customer base. AWS claims to serve “millions of customers”, which include “fastest-growing startups, largest enterprise and leading government agencies”. In 2016, ArsTechnica reported that AWS had more than a million users.

Developers are an important demographic for AWS. According to Statistica, 26.6% of software developers used AWS services last year. Meanwhile, 19% of connected devices ran on AWS in 2019.

Services, Regions and Partners

When it comes to the product itself, AWS currently provides “175 featured services from data centres globally”. The firm operates data centres across the US, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, the UK, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden and Brazil, as well as one exclusive region for the US Government and two regions for Chinese customers. AWS also operates a large partner network, which is comprised of over 8,000 businesses that can help customers implement and build applications on the platform.

Market Share

Clearly, AWS has achieved some big milestones in recent years. But what other statistics should you know? Figures from Statistica show that AWS currently has a market share of 47.8% in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service sector, along with a share of 25.2% in the Platform-as-a-Service arena.

The AWS Opportunity

For many different organisations, the use of AWS is evidently widespread. But it’s not just interesting to see companies of varying industries implementing Amazon’s cloud tools.

They’re also using it for different use cases, whether it’s mitigating cyber security threats or developing faster websites. The opportunity here is huge. What great things will you achieve with AWS?