AWS – The Lotus Notes of Public Cloud

As we are looking at the post-Thanksgiving tradition of AWS re:Invent starting tomorrow, I watched this excellent breaking Analysis from Dave Valente. Dave shared some great insights about how AWS is looking to compete with the likes of Data Bricks for dominance of data analytics. I think Dave missed the combination of the “Citizen Data Analyst” and the “Citizen Developer” powered by AWS Lambda.

 

Dave is correct that one day we’ll see AWS analytics customers include Pizza shop owners. Dave then discusses how AWS will service technical users with its IaaS offerings. I’ve championed a bigger view over the years. I believe AWS and other cloud providers will democratize application development as well.

What we see as AWS Lamdba Functions today will evolve into an application development platform aimed at the Pizza shop owner. Similar to how Lotus Notes enabled thousands of business-like developers to create applications that power business processes. Lotus Notes proved hard to kill. Not because email was hard to migrate to SaaS. Lotus Notes was hard to kill because businesses relied on applications developed within individual departments.

Ultimately, I believe the goal of AWS is to be as simple and addictive as Lotus Notes applications. The Pizza Shop owner will be both a data analyst and application developer creating new applications that enable new business opportunities.