As Workday and AWS deepen their strategic partnership with a new initiative aimed at AI developers, it’s striking to learn that all that goodness between the two Cloud Wars Top 10 powerhouses got rolling with an initial AWS monthly bill of a whopping $38.31.
First, the details of the latest collaboration between the two companies.
Last week at the Workday Rising annual customer event — attended live by more than 15,000 people — the companies launched an initiative aimed at helping artificial intelligence (AI) developers leverage AWS and Workday more productively, rapidly, and securely.
“Workday plans to support several AWS AI services natively in Workday Extend to enable developers to create Workday Extend apps with advanced features derived from using these hyperscale innovations,” Workday said in a press release.
Those will include:
- event-processing capabilities powered by Amazon EventBridge;
- customizable functions using AWS Lambda;
- storage with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3); and
- support for AI services including Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Textract, and Amazon Translate.
The goal, Workday said, is to help developers responsible for creating customized apps to meet fast-emerging business requirements to better understand sentiment, video, images, and key phrases.
To ensure developers and customers can be confident of maintaining Workday’s high levels of security within these Workday-AWS projects, developers can use Workday Orchestrate connectors to tap into the AWS services in a fully secure fashion.
At the Rising Event, AWS VP of Technology Matt Wood joined Workday co-CEO Carl Eschenbach on stage to discuss these new advances and also to reflect a bit on the long and deep partnership their companies have enjoyed. Eschenbach said that when Wood began his career at AWS 13 years ago, AWS annual revenue was $500 million and is now about $90 billion.
Wood replied by saying that the AWS-Workday partnership began more than 10 years ago, and that in preparation for his chat with Eschenbach during Rising, Wood looked back into the AWS archives to the earliest days of their work together.
“And I found that the very first monthly bill from AWS to Workday was for the grand total of $38.31!” Wood said with a laugh.
Not missing a beat, Eschenbach quipped, “Well later on, Matt, how about if we talk about what can do to get our bills back to that level!”
As I always say here at Cloud Wars, competition is a wonderful thing — and at various times during the event, Workday executives also spoke warmly and enthusiastically of their fast-growing partnership with Google Cloud, a very serious rival of AWS.
That competitive angle probably won’t be enough to get Workday’s monthly AWS bills back under $40, but it will definitely ensure that both AWS and Google Cloud are collaborating more closely than ever before with Workday to drive great new business value for developers and other customers here in the early days of the GenAI Revolution.
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