Amazon Invades Wall Street as Industry-Cloud Boom Rolls On

Providing a dazzling glimpse into the future of business, Goldman Sachs and Amazon’s AWS have triggered a compelling question: is Goldman Sachs getting into the cloud business, or is Amazon jumping into financial services?

However you choose to slice that, it’s an extraordinary accomplishment for Amazon, which holds the # 2 spot on my weekly Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings behind #1 Microsoft.

What they’re doing offers, as noted above, a titillating glimpse into the future of the business world in which it will be more and more difficult to define the boundaries separating the industry expertise of the customer and the technology capabilities of the cloud provider.

As this industry-cloud phenomenon intensifies, I believe we’ll see more and more of  this type of collaboration between two terrific companies reimagining how they might work together in new ways to delight and dazzle customers.

Look at how Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon described this bold new adventure: “We are redefining the future of cloud for financial services as we enable developers to focus on building financial solutions for their customers.” Pretty ambitious, isn’t it? After all, that means that a 157-year-old Wall St. firm has very publicly set its sights on “redefining the future of cloud for financial services” right as every major cloud provider in the world—Salesforce, Google Cloud, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, Workday and others—are themselves jumping aggressively into the financial-services cloud business.

As if that’s not enough, Solomon also said Goldman and AWS expect to “deliver an unparalleled solution for financial data management and analytics on the cloud, revolutionizing how our clients extract value from the increasing wealth of information in our industry.”

I think we spell that d-i-s-r-u-p-t-i-o-n.

At its core, the value proposition offered by Goldman Sachs and AWS to other investment firms is that those two companies have developed some cloud solutions that will allow developers to spend less time mucking around with old and incompatible technology and more time building powerful new data-driven investment tools.

Or as the press release from Goldman puts it:

The collaboration between Goldman Sachs and AWS will vastly reduce the need for investment firms to develop and maintain foundational data-integration technology, and lower the barriers to entry for accessing advanced quantitative analytics across global markets. Goldman Sachs institutional clients will be able to accelerate time to market for financial applications, optimize their resources to focus on portfolio returns, and innovate faster. Users of the Goldman Sachs Financial Cloud for Data will also benefit from more streamlined and secure access to best-in-class financial data from Goldman Sachs.

Could Goldman Sachs have done this on its own? Possibly—but it would have taken years longer, and in today’s hyper-accelerated world, “years” is an absolutely excessive cost. So the best path forward was a tight co-creation relationship with a big cloud provider, and clearly Goldman felt AWS was the best partner for the job.

For at least 3 years, we’ve been hearing that “every company is becoming a software company.”

Maybe the more-timely version of that is “every company could very well become a cloud company.”

And in the meantime, life in the Cloud Wars just gets more and more interesting—what’s not to like??

Subscribe to the Industry Cloud Newsletter, a free biweekly update on the booming demand from business leaders for industry-specific cloud applications.