Looking to close the yawning competitive gap it faces in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) relative to fellow hyperscalers Microsoft, Google Cloud, and Oracle, AWS has formed a strategic partnership with industrial giant Siemens to offer a low-code development platform for the engineering and manufacturing markets.
Siemens CEO Roland Busch said the combination of Amazon’s Bedrock AI models with Siemens’ Mendix low-code platform will unleash broad waves of innovation for industrial companies and applications.
“This means that experts in fields such as engineering, manufacturing or logistics can now easily create and enhance applications powered by generative AI,” Busch wrote in a LinkedIn post stating that “the benefits are immense.”
As manufacturing and engineering companies strive to keep pace in the digital world by becoming “more competitive, resilient, and sustainable,” Busch wrote, “customers can select the best AI model to drive productivity and innovation and Mendix allows them to quickly integrate it. All without any dedicated programming knowledge.” Full details are available here.
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A few observations about this:
- as noted above, while AWS still rules the roost in cloud infrastructure, customers are revealing an enormous appetite for cloud software, and AWS lags well behind Microsoft, Google Cloud, and Oracle in that highly strategic category;
- low-code is a booming market that AWS cannot afford to miss — so even if it has been unable or unwilling to build out its own set of low-code solutions, the Siemens partnership gives it big-time credibility in the large and fast-changing industrial market; and
- AWS has made a very smart move by looking to broaden the awareness and availability of the Amazon Bedrock models in what is becoming a wickedly competitive segment of the booming AI sector.
On top of that, AWS cannot afford to fall farther behind its hyperscaler competitors in the enterprise-software field in general and the GenAI space in particular. The formation of the partnership with Siemens shows that AWS is willing to take new approaches to help close that gap, and I believe we can expect it to pursue and sign other similar agreements with leading global players in other vibrant industries such as retail, pharmaceuticals, financial services, and logistics.
For Siemens, the AWS partnership not only expands the company’s aggressive move into the software field — check out this page from the Siemens website and ask yourself if it represents an industrial company or a software company — but also gives it high-level cloud and AI engagements with two of the world’s four hyperscalers: AWS and Microsoft.
Busch and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had an intriguing conversation about the cloud and AI partnership a few months ago, and you can see that here.
Final Thought
Siemens and AWS aside, this is a great example of the next wave of supplier/customer relationships in this fascinating era of cloud, AI, and co-creation. As corporations that traditionally bought all of their technology from the big tech firms begin to build more and more of their own software, we can all expect to see more alliances along the lines of this Siemens/AWS partnership.
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