Datasets:

greenpau

/

amz-press-release

like 0

AWS Announces General Availability of Concurrency Scaling for Amazon Redshift

/news/news-details/2019/AWS-Announces-General-Availability-of-Concurrency-Scaling-for-Amazon-Redshift/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-General-Availability-of-Concurrency-Scaling-for-Amazon-Redshift

03/27/2019 14:12:00

AWS Announces General Availability of Concurrency Scaling for Amazon Redshift

03/27/2019

2019

With more than 200 new features and enhancements in the last two years, Amazon Redshift delivering an average of 10x faster query times and over 10,000 customers (the clear cloud leader for data warehouses) Pfizer, McDonald's, Hilton Hotels Worldwide, Amazon.com, Yelp, Intuit, Redfin, FOX Corporation, NTT DOCOMO, Equinox Fitness, and Edmunds among the more than 10,000 customers collectively processing more than two exabytes with Amazon Redshift every day SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 27, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services Inc., an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of Concurrency Scaling, a new Amazon Redshift feature that automatically adds and removes capacity to handle unpredictable demand from thousands of concurrent users. Concurrency Scaling comes at no cost to almost all customers, and every customer – even those with the spikiest workloads – will immediately see greater processing capacity at lower costs with more predictable spend. AWS also shared that Amazon Redshift has more than 10,000 customers, making it the most popular cloud data warehouse. The experience gained from serving a large and diverse customer base, along with the lessons learned from processing over two exabytes of customer data every day, has enabled Amazon Redshift to accelerate feature development and continuously optimize performance, delivering 10x faster average query times to customers over the last two years. Concurrency Scaling is the latest innovation of more than 200 features and enhancements delivered to customers during the past two years, including Elastic Resize, which adds more nodes to a cluster in minutes, and Short Query Acceleration, which uses machine learning algorithms to speed up interactive queries. To learn more about Amazon Redshift's recently released capabilities, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/. "Amazon Redshift provides ten times the performance of traditional on premises data warehouses at one tenth the cost, and it has the most customers and the largest production deployments of any cloud data warehouse provider," said Raju Gulabani, Vice President, Database, Analytics, and Machine Learning at AWS. "Customers choose Amazon Redshift for its performance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. We've had thousands of customers for several years, and as the service has grown, we've been lucky enough to get continuous feedback on what we can do to improve the service. This feedback has led to the more than 200 features and capabilities added to the service during the past two years, including Elastic Resize, Short Query Acceleration, and now Concurrency Scaling. Concurrency Scaling adds to Amazon Redshift's scalability and flexibility by transparently adding and removing capacity to handle unpredictable workloads from thousands of concurrent users. The features and enhancements released over the past two years mean that customers are seeing a 10x improvement in query times on average, and with Concurrency Scaling, the service transparently scales to handle unpredictable demand, making it ideal for all customer data warehousing workloads." In addition to the performance gains, customers choose Amazon Redshift because it provides the flexibility to extend their data warehouse to analyze exabytes of data across their Amazon S3 data lake without unnecessary data movement or duplication. Customers can store their data in their Amazon S3 data lake in popular open formats such as Parquet, ORC, and JSON. They can then use Amazon Redshift Spectrum to break down data silos to answer the most complex analytical questions and uncover new business insights across their data warehouses and data lake. Pfizer, McDonald's, Hilton Hotels Worldwide, Yelp, Intuit, Redfin, NTT DOCOMO, Equinox Fitness, and Edmunds are just a few of the more than ten thousand customers and partners that benefit from Amazon Redshift's new features and enhancements. Pfizer is one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, with revenue of $53.6 billion in 2018. "Amazon Redshift enables us to provide scientists with near real-time analysis of millions of rows of manufacturing data generated by continuous manufacturing equipment, with 1,600 data points per row," said Jim Silva, Director Business Partner, Pfizer Inc. "Redshift enables us to query our high-volume data at 10 times the performance of our prior data warehousing solution. Because of the performance and scale Redshift provides, we have increased our manufacturing efficiency by optimizing future manufacturing runs. In addition, we have reduced the time needed to gather and prepare data for regulatory submissions by a factor of five and now avoid repeated experimentation, which would otherwise have taken an extra three weeks of scientists' time." McDonald's is one of the world's leading global foodservice retailers with over 37,000 locations in 120 countries. McDonald's uses Amazon Redshift to run global workloads for operational reporting and dashboards. "Amazon Redshift enables faster business insights and growth, and provides an easy-to-manage infrastructure to support our data workloads. Redshift has given us the confidence to run more data and analytics workloads on AWS and helps us meet the growing needs of our customers," said Abhi Bhatt, Director Global Data & Analytics, McDonald's. Hilton Hotels Worldwide operates 5,400 hotels across six continents. To help drive data insights for key business applications, including worldwide hotel booking and reservation management systems, the company replaced multiple legacy data warehousing environments with a data lake running on Hadoop and AWS. Data from billions of records and objects from various reservation and business applications are fed into the data lake, where it is analyzed in real time using Hadoop and Amazon Redshift. "Using Amazon Redshift to identify common characteristics, patterns, and trends in hotel reservations, our revenue management team has already reduced analysis time by 50 percent over the previous legacy data warehouse system," said Sudhir Menon, VP of Enterprise Information Management, Hilton Hotels Worldwide. Amazon.com, one of the world's largest e-commerce companies, with over $230B in annual revenues, recently migrated all their analytical workloads from Oracle to a data lake architecture on AWS. "Amazon Redshift has been a key component of our successful migration off Oracle and has enabled us to significantly reduce the cost of our analytics while scaling to support one of the largest analytical workloads in the world," said Dave George, VP of Technology Software & Development, Amazon.com. "We currently have over 500PB of data in our Redshift clusters and our Amazon S3 data lakes that we analyze to deliver mission critical insights to support all parts of the company. Working in partnership with AWS, we continue to leverage new features such as Redshift Spectrum. Integration with Redshift Spectrum has significantly reduced the cost of analyzing our largest datasets while providing consistently fast performance." NTT DOCOMOis the largest mobile service provider in Japan, serving more than 68 million customers. "We migrated to Amazon Redshift in 2014 because it was 10 times faster than our prior on-premises system. Today, it is the center of our analytics environment," said Masayuki Tsuda, General Manager of Service Innovation Department, NTT DOCOMO. "Since we first started using Amazon Redshift, we have added thousands of analysts and data scientists to analyze tens of petabytes daily. Redshift provides our users with consistently faster performance, even as its usage within the company has grown." FOX Corporationproduces and distributes content through some of the world's leading and most valued brands, including: FOX News, FOX Sports, the FOX Network, and the FOX Television Stations. FOX empowers a diverse range of creators to imagine and develop culturally significant content, while building an organization that thrives on creative ideas, operational expertise and strategic thinking."Redshift allows us to ingest, optimize, transform, and aggregate hundreds of millions of events per day at scale, coming to us from a variety of sources," said Alex Tverdohleb, Vice President Data Services, Consumer Products & Engineering, FOX Corporation. "With recent improvements in Redshift's performance, we are noticing a 3.5x to 4x improvement in the performance of our workload over the last year alone, and at half the cost compared to other vendors. We're especially excited about Concurrency Scaling because it allows us to scale up at a moment's notice to handle unpredictable workloads with almost no additional charges. The speed and quality of the data delivery allows our internal and external customers to drive the business and operations forward faster and more cost effectively." Intuit is a leading provider of financial management software for consumers, small businesses, and accounting professionals. "We moved our mission-critical workloads to Amazon Redshift from our on-premises environment to speed development, innovate faster, and better solve customers' needs," said Jason Rhoades, System Architect at Intuit. "Redshift's performance allows us to scale our workloads by over 3x in 2019 at no additional cost. With new features such as Auto-Vacuum and Auto-Analyze, we've been able to eliminate all of our database maintenance jobs, enabling our team to focus on our customers. More teams at Intuit are looking to use Redshift for an ever-wider array of business opportunities because of its exceptional performance, cost, and elasticity." Yelp is a local-search service that aims to connect people with great local businesses and has over 148 million local business reviews. Yelp stores approximately 18 months' worth of advertising information in Amazon Redshift. Teams use the information to understand how ads are being delivered and to train models that will result in more relevant future ads. "Amazon Redshift is a critical part of Yelp's analytics infrastructure because of its performance and scalability," said Shahid Chohan, Software Engineer at Yelp. "We love how the Amazon Redshift team continuously adds features that make Redshift faster, more elastic, and easier to use. The latest new feature, Concurrency Scaling, instantly adds capacity to support additional users and removes it when the load subsides, with nothing to manage on our end. We've deployed this on all our Redshift clusters because it gives us the flexibility to handle the variance in our workloads over the course of a day without us having to intervene." All Nippon Airways (ANA) is Japan's largest airline, operating domestic and international routes. "We use Amazon Redshift to analyze ANA's international and domestic flight reservations, ticket issuing and boarding information, aircraft operation records, and cargo transportation records," said Hajime Fudeshima, director of Business Intelligence, Innovation, and IT Strategy at ANA. "Multiple divisions of ANA are able to analyze all of our data in Amazon S3 with Amazon Redshift Spectrum, enabling us to immediately generate unique insights that differentiate our business." Equinox Fitness is an American luxury fitness company with more than 145 locations within every major city across the United States in addition to London, Toronto, and Vancouver. Equinox Fitness migrated to Amazon Redshift to analyze their clickstream data. "Moving to Amazon Redshift has helped us reduce our overall maintenance costs by nearly 80% when compared to our legacy data warehouse," said Elliott Cordo, VP of Data Analytics, Equinox Fitness. "By leveraging Redshift Spectrum's ability to query data directly in our Amazon S3 data lake, we have been able to easily integrate new data sources in hours, not days or weeks. This has not only reduced our time to insight, but helped us control our infrastructure costs. Redshift requires very little maintenance, to the point where we don't even have a dedicated administrator and spend less than an hour a month on maintenance and administration." Redfin is a technology-powered real estate brokerage, combining its own full-service agents with modern technology to redefine real estate. Redfin can innovate quickly and cost effectively while managing billions of property records. "Amazon Redshift provides the core analytics infrastructure that we rely on. Using the Elastic Resize feature that was released last year, we can optimize our performance by easily scaling up our cluster when faced with increased demands and scaling down during off-peak hours," said Yong Huang, Director of Big Data and Analytics, Redfin. "Amazon Redshift's ability to query data across our Redshift cluster and our Amazon S3 data lake, gives us a single view of all our data and makes it easy for our analysts to gain the insights they need seamlessly and quickly." Edmunds is an online resource for automotive information, which offers detailed and constantly updated information about vehicles to 20 million monthly visitors. "At Edmunds, Amazon Redshift provides a scalable and cost-effective infrastructure to support all of our analytical workloads," said Greg Rokita, Executive Director of Technology, Edmunds. "Amazon Redshift delivers faster performance the more we use it because it uses machine learning to optimize our workloads and accelerates our queries. Twenty percent of our queries now complete in less than a second. We were also impressed with Redshift's new Elastic Resize feature, which adds capacity to our clusters in minutes, with no effort needed on our end. As Redshift continuously improves on performance and scalability, our mission-critical workloads automatically run even faster." Tableau's leading analytics platform helps customers derive insights from their data stored within Amazon Redshift. "Amazon Redshift is one of our customers' most commonly selected data sources, so we know firsthand the power it provides, enabling customers to create a massively scalable data warehouse with just a few clicks. We are proud to collaborate with the Amazon Redshift team to ensure an optimal customer experience when leveraging Tableau to gain insights that help them drive their business," said Brian Matsubara, Senior Director of Global Technology Alliances at Tableau Software. "We're excited to see the rapid innovation and continuous improvements in performance and scale by the Redshift team and look forward to working together to help more customers realize the power of data." Informatica provides innovative capabilities to accelerate customer adoption of cloud analytics with AI-driven automation of data management including data migration, data ingestion, data integration, and data quality. "Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is loading more than one trillion transactions per month to Amazon Redshift and we are seeing tremendous joint customer momentum and growth," said Ronen Schwartz, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cloud, Big Data, and Data Integration at Informatica. "We are excited to leverage the dramatic performance improvement and query throughput increases the Redshift team has delivered as they enable our customers to execute analytics at scale, minimize time to insight, and help our customers accelerate their data-driven digital transformations. The improvements over the last two years have enabled us to grow with confidence knowing that Redshift's performance will scale as we grow." Delivery Hero is a Berlin-based food delivery service that operates in over 40 countries, delivering more than one million orders a day. "We aggregate over 10 terabytes daily from a diverse set of data sources and APIs from around the world into our Amazon Redshift data warehouse running on AWS," said Kevin Viraud, Principal Data Engineer (International) at Delivery Hero. "Our daily processing workload has increased by 50 percent over the past 12 months but the performance improvements released by the Redshift team over the same time period have meant that we are actually processing data faster than before and haven't had to increase the size of our cluster. This has allowed us to stay well within our projected budget while improving our data delivery SLAs." Periscope Data helps data professionals across some of the world's most recognizable brands get full control over the analytics lifecycle — including ingestion, storage, analysis, visualization, and reporting — and gives line-of-business owners and non-technical users the ability to use data to quickly answer questions. "We're here to create a more data-driven world, where everyone can understand and unlock the full potential of their data," said Tom O'Neill, Co-Founder and CTO of Periscope Data. "We operate hundreds of Redshift clusters running tens of millions of queries per day, and our workloads can fluctuate significantly throughout the day. With Concurrency Scaling, Amazon Redshift makes it easy for us to efficiently add query capacity and enables us to deliver a consistently great experience to all of our customers, at any concurrent query load."

<p><em>With more than 200 new features and enhancements in the last two years, Amazon Redshift delivering an average of 10x faster query times and over 10,000 customers (the clear cloud leader for data warehouses)</em></p><p><em>Pfizer, McDonald's, Hilton Hotels Worldwide, Amazon.com, Yelp, Intuit, Redfin, FOX Corporation, NTT DOCOMO, Equinox Fitness, and Edmunds among the more than 10,000 customers collectively processing more than two exabytes with Amazon Redshift every day</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 27, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services Inc., an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of Concurrency Scaling, a new Amazon Redshift feature that automatically adds and removes capacity to handle unpredictable demand from thousands of concurrent users. Concurrency Scaling comes at no cost to almost all customers, and every customer – even those with the spikiest workloads – will immediately see greater processing capacity at lower costs with more predictable spend. AWS also shared that Amazon Redshift has more than 10,000 customers, making it the most popular cloud data warehouse. The experience gained from serving a large and diverse customer base, along with the lessons learned from processing over two exabytes of customer data every day, has enabled Amazon Redshift to accelerate feature development and continuously optimize performance, delivering 10x faster average query times to customers over the last two years.</p><p>Concurrency Scaling is the latest innovation of more than 200 features and enhancements delivered to customers during the past two years, including Elastic Resize, which adds more nodes to a cluster in minutes, and Short Query Acceleration, which uses machine learning algorithms to speed up interactive queries. To learn more about Amazon Redshift's recently released capabilities, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/.</p><p>"Amazon Redshift provides ten times the performance of traditional on premises data warehouses at one tenth the cost, and it has the most customers and the largest production deployments of any cloud data warehouse provider," said Raju Gulabani, Vice President, Database, Analytics, and Machine Learning at AWS. "Customers choose Amazon Redshift for its performance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. We've had thousands of customers for several years, and as the service has grown, we've been lucky enough to get continuous feedback on what we can do to improve the service. This feedback has led to the more than 200 features and capabilities added to the service during the past two years, including Elastic Resize, Short Query Acceleration, and now Concurrency Scaling. Concurrency Scaling adds to Amazon Redshift's scalability and flexibility by transparently adding and removing capacity to handle unpredictable workloads from thousands of concurrent users. The features and enhancements released over the past two years mean that customers are seeing a 10x improvement in query times on average, and with Concurrency Scaling, the service transparently scales to handle unpredictable demand, making it ideal for all customer data warehousing workloads."</p><p>In addition to the performance gains, customers choose Amazon Redshift because it provides the flexibility to extend their data warehouse to analyze exabytes of data across their Amazon S3 data lake without unnecessary data movement or duplication. Customers can store their data in their Amazon S3 data lake in popular open formats such as Parquet, ORC, and JSON. They can then use Amazon Redshift Spectrum to break down data silos to answer the most complex analytical questions and uncover new business insights across their data warehouses and data lake.</p><p>Pfizer, McDonald's, Hilton Hotels Worldwide, Yelp, Intuit, Redfin, NTT DOCOMO, Equinox Fitness, and Edmunds are just a few of the more than ten thousand customers and partners that benefit from Amazon Redshift's new features and enhancements.</p><p>Pfizer is one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, with revenue of $53.6 billion in 2018. "Amazon Redshift enables us to provide scientists with near real-time analysis of millions of rows of manufacturing data generated by continuous manufacturing equipment, with 1,600 data points per row," said Jim Silva, Director Business Partner, Pfizer Inc. "Redshift enables us to query our high-volume data at 10 times the performance of our prior data warehousing solution. Because of the performance and scale Redshift provides, we have increased our manufacturing efficiency by optimizing future manufacturing runs. In addition, we have reduced the time needed to gather and prepare data for regulatory submissions by a factor of five and now avoid repeated experimentation, which would otherwise have taken an extra three weeks of scientists' time."</p><p>McDonald's is one of the world's leading global foodservice retailers with over 37,000 locations in 120 countries. McDonald's uses Amazon Redshift to run global workloads for operational reporting and dashboards. "Amazon Redshift enables faster business insights and growth, and provides an easy-to-manage infrastructure to support our data workloads. Redshift has given us the confidence to run more data and analytics workloads on AWS and helps us meet the growing needs of our customers," said Abhi Bhatt, Director Global Data &amp; Analytics, McDonald's.</p><p>Hilton Hotels Worldwide operates 5,400 hotels across six continents. To help drive data insights for key business applications, including worldwide hotel booking and reservation management systems, the company replaced multiple legacy data warehousing environments with a data lake running on Hadoop and AWS. Data from billions of records and objects from various reservation and business applications are fed into the data lake, where it is analyzed in real time using Hadoop and Amazon Redshift. "Using Amazon Redshift to identify common characteristics, patterns, and trends in hotel reservations, our revenue management team has already reduced analysis time by 50 percent over the previous legacy data warehouse system," said Sudhir Menon, VP of Enterprise Information Management, Hilton Hotels Worldwide.</p><p>Amazon.com, one of the world's largest e-commerce companies, with over $230B in annual revenues, recently migrated all their analytical workloads from Oracle to a data lake architecture on AWS. "Amazon Redshift has been a key component of our successful migration off Oracle and has enabled us to significantly reduce the cost of our analytics while scaling to support one of the largest analytical workloads in the world," said Dave George, VP of Technology Software &amp; Development, Amazon.com. "We currently have over 500PB of data in our Redshift clusters and our Amazon S3 data lakes that we analyze to deliver mission critical insights to support all parts of the company. Working in partnership with AWS, we continue to leverage new features such as Redshift Spectrum. Integration with Redshift Spectrum has significantly reduced the cost of analyzing our largest datasets while providing consistently fast performance."</p><p>NTT DOCOMOis the largest mobile service provider in Japan, serving more than 68 million customers. "We migrated to Amazon Redshift in 2014 because it was 10 times faster than our prior on-premises system. Today, it is the center of our analytics environment," said Masayuki Tsuda, General Manager of Service Innovation Department, NTT DOCOMO. "Since we first started using Amazon Redshift, we have added thousands of analysts and data scientists to analyze tens of petabytes daily. Redshift provides our users with consistently faster performance, even as its usage within the company has grown."</p><p>FOX Corporationproduces and distributes content through some of the world's leading and most valued brands, including: FOX News, FOX Sports, the FOX Network, and the FOX Television Stations. FOX empowers a diverse range of creators to imagine and develop culturally significant content, while building an organization that thrives on creative ideas, operational expertise and strategic thinking."Redshift allows us to ingest, optimize, transform, and aggregate hundreds of millions of events per day at scale, coming to us from a variety of sources," said Alex Tverdohleb, Vice President Data Services, Consumer Products &amp; Engineering, FOX Corporation. "With recent improvements in Redshift's performance, we are noticing a 3.5x to 4x improvement in the performance of our workload over the last year alone, and at half the cost compared to other vendors. We're especially excited about Concurrency Scaling because it allows us to scale up at a moment's notice to handle unpredictable workloads with almost no additional charges. The speed and quality of the data delivery allows our internal and external customers to drive the business and operations forward faster and more cost effectively."</p><p>Intuit is a leading provider of financial management software for consumers, small businesses, and accounting professionals. "We moved our mission-critical workloads to Amazon Redshift from our on-premises environment to speed development, innovate faster, and better solve customers' needs," said Jason Rhoades, System Architect at Intuit. "Redshift's performance allows us to scale our workloads by over 3x in 2019 at no additional cost. With new features such as Auto-Vacuum and Auto-Analyze, we've been able to eliminate all of our database maintenance jobs, enabling our team to focus on our customers. More teams at Intuit are looking to use Redshift for an ever-wider array of business opportunities because of its exceptional performance, cost, and elasticity."</p><p>Yelp is a local-search service that aims to connect people with great local businesses and has over 148 million local business reviews. Yelp stores approximately 18 months' worth of advertising information in Amazon Redshift. Teams use the information to understand how ads are being delivered and to train models that will result in more relevant future ads. "Amazon Redshift is a critical part of Yelp's analytics infrastructure because of its performance and scalability," said Shahid Chohan, Software Engineer at Yelp. "We love how the Amazon Redshift team continuously adds features that make Redshift faster, more elastic, and easier to use. The latest new feature, Concurrency Scaling, instantly adds capacity to support additional users and removes it when the load subsides, with nothing to manage on our end. We've deployed this on all our Redshift clusters because it gives us the flexibility to handle the variance in our workloads over the course of a day without us having to intervene."</p><p>All Nippon Airways (ANA) is Japan's largest airline, operating domestic and international routes. "We use Amazon Redshift to analyze ANA's international and domestic flight reservations, ticket issuing and boarding information, aircraft operation records, and cargo transportation records," said Hajime Fudeshima, director of Business Intelligence, Innovation, and IT Strategy at ANA. "Multiple divisions of ANA are able to analyze all of our data in Amazon S3 with Amazon Redshift Spectrum, enabling us to immediately generate unique insights that differentiate our business."</p><p>Equinox Fitness is an American luxury fitness company with more than 145 locations within every major city across the United States in addition to London, Toronto, and Vancouver. Equinox Fitness migrated to Amazon Redshift to analyze their clickstream data. "Moving to Amazon Redshift has helped us reduce our overall maintenance costs by nearly 80% when compared to our legacy data warehouse," said Elliott Cordo, VP of Data Analytics, Equinox Fitness. "By leveraging Redshift Spectrum's ability to query data directly in our Amazon S3 data lake, we have been able to easily integrate new data sources in hours, not days or weeks. This has not only reduced our time to insight, but helped us control our infrastructure costs. Redshift requires very little maintenance, to the point where we don't even have a dedicated administrator and spend less than an hour a month on maintenance and administration."</p><p>Redfin is a technology-powered real estate brokerage, combining its own full-service agents with modern technology to redefine real estate. Redfin can innovate quickly and cost effectively while managing billions of property records. "Amazon Redshift provides the core analytics infrastructure that we rely on. Using the Elastic Resize feature that was released last year, we can optimize our performance by easily scaling up our cluster when faced with increased demands and scaling down during off-peak hours," said Yong Huang, Director of Big Data and Analytics, Redfin. "Amazon Redshift's ability to query data across our Redshift cluster and our Amazon S3 data lake, gives us a single view of all our data and makes it easy for our analysts to gain the insights they need seamlessly and quickly."</p><p>Edmunds is an online resource for automotive information, which offers detailed and constantly updated information about vehicles to 20 million monthly visitors. "At Edmunds, Amazon Redshift provides a scalable and cost-effective infrastructure to support all of our analytical workloads," said Greg Rokita, Executive Director of Technology, Edmunds. "Amazon Redshift delivers faster performance the more we use it because it uses machine learning to optimize our workloads and accelerates our queries. Twenty percent of our queries now complete in less than a second. We were also impressed with Redshift's new Elastic Resize feature, which adds capacity to our clusters in minutes, with no effort needed on our end. As Redshift continuously improves on performance and scalability, our mission-critical workloads automatically run even faster."</p><p>Tableau's leading analytics platform helps customers derive insights from their data stored within Amazon Redshift. "Amazon Redshift is one of our customers' most commonly selected data sources, so we know firsthand the power it provides, enabling customers to create a massively scalable data warehouse with just a few clicks. We are proud to collaborate with the Amazon Redshift team to ensure an optimal customer experience when leveraging Tableau to gain insights that help them drive their business," said Brian Matsubara, Senior Director of Global Technology Alliances at Tableau Software. "We're excited to see the rapid innovation and continuous improvements in performance and scale by the Redshift team and look forward to working together to help more customers realize the power of data."</p><p>Informatica provides innovative capabilities to accelerate customer adoption of cloud analytics with AI-driven automation of data management including data migration, data ingestion, data integration, and data quality. "Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is loading more than one trillion transactions per month to Amazon Redshift and we are seeing tremendous joint customer momentum and growth," said Ronen Schwartz, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cloud, Big Data, and Data Integration at Informatica. "We are excited to leverage the dramatic performance improvement and query throughput increases the Redshift team has delivered as they enable our customers to execute analytics at scale, minimize time to insight, and help our customers accelerate their data-driven digital transformations. The improvements over the last two years have enabled us to grow with confidence knowing that Redshift's performance will scale as we grow."</p><p>Delivery Hero is a Berlin-based food delivery service that operates in over 40 countries, delivering more than one million orders a day. "We aggregate over 10 terabytes daily from a diverse set of data sources and APIs from around the world into our Amazon Redshift data warehouse running on AWS," said Kevin Viraud, Principal Data Engineer (International) at Delivery Hero. "Our daily processing workload has increased by 50 percent over the past 12 months but the performance improvements released by the Redshift team over the same time period have meant that we are actually processing data faster than before and haven't had to increase the size of our cluster. This has allowed us to stay well within our projected budget while improving our data delivery SLAs."</p><p>Periscope Data helps data professionals across some of the world's most recognizable brands get full control over the analytics lifecycle — including ingestion, storage, analysis, visualization, and reporting — and gives line-of-business owners and non-technical users the ability to use data to quickly answer questions. "We're here to create a more data-driven world, where everyone can understand and unlock the full potential of their data," said Tom O'Neill, Co-Founder and CTO of Periscope Data. "We operate hundreds of Redshift clusters running tens of millions of queries per day, and our workloads can fluctuate significantly throughout the day. With Concurrency Scaling, Amazon Redshift makes it easy for us to efficiently add query capacity and enables us to deliver a consistently great experience to all of our customers, at any concurrent query load."</p>

AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive—the Lowest Cost Storage in the Cloud

/news/news-details/2019/AWS-Announces-General-Availability-of-Amazon-S3-Glacier-Deep-Archivethe-Lowest-Cost-Storage-in-the-Cloud/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-General-Availability-of-Amazon-S3-Glacier-Deep-Archivethe-Lowest-Cost-Storage-in-the-Cloud

03/27/2019 02:11:00

AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive—the Lowest Cost Storage in the Cloud

03/27/2019

2019

New Amazon S3 storage class meets customers' long-term data retention requirements and eliminates the complexity of managing tape, while ensuring that data is preserved for future analysis Deluxe, Vodacom, and Academic Preservation Trust among customers using S3 Glacier Deep Archive Commvault and Veritas among ISVs that will offer data backup and protection solutions integrated with S3 Glacier Deep Archive SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 27, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive, a new storage class that provides secure, durable object storage for long-term retention of data that is rarely accessed. At just $0.00099 per GB-month (less than one-tenth of one cent, or $1 per TB-month), S3 Glacier Deep Archive offers the lowest cost storage in the cloud, at prices significantly lower than storing and maintaining data in on-premises magnetic tape libraries or archiving data off-site. To get started with S3 Glacier Deep Archive visit: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/. Organizations in many market segments (e.g., financial services, healthcare, and government, etc.) are required to retain data for long periods of time to meet regulatory compliance requirements. In addition, there are organizations, such as media and entertainment companies, that want to keep a backup copy of core intellectual property. These datasets are often very large, consisting of multiple petabytes, and yet typically only a small percentage of this data is ever accessed—once or twice a year at most. To retain data long-term, many organizations turn to on-premises magnetic tape libraries or offsite tape archival services. However, maintaining this tape infrastructure is difficult and time-consuming; tapes degrade if not properly stored and require multiple copies, frequent validation, and periodic refreshes to maintain data durability. Additionally, it is difficult or impossible to do machine learning and other types of analysis directly on data stored on tape. Now, with S3 Glacier Deep Archive, customers with large datasets they want to retain for long periods will be able to eliminate both the cost and management of tape infrastructure, while ensuring that their data is preserved for future use and analysis, such as in oil and gas seismic exploration and developing autonomous vehicles. Customers can still use S3 Glacier when they want retrieval options in minutes for archive data, while S3 Glacier Deep Archive is ideal for customers who want the lowest cost for archive data that is rarely accessed. In the event that recovery becomes necessary, the objects can be recovered in as little as 12 hours with S3 Glacier Deep Archive versus days or weeks with off-site tape. "We have customers who have exabytes of storage locked away on tape, who are stuck managing tape infrastructure for the rare event of data retrieval. It's hard to do and that data is not close to the rest of their data if they want to do analytics and machine learning on it," said Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Vice President, Amazon S3, AWS. "S3 Glacier Deep Archive costs just a dollar per terabyte per month and opens up rarely accessed storage for analysis whenever the business needs it, without having to deal with the infrastructure or logistics of tape access." With six different storage class options, Amazon S3 provides the broadest array of cost-optimization options available in the cloud today. All objects stored in S3 Glacier Deep Archive are replicated and stored across at least three geographically-dispersed Availability Zones, designed for 99.999999999% (eleven nines) durability, and can be restored within 12 hours or less. S3 Glacier Deep Archive also offers a bulk retrieval option that lets customers retrieve petabytes of data within 48 hours. Customers can upload data to S3 Glacier Deep Archive over the internet or using AWS Direct Connect and the AWS Management Console, AWS Storage Gateway, AWS DataSync, AWS Command Line Interface, or the AWS Software Development Kit. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is integrated with Tape Gateway, a cloud-based virtual tape library feature of AWS Storage Gateway, so customers using it to manage on-premises tape-based backups can choose to archive their new virtual tapes in either S3 Glacier or S3 Glacier Deep Archive. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is available in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Deluxe is the world's leading video creation to distribution company offering global, end-to-end services and technology. Through unmatched scale, technology and capabilities, Deluxe enables the global market for video content. "As the demand for higher quality and increased amounts of content continues to rapidly grow, we will now have the ability to eliminate the limitations of a hybrid on-prem tape model by using S3 Glacier Deep Archive to reduce access time and rapidly shift the availability and workability of content sources exclusively on the cloud," said Andy Shenkler, Chief Product Officer, Deluxe. "AWS's S3 Glacier Deep Archive addresses the challenges that have previously existed around the economics and timelines associated with accessing and utilizing large media assets throughout every step of the content creation and distribution process." Vodacom is a leading communications company providing a wide range of services, including mobile and fixed voice, messaging, data, financial, Enterprise IT, and converged services to over 73 million customers across the African continent. "We are a data driven organization and use current and historical information to provide personalized customer offers, improve user retention, and ensure a higher quality of network service through analysis," said Willie Stegmann, Group Chief Information Officer, at Vodacom. "We identified archive and backup storage as key candidates to migrate offsite in an attempt to reduce the time we spend managing storage infrastructure. S3 Glacier Deep Archive provides us with near limitless secure and durable capacity at a cost so low that we no longer need to consider deleting critical data. The use of S3 Glacier Deep Archive also means that we can easily meet recovery time objectives of 12 to 48 hours for the identified backup and archive storage sets." The Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust) is a consortium of higher education institutions committed to providing both a preservation repository for digital content and collaboratively developed services related to that content. APTrust helps address one of the great challenges facing research libraries and their parent institutions—preventing the permanent loss of scholarship and cultural records. "We accept all types of digital content from member institutions—print, audio, video, encrypted, and other types of files," said Chip German, Program Director, APTrust. "Our members deposit with us all sorts of data they consider valuable, including data that's required by funders to be preserved and made accessible for a set period. The copies we store are usually secondary ones in case a disaster damages the primary copy, but that level of assurance comes at a cost that researchers and their institutions often haven't fully anticipated. Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive gives APTrust members a much more affordable option to preserve their data for as long as they desire, and to do so confidently and conveniently." Commvault, an AWS Partner Network Advanced Technology Partner with both Storage and Public Sector Competencies, is a recognized global enterprise software leader in the management of data for cloud and on-premises environments. "Our customers need to be able to move, manage, and use data in a way that promotes business agility and contains costs," said Karen Falcone, Vice President, Worldwide Cloud and Service Providers, at Commvault. "With Commvault's support for AWS, customers get single, comprehensive data management platform with full data protection, backup, recovery, management, and eDiscovery capabilities—all tightly integrated with AWS services. And now, S3 Glacier Deep Archive will allow us to provide the lowest cost storage available in the cloud and have it accessible, if necessary, in the future. For our customers in regulated industries, that can mean petabytes of data going back years. Customers can use S3 Glacier Deep Archive today as an Early Release feature." Veritas is an AWS Partner Network Advanced Storage competency partner and the proven industry leader in data protection and software defined storage solutions for over two decades. "Our customers need to be able to harness the power of their information with solutions designed to serve the world's most complex and largest heterogeneous environments while accelerating digital transformation, reducing risk, and delivering cost savings," said Cameron Bahar, SVP & CTO, at Veritas. "With Veritas solutions supporting AWS, we continue to extend our support for cloud usage models and provide our customers simple and agile solutions to solve complex data management issues for backup/recovery, archiving, primary storage, and disaster recovery use cases. With Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive, Veritas will be able to help customers increase their savings even more significantly. Veritas customers can use S3 Glacier Deep Archive Standard tier with the latest NetBackup version as of today."

<p><em>New Amazon S3 storage class meets customers' long-term data retention requirements and eliminates the complexity of managing tape, while ensuring that data is preserved for future analysis</em></p><p><em>Deluxe, Vodacom, and Academic Preservation Trust among customers using S3 Glacier Deep Archive</em></p><p><em>Commvault and Veritas among ISVs that will offer data backup and protection solutions integrated with S3 Glacier Deep Archive</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 27, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive, a new storage class that provides secure, durable object storage for long-term retention of data that is rarely accessed. At just $0.00099 per GB-month (less than one-tenth of one cent, or $1 per TB-month), S3 Glacier Deep Archive offers the lowest cost storage in the cloud, at prices significantly lower than storing and maintaining data in on-premises magnetic tape libraries or archiving data off-site. To get started with S3 Glacier Deep Archive visit: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/.</p><p>Organizations in many market segments (e.g., financial services, healthcare, and government, etc.) are required to retain data for long periods of time to meet regulatory compliance requirements. In addition, there are organizations, such as media and entertainment companies, that want to keep a backup copy of core intellectual property. These datasets are often very large, consisting of multiple petabytes, and yet typically only a small percentage of this data is ever accessed—once or twice a year at most. To retain data long-term, many organizations turn to on-premises magnetic tape libraries or offsite tape archival services. However, maintaining this tape infrastructure is difficult and time-consuming; tapes degrade if not properly stored and require multiple copies, frequent validation, and periodic refreshes to maintain data durability. Additionally, it is difficult or impossible to do machine learning and other types of analysis directly on data stored on tape. Now, with S3 Glacier Deep Archive, customers with large datasets they want to retain for long periods will be able to eliminate both the cost and management of tape infrastructure, while ensuring that their data is preserved for future use and analysis, such as in oil and gas seismic exploration and developing autonomous vehicles. Customers can still use S3 Glacier when they want retrieval options in minutes for archive data, while S3 Glacier Deep Archive is ideal for customers who want the lowest cost for archive data that is rarely accessed. In the event that recovery becomes necessary, the objects can be recovered in as little as 12 hours with S3 Glacier Deep Archive versus days or weeks with off-site tape.</p><p>"We have customers who have exabytes of storage locked away on tape, who are stuck managing tape infrastructure for the rare event of data retrieval. It's hard to do and that data is not close to the rest of their data if they want to do analytics and machine learning on it," said Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Vice President, Amazon S3, AWS. "S3 Glacier Deep Archive costs just a dollar per terabyte per month and opens up rarely accessed storage for analysis whenever the business needs it, without having to deal with the infrastructure or logistics of tape access."</p><p>With six different storage class options, Amazon S3 provides the broadest array of cost-optimization options available in the cloud today. All objects stored in S3 Glacier Deep Archive are replicated and stored across at least three geographically-dispersed Availability Zones, designed for 99.999999999% (eleven nines) durability, and can be restored within 12 hours or less. S3 Glacier Deep Archive also offers a bulk retrieval option that lets customers retrieve petabytes of data within 48 hours. Customers can upload data to S3 Glacier Deep Archive over the internet or using AWS Direct Connect and the AWS Management Console, AWS Storage Gateway, AWS DataSync, AWS Command Line Interface, or the AWS Software Development Kit. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is integrated with Tape Gateway, a cloud-based virtual tape library feature of AWS Storage Gateway, so customers using it to manage on-premises tape-based backups can choose to archive their new virtual tapes in either S3 Glacier or S3 Glacier Deep Archive. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is available in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.</p><p>Deluxe is the world's leading video creation to distribution company offering global, end-to-end services and technology. Through unmatched scale, technology and capabilities, Deluxe enables the global market for video content. "As the demand for higher quality and increased amounts of content continues to rapidly grow, we will now have the ability to eliminate the limitations of a hybrid on-prem tape model by using S3 Glacier Deep Archive to reduce access time and rapidly shift the availability and workability of content sources exclusively on the cloud," said Andy Shenkler, Chief Product Officer, Deluxe. "AWS's S3 Glacier Deep Archive addresses the challenges that have previously existed around the economics and timelines associated with accessing and utilizing large media assets throughout every step of the content creation and distribution process."</p><p>Vodacom is a leading communications company providing a wide range of services, including mobile and fixed voice, messaging, data, financial, Enterprise IT, and converged services to over 73 million customers across the African continent. "We are a data driven organization and use current and historical information to provide personalized customer offers, improve user retention, and ensure a higher quality of network service through analysis," said Willie Stegmann, Group Chief Information Officer, at Vodacom. "We identified archive and backup storage as key candidates to migrate offsite in an attempt to reduce the time we spend managing storage infrastructure. S3 Glacier Deep Archive provides us with near limitless secure and durable capacity at a cost so low that we no longer need to consider deleting critical data. The use of S3 Glacier Deep Archive also means that we can easily meet recovery time objectives of 12 to 48 hours for the identified backup and archive storage sets."</p><p>The Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust) is a consortium of higher education institutions committed to providing both a preservation repository for digital content and collaboratively developed services related to that content. APTrust helps address one of the great challenges facing research libraries and their parent institutions—preventing the permanent loss of scholarship and cultural records. "We accept all types of digital content from member institutions—print, audio, video, encrypted, and other types of files," said Chip German, Program Director, APTrust. "Our members deposit with us all sorts of data they consider valuable, including data that's required by funders to be preserved and made accessible for a set period. The copies we store are usually secondary ones in case a disaster damages the primary copy, but that level of assurance comes at a cost that researchers and their institutions often haven't fully anticipated. Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive gives APTrust members a much more affordable option to preserve their data for as long as they desire, and to do so confidently and conveniently."</p><p>Commvault, an AWS Partner Network Advanced Technology Partner with both Storage and Public Sector Competencies, is a recognized global enterprise software leader in the management of data for cloud and on-premises environments. "Our customers need to be able to move, manage, and use data in a way that promotes business agility and contains costs," said Karen Falcone, Vice President, Worldwide Cloud and Service Providers, at Commvault. "With Commvault's support for AWS, customers get single, comprehensive data management platform with full data protection, backup, recovery, management, and eDiscovery capabilities—all tightly integrated with AWS services. And now, S3 Glacier Deep Archive will allow us to provide the lowest cost storage available in the cloud and have it accessible, if necessary, in the future. For our customers in regulated industries, that can mean petabytes of data going back years. Customers can use S3 Glacier Deep Archive today as an Early Release feature."</p><p>Veritas is an AWS Partner Network Advanced Storage competency partner and the proven industry leader in data protection and software defined storage solutions for over two decades. "Our customers need to be able to harness the power of their information with solutions designed to serve the world's most complex and largest heterogeneous environments while accelerating digital transformation, reducing risk, and delivering cost savings," said Cameron Bahar, SVP &amp; CTO, at Veritas. "With Veritas solutions supporting AWS, we continue to extend our support for cloud usage models and provide our customers simple and agile solutions to solve complex data management issues for backup/recovery, archiving, primary storage, and disaster recovery use cases. With Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive, Veritas will be able to help customers increase their savings even more significantly. Veritas customers can use S3 Glacier Deep Archive Standard tier with the latest NetBackup version as of today."</p>

Open for Business: Shop Amazon's Curated Storefront for the 2019 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival

/news/news-details/2019/Open-for-Business-Shop-Amazons-Curated-Storefront-for-the-2019-Coachella-Valley-Music-and-Arts-Festival/default.aspx

Open-for-Business-Shop-Amazons-Curated-Storefront-for-the-2019-Coachella-Valley-Music-and-Arts-Festival

03/27/2019 08:56:00

Open for Business: Shop Amazon's Curated Storefront for the 2019 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival

03/27/2019

2019

Amazon's new festival-inspired storefront includes everything attendees need to make the most out of their time at Coachella – portable phone chargers, sunglasses, sunscreen, and more – available to ship to an Amazon Locker inside festival gates, at no additional cost SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 27, 2019-- (NASDAQ: AMZN) – Today, Amazon opened its curated storefront for the 2019 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. This new festival-inspired storefront gives customers the ability to order all of their festival essentials — either in advance for delivery to their home or to an Amazon pickup point, or by shipping directly to an Amazon Locker located inside the gates of Coachella. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190327005414/en/ Amazon Lockers, for the first time ever, will be available as a convenient and secure delivery option for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival from April 12-14 and April 19-21. (Photo: Business Wire) The curated Coachella storefront on amazon.com offers festival essentials approved by Coachella for delivery to an Amazon Locker inside the festival gates. The store features an array of items to help customers make the most out of their experience, from categories like fashion & accessories, beauty, health & wellness, tech, and camping. Items available include sunglasses, sunscreen, pain relievers, bug spray, portable fans, disposable cameras, nail art, and more. Customers can shop and ship these festival essentials at amazon.com/Coachella. "Our Amazon festival storefront is a one-stop shop for Coachella attendees. From functional items like sunscreen and hand sanitizer, to trendy accessories like instant-print cameras and aviator sunglasses, we've got festival-goers covered," said Patrick Supanc, Amazon Worldwide Director of Lockers and Pickup. "Combined with the first-ever Amazon Lockers located inside the festival grounds, we are helping attendees spend less time worrying about packing and more time enjoying the experience of a lifetime that is Coachella." Coachella 2019 takes place across two weekends in April: Weekend 1 is April 12-14 and Weekend 2 is April 19-21. Amazon shipping timelines for these dates are as follows: From now until Thursday, April 11, customers can plan ahead and order their festival essentials to their home, nearest Amazon Locker, or just about anywhere else. Beginning Thursday, April 11 at 6 a.m. PT, customers can shop and ship directly to an Amazon Locker located within festival grounds. The deadline to place orders for delivery during Weekend 1 is Sunday, April 14 at Noon PT. Customers attending the second weekend of Coachella can ship directly to the festival starting on Thursday, April 18 at 6 a.m. PT. The deadline to place orders for delivery during Weekend 2 is Sunday, April 21 at Noon PT. Orders placed by Noon PT on festival days (April 12-14 and April 19-21) will receive same-day delivery at no additional cost. All packages must be picked up before each festival weekend ends. Only Coachella pass holders will have access to the Amazon Lockers located within festival grounds. Shipping to an Amazon Locker at Coachella is easy. During checkout, starting April 11 at 6 a.m. PT, customers will select one of the Amazon Lockers named "Coachella," all located in zip code 92201, as their shipping address. Once their package is ready for pickup, customers will receive an e-mail with a barcode that they'll use to pick up their package from one of the Amazon Lockers located within the venue. Amazon team members will be onsite to answer any questions from customers picking up their packages. To celebrate the first-ever appearance of Amazon Lockers at Coachella, Amazon is giving away two VIP passes to Weekend 2 of the festival, as well as $3,000 for travel and accommodation. The winner and a guest will get to see their favorite artists and experience an Amazon Locker at Coachella firsthand. Customers interested in entering can visit amazon.com/Coachellagiveaway for more details and the official rules. The winner will be awarded by a random drawing to be held on or about April 6, 2019. Amazon Lockers are available in more than 900 cities and towns across the U.S. as an alternative, secure, and convenient delivery option available at no additional cost. Amazon Lockers are one of the many pickup points that Amazon offers to bring the ultimate convenience to customers. Other pickup points include Amazon Pickup Locations in neighborhoods, cities and campuses across the U.S., and Hub by Amazon for apartment buildings. For more information about Amazon Lockers at Coachella, visit amazon.com/Coachella. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190327005414/en/ Source: Amazon Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr

<p><em>Amazon's new festival-inspired storefront includes everything attendees need to make the most out of their time at Coachella – portable phone chargers, sunglasses, sunscreen, and more – available to ship to an Amazon Locker inside festival gates, at no additional cost</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 27, 2019-- (NASDAQ: AMZN) – Today, Amazon opened its curated storefront for the 2019 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. This new festival-inspired storefront gives customers the ability to order all of their festival essentials — either in advance for delivery to their home or to an Amazon pickup point, or by shipping directly to an Amazon Locker located inside the gates of Coachella.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190327005414/en/</p><div><p>Amazon Lockers, for the first time ever, will be available as a convenient and secure delivery option for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival from April 12-14 and April 19-21. (Photo: Business Wire)</p></div><p>The curated Coachella storefront on amazon.com offers festival essentials approved by Coachella for delivery to an Amazon Locker inside the festival gates. The store features an array of items to help customers make the most out of their experience, from categories like fashion &amp; accessories, beauty, health &amp; wellness, tech, and camping. Items available include sunglasses, sunscreen, pain relievers, bug spray, portable fans, disposable cameras, nail art, and more. Customers can shop and ship these festival essentials at amazon.com/Coachella.</p><p>"Our Amazon festival storefront is a one-stop shop for Coachella attendees. From functional items like sunscreen and hand sanitizer, to trendy accessories like instant-print cameras and aviator sunglasses, we've got festival-goers covered," said Patrick Supanc, Amazon Worldwide Director of Lockers and Pickup. "Combined with the first-ever Amazon Lockers located inside the festival grounds, we are helping attendees spend less time worrying about packing and more time enjoying the experience of a lifetime that is Coachella."</p><p>Coachella 2019 takes place across two weekends in April: Weekend 1 is April 12-14 and Weekend 2 is April 19-21. Amazon shipping timelines for these dates are as follows:</p><ul><li>From now until Thursday, April 11, customers can plan ahead and order their festival essentials to their home, nearest Amazon Locker, or just about anywhere else.</li><li>Beginning Thursday, April 11 at 6 a.m. PT, customers can shop and ship directly to an Amazon Locker located within festival grounds. The deadline to place orders for delivery during Weekend 1 is Sunday, April 14 at Noon PT.</li><li>Customers attending the second weekend of Coachella can ship directly to the festival starting on Thursday, April 18 at 6 a.m. PT. The deadline to place orders for delivery during Weekend 2 is Sunday, April 21 at Noon PT.</li><li>Orders placed by Noon PT on festival days (April 12-14 and April 19-21) will receive same-day delivery at no additional cost. All packages must be picked up before each festival weekend ends. Only Coachella pass holders will have access to the Amazon Lockers located within festival grounds.</li></ul><p>Shipping to an Amazon Locker at Coachella is easy. During checkout, starting April 11 at 6 a.m. PT, customers will select one of the Amazon Lockers named "Coachella," all located in zip code 92201, as their shipping address. Once their package is ready for pickup, customers will receive an e-mail with a barcode that they'll use to pick up their package from one of the Amazon Lockers located within the venue. Amazon team members will be onsite to answer any questions from customers picking up their packages.</p><p>To celebrate the first-ever appearance of Amazon Lockers at Coachella, Amazon is giving away two VIP passes to Weekend 2 of the festival, as well as $3,000 for travel and accommodation. The winner and a guest will get to see their favorite artists and experience an Amazon Locker at Coachella firsthand. Customers interested in entering can visit amazon.com/Coachellagiveaway for more details and the official rules. The winner will be awarded by a random drawing to be held on or about April 6, 2019.</p><p>Amazon Lockers are available in more than 900 cities and towns across the U.S. as an alternative, secure, and convenient delivery option available at no additional cost. Amazon Lockers are one of the many pickup points that Amazon offers to bring the ultimate convenience to customers. Other pickup points include Amazon Pickup Locations in neighborhoods, cities and campuses across the U.S., and Hub by Amazon for apartment buildings.</p><p>For more information about Amazon Lockers at Coachella, visit amazon.com/Coachella.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190327005414/en/</p><p>Source: Amazon</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p>

Volkswagen and AWS Join Forces to Transform Automotive Manufacturing

/news/news-details/2019/Volkswagen-and-AWS-Join-Forces-to-Transform-Automotive-Manufacturing/default.aspx

Volkswagen-and-AWS-Join-Forces-to-Transform-Automotive-Manufacturing

03/27/2019 05:00:00

Volkswagen and AWS Join Forces to Transform Automotive Manufacturing

03/27/2019

2019

AWS will power the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud, automating all automobile manufacturing and logistics processes Industrial digital production platform to empower a worldwide industrial ecosystem that will integrate more than 30,000 facilities and 1,500 suppliers and partners in Volkswagen's global supply chain over time SEATTLE & WOLFSBURG, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 27, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), and the Volkswagen Group announced a multi-year, global agreement to build the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud, a cloud-based Industrial digital production platform that will transform the automotive company's manufacturing and logistics processes. Volkswagen will rely upon the breadth and depth of AWS's portfolio of services, including IoT, machine learning, analytics, and compute services to increase plant efficiency and uptime, improve production flexibility, and increase vehicle quality. The Volkswagen Industrial Cloud will bring together real-time data from all of the Volkswagen Group's 122 manufacturing plants to manage the overall effectiveness of assembly equipment, as well as track parts and vehicles. Volkswagen will use the suite of AWS IoT services, including AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Analytics, and AWS IoT SiteWise, to detect, collect, organize, and run sophisticated analytics on data from the plant floor. AWS's IoT services will deliver new insights into manufacturing operations across facilities that will optimize production and improve process efficiencies. With a company-wide Data Lake built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to analyze the data, Volkswagen will glean insights that will pinpoint operational trends, improve forecasting, and streamline operations by identifying gaps in production and waste. Volkswagen will use Amazon SageMaker, a fully-managed service that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly, to optimize the operation of machinery and equipment in all of its plants. Additionally, Volkswagen plans to use AWS Outposts, which bring native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models on-premises, providing seamless functionality between the factory floor and the cloud for latency sensitive applications, offering a consistent hybrid experience. "We will continue to strengthen production as a key competitive factor for the Volkswagen Group. Our strategic collaboration with AWS will lay the foundation," says Oliver Blume, Chairman of the Executive Board of Porsche AG and Member of the Board of Management of Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft responsible for ‘Production'. "The Volkswagen Group, with its global expertise in automobile production, and AWS, with its technological know-how, complement each other extraordinarily well. With our global industry platform we want to create a growing industrial ecosystem with transparency and efficiency bringing benefits to all concerned." "Volkswagen's industrial cloud, which will reinvent its manufacturing and logistics processes, is yet another example of how Volkswagen continues to innovate and lead," said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. "Volkswagen's and AWS's collaboration will have a profound impact on efficiency and quality in production throughout Volkswagen's global supply chain, as Volkswagen gains access to the broadest and deepest cloud with the most functionality, the most innovation, the highest performance and security, and the largest community of partners and customers of any other infrastructure provider. We are tightly aligned across Volkswagen's businesses to help them reimagine the future of automobile manufacturing by taking advantage of all the benefits the cloud can deliver."

<p><em>AWS will power the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud, automating all automobile manufacturing and logistics processes</em></p><p>Industrial digital production platform to empower a worldwide industrial ecosystem that will integrate more than 30,000 facilities and 1,500 suppliers and partners in Volkswagen's global supply chain over time</p><p>SEATTLE &amp; WOLFSBURG, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 27, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), and the Volkswagen Group announced a multi-year, global agreement to build the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud, a cloud-based Industrial digital production platform that will transform the automotive company's manufacturing and logistics processes. Volkswagen will rely upon the breadth and depth of AWS's portfolio of services, including IoT, machine learning, analytics, and compute services to increase plant efficiency and uptime, improve production flexibility, and increase vehicle quality.</p><p>The Volkswagen Industrial Cloud will bring together real-time data from all of the Volkswagen Group's 122 manufacturing plants to manage the overall effectiveness of assembly equipment, as well as track parts and vehicles. Volkswagen will use the suite of AWS IoT services, including AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Analytics, and AWS IoT SiteWise, to detect, collect, organize, and run sophisticated analytics on data from the plant floor. AWS's IoT services will deliver new insights into manufacturing operations across facilities that will optimize production and improve process efficiencies. With a company-wide Data Lake built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to analyze the data, Volkswagen will glean insights that will pinpoint operational trends, improve forecasting, and streamline operations by identifying gaps in production and waste. Volkswagen will use Amazon SageMaker, a fully-managed service that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly, to optimize the operation of machinery and equipment in all of its plants. Additionally, Volkswagen plans to use AWS Outposts, which bring native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models on-premises, providing seamless functionality between the factory floor and the cloud for latency sensitive applications, offering a consistent hybrid experience.</p><p>"We will continue to strengthen production as a key competitive factor for the Volkswagen Group. Our strategic collaboration with AWS will lay the foundation," says Oliver Blume, Chairman of the Executive Board of Porsche AG and Member of the Board of Management of Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft responsible for ‘Production'. "The Volkswagen Group, with its global expertise in automobile production, and AWS, with its technological know-how, complement each other extraordinarily well. With our global industry platform we want to create a growing industrial ecosystem with transparency and efficiency bringing benefits to all concerned."</p><p>"Volkswagen's industrial cloud, which will reinvent its manufacturing and logistics processes, is yet another example of how Volkswagen continues to innovate and lead," said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. "Volkswagen's and AWS's collaboration will have a profound impact on efficiency and quality in production throughout Volkswagen's global supply chain, as Volkswagen gains access to the broadest and deepest cloud with the most functionality, the most innovation, the highest performance and security, and the largest community of partners and customers of any other infrastructure provider. We are tightly aligned across Volkswagen's businesses to help them reimagine the future of automobile manufacturing by taking advantage of all the benefits the cloud can deliver."</p>

Standard Bank Group Selects AWS as Its Preferred Cloud Provider

/news/news-details/2019/Standard-Bank-Group-Selects-AWS-as-Its-Preferred-Cloud-Provider/default.aspx

Standard-Bank-Group-Selects-AWS-as-Its-Preferred-Cloud-Provider

03/27/2019 02:00:00

Standard Bank Group Selects AWS as Its Preferred Cloud Provider

03/27/2019

2019

One of Africa's largest lenders selects AWS to accelerate mass migration, drive digital transformation, and enhance security posture in the cloud SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 27, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Standard Bank Group has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider with the intention of migrating its production workloads, including its customer facing platforms and strategic core banking applications to the cloud. Standard Bank Group will leverage AWS services, including data analytics and machine learning, to automate financial operations and enhance customer facing web and mobile applications. The migration to AWS will take place across all business units, subject to approvals from local regulators, including Personal Banking, Wealth, Corporate Investment Banking, and Insurance, driving a more personalized banking and investment experience for customers. Standard Bank Group chose AWS because of its broad and deep portfolio of cloud services, overall commitment to security excellence, and strong financial services experience. The South African Reserve Bank also confirmed Standard Bank Group can make the move to AWS while still meeting all current compliance requirements. Standard Bank Group will take advantage of advanced analytics and machine learning services, including Amazon SageMaker, to advance fraud detection and launch new business initiatives, such as machine learning-based advisor capabilities that will help customers make more informed financial decisions. As part of the move, an AWS Cloud Center of Excellence will be established within the bank, featuring a dedicated team focused on facilitating the migration to the cloud and building AWS training and certification programs to up-skill all employees. AWS and Standard Bank Group will also collaborate on building an education and digital skills program, to be launched across Southern Africa, to train the next generation of African cloud experts. "Our vision is to be Africa's leading financial services organization and to achieve this we have chosen to work with the world's leading cloud," said Sim Tshabalala, Group CEO of Standard Bank. "For Standard Bank Group to remain a leader in African financial services, we recognize we need to adopt a cloud-first approach to our business. AWS Cloud technology will create a springboard for Standard Bank Group, helping us to rapidly roll out our digitization and data strategy to better cater to customers whose needs are constantly evolving. The combination of AWS's rapid agility and high levels of security, combined with Standard Bank's customer obsession and desire to constantly raise the bar, will allow us to build Africa's financial services organization of the future and to be positioned as more than a bank." "The cloud is transforming the financial services industry as organizations look for new ways to enhance customer experiences, and power their entire enterprise operations more efficiently and effectively on the world's leading cloud," said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. "Standard Bank Group has been a trusted financial institution for more than 150 years. We look forward to working closely with them as they become Africa's first bank in the cloud, leveraging AWS to innovate new services at a faster clip, maintain operational excellence, and provide secure banking services to customers around the world."

<p><em>One of Africa's largest lenders selects AWS to accelerate mass migration, drive digital transformation, and enhance security posture in the cloud</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 27, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Standard Bank Group has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider with the intention of migrating its production workloads, including its customer facing platforms and strategic core banking applications to the cloud. Standard Bank Group will leverage AWS services, including data analytics and machine learning, to automate financial operations and enhance customer facing web and mobile applications. The migration to AWS will take place across all business units, subject to approvals from local regulators, including Personal Banking, Wealth, Corporate Investment Banking, and Insurance, driving a more personalized banking and investment experience for customers.</p><p>Standard Bank Group chose AWS because of its broad and deep portfolio of cloud services, overall commitment to security excellence, and strong financial services experience. The South African Reserve Bank also confirmed Standard Bank Group can make the move to AWS while still meeting all current compliance requirements. Standard Bank Group will take advantage of advanced analytics and machine learning services, including Amazon SageMaker, to advance fraud detection and launch new business initiatives, such as machine learning-based advisor capabilities that will help customers make more informed financial decisions. As part of the move, an AWS Cloud Center of Excellence will be established within the bank, featuring a dedicated team focused on facilitating the migration to the cloud and building AWS training and certification programs to up-skill all employees. AWS and Standard Bank Group will also collaborate on building an education and digital skills program, to be launched across Southern Africa, to train the next generation of African cloud experts.</p><p>"Our vision is to be Africa's leading financial services organization and to achieve this we have chosen to work with the world's leading cloud," said Sim Tshabalala, Group CEO of Standard Bank. "For Standard Bank Group to remain a leader in African financial services, we recognize we need to adopt a cloud-first approach to our business. AWS Cloud technology will create a springboard for Standard Bank Group, helping us to rapidly roll out our digitization and data strategy to better cater to customers whose needs are constantly evolving. The combination of AWS's rapid agility and high levels of security, combined with Standard Bank's customer obsession and desire to constantly raise the bar, will allow us to build Africa's financial services organization of the future and to be positioned as more than a bank."</p><p>"The cloud is transforming the financial services industry as organizations look for new ways to enhance customer experiences, and power their entire enterprise operations more efficiently and effectively on the world's leading cloud," said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. "Standard Bank Group has been a trusted financial institution for more than 150 years. We look forward to working closely with them as they become Africa's first bank in the cloud, leveraging AWS to innovate new services at a faster clip, maintain operational excellence, and provide secure banking services to customers around the world."</p>

Amazon Selling Partner Conferences Sell Out in Six Weeks, with 1,800+ Small and Medium Sized Businesses Set to Learn about How to Build and Grow their Sales Online

/news/news-details/2019/Amazon-Selling-Partner-Conferences-Sell-Out-in-Six-Weeks-with-1800-Small-and-Medium-Sized-Businesses-Set-to-Learn-about-How-to-Build-and-Grow-their-Sales-Online/default.aspx

Amazon-Selling-Partner-Conferences-Sell-Out-in-Six-Weeks-with-1800-Small-and-Medium-Sized-Businesses-Set-to-Learn-about-How-to-Build-and-Grow-their-Sales-Online

03/25/2019 08:06:00

Amazon Selling Partner Conferences Sell Out in Six Weeks, with 1,800+ Small and Medium Sized Businesses Set to Learn about How to Build and Grow their Sales Online

03/25/2019

2019

Events will run in Fort Lauderdale, FL; Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, CA; and Seattle, WA between March and October 2019 Attendees will learn how to leverage tools and resources to help their business succeed in Amazon's Stores, prepare for seasonal surges, network with fellow sellers, and get one-to-one help from Amazon's selling experts More than half of units sold in Amazon's stores are from small and medium-sized businesses, with over a million U.S.-based small and medium-sized businesses selling in Amazon's stores SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 25, 2019-- Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced that its new Selling Partner Summits, a series of six conferences for small and medium-sized business (SMBs) to help them build their business in Amazon's stores, have sold out in just six weeks. More than 1,800 SMBs are set to attend the nationwide events between March and October. The Summits are part of Amazon's significant investment to help businesses succeed in selling their products online. Each Summit will feature an Amazon-led educational track, experts lounge, and product labs to help small businesses build and grow their sales in Amazon's stores. Participants will learn directly from Amazon's experts and meet like-minded Amazon sellers to network, learn, and share success stories. The first event will be held in Ft. Lauderdale, FL on March 26-27. Later in 2019, the Summits will be hosted in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle. "We are a champion of small business across America, investing heavily to help over a million businesses sell their products in Amazon Stores while creating economic opportunity and jobs for hundreds of thousands of people across the country," said Pete Sauerborn, VP of Selling Partner Recruitment and Development for Amazon. "As part of our commitment to empowering small business, these summits are another powerful tool to help them learn how to sell online and grow their sales." At the Summits, attendees will have an Amazon-led educational track based on their business model and how long they've been selling. The educational tracks are segmented as New Brand Owner, Established Brand Owner, New Reseller, and Established Resellers. Each track is engineered for sellers to walk away from the event with knowledge and insights to help them scale their business and better identify the growth levers that make the most sense for their business. The Selling Partner Summit Series will feature sessions designed to help sellers grow their business, including: Customer Obsession: Understand your pivotal role in Amazon's commitment to maintaining outstanding customer experience. The Selling Partner Journey: Get an overview of the tools and programs available to sellers and how they can help you grow your business. Inventory & Fulfillment: Study up on fulfillment options and inventory management best practices to prevent stock-outs and plan for seasonal sales surges. Discovery: Learn how to help Amazon customers find your products via listing creation, search optimization, and advertising opportunities. Account Health: Understand the policies, metrics, and processes pertaining to your account health. Featured Offers (buy box): Make sense of featured offer eligibility and the performance-based requirements products must meet to 'win the featured offer.' Amazon Expert Lounge: Ask your remaining questions 1:1 in the Expert Lounge after completing the educational tracks. Registration for the new Selling Partner Summit Series opened on February 6th and sold out quickly in just six weeks. Amazon has previously hosted events to help sellers including Amazon Academy events across Europe and the Boost Conference in the U.S., specifically for businesses using the Fulfillment by Amazon service. More than half of units sold in Amazon's stores are from SMBs. The 2018 Amazon Small Business Impact Report revealed that there are more than one million U.S.-based SMBs selling in Amazon's stores, and SMBs are estimated to have created more than 900,000 jobs worldwide to support their sales through Amazon. In 2018, more than 50,000 small and medium-sized businesses exceeded $500,000 in sales in Amazon's stores worldwide, and nearly 200,000 surpassed $100,000 in sales. The number of small and medium-sized businesses eclipsing $1 million in sales in Amazon's stores worldwide grew by 20 percent last year. To learn more about the Selling Partner Summit Series, visit here. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190325005129/en/ Source: Amazon Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr

<p><em>Events will run in Fort Lauderdale, FL; Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, CA; and Seattle, WA between March and October 2019</em></p><p><em>Attendees will learn how to leverage tools and resources to help their business succeed in Amazon's Stores, prepare for seasonal surges, network with fellow sellers, and get one-to-one help from Amazon's selling experts</em></p><p><em>More than half of units sold in Amazon's stores are from small and medium-sized businesses, with over a million U.S.-based small and medium-sized businesses selling in Amazon's stores</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 25, 2019-- Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced that its new Selling Partner Summits, a series of six conferences for small and medium-sized business (SMBs) to help them build their business in Amazon's stores, have sold out in just six weeks. More than 1,800 SMBs are set to attend the nationwide events between March and October. The Summits are part of Amazon's significant investment to help businesses succeed in selling their products online.</p><p>Each Summit will feature an Amazon-led educational track, experts lounge, and product labs to help small businesses build and grow their sales in Amazon's stores. Participants will learn directly from Amazon's experts and meet like-minded Amazon sellers to network, learn, and share success stories. The first event will be held in Ft. Lauderdale, FL on March 26-27. Later in 2019, the Summits will be hosted in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle.</p><p>"We are a champion of small business across America, investing heavily to help over a million businesses sell their products in Amazon Stores while creating economic opportunity and jobs for hundreds of thousands of people across the country," said Pete Sauerborn, VP of Selling Partner Recruitment and Development for Amazon. "As part of our commitment to empowering small business, these summits are another powerful tool to help them learn how to sell online and grow their sales."</p><p>At the Summits, attendees will have an Amazon-led educational track based on their business model and how long they've been selling. The educational tracks are segmented as New Brand Owner, Established Brand Owner, New Reseller, and Established Resellers. Each track is engineered for sellers to walk away from the event with knowledge and insights to help them scale their business and better identify the growth levers that make the most sense for their business.</p><p>The Selling Partner Summit Series will feature sessions designed to help sellers grow their business, including:</p><ul><li>Customer Obsession: Understand your pivotal role in Amazon's commitment to maintaining outstanding customer experience.</li><li>The Selling Partner Journey: Get an overview of the tools and programs available to sellers and how they can help you grow your business.</li><li>Inventory &amp; Fulfillment: Study up on fulfillment options and inventory management best practices to prevent stock-outs and plan for seasonal sales surges.</li><li>Discovery: Learn how to help Amazon customers find your products via listing creation, search optimization, and advertising opportunities.</li><li>Account Health: Understand the policies, metrics, and processes pertaining to your account health.</li><li>Featured Offers (buy box): Make sense of featured offer eligibility and the performance-based requirements products must meet to 'win the featured offer.'</li><li>Amazon Expert Lounge: Ask your remaining questions 1:1 in the Expert Lounge after completing the educational tracks.</li></ul><p>Registration for the new Selling Partner Summit Series opened on February 6^th and sold out quickly in just six weeks. Amazon has previously hosted events to help sellers including Amazon Academy events across Europe and the Boost Conference in the U.S., specifically for businesses using the Fulfillment by Amazon service.</p><p>More than half of units sold in Amazon's stores are from SMBs. The 2018 Amazon Small Business Impact Report revealed that there are more than one million U.S.-based SMBs selling in Amazon's stores, and SMBs are estimated to have created more than 900,000 jobs worldwide to support their sales through Amazon. In 2018, more than 50,000 small and medium-sized businesses exceeded $500,000 in sales in Amazon's stores worldwide, and nearly 200,000 surpassed $100,000 in sales. The number of small and medium-sized businesses eclipsing $1 million in sales in Amazon's stores worldwide grew by 20 percent last year.</p><p>To learn more about the Selling Partner Summit Series, visit here.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190325005129/en/</p><p>Source: Amazon</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p>

MLB.TV Now Available on Prime Video Channels

/news/news-details/2019/MLB.TV-Now-Available-on-Prime-Video-Channels/default.aspx

MLB.TV-Now-Available-on-Prime-Video-Channels

03/20/2019 15:10:00

MLB.TV Now Available on Prime Video Channels

03/20/2019

2019

Prime members in the U.S. can subscribe to MLB.TV and stream regular season out-of-market Major League Baseball games SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 20, 2019-- (NASDAQ: AMZN)—Amazon today announced the launch of MLB.TV on Prime Video Channels, allowing Prime members to subscribe to MLB.TV and stream regular season out-of-market baseball games live and on-demand, all from the Prime Video service. With MLB.TV, Prime members have a convenient option to watch live out-of-market MLB games while at home or on-the-go. Baseball fans can cheer on their favorite teams with MLB.TV on the Prime Video app across hundreds of devices, including compatible TVs, game consoles, set-top boxes and other connected devices, including Amazon Fire TV, mobile devices and online. MLB.TV will work seamlessly in Prime Video, with no additional apps to download or passwords to remember. "Prime members love the convenience of streaming live sports on-the-go—and now with MLB.TV, they won't have to miss watching their favorite teams play," said Marie Donoghue, Vice President, Global Sports Video. "We know Prime members can't get enough of sports, and we're dedicated to providing more access to the Major League Baseball games they want." Prime members streaming MLB.TV on Fire TV devices (Fire TV Cube, Fire TV Stick, Fire TV Stick 4K, and Fire TV Edition) will have access to Prime Video's exclusive X-Ray feature, which allows fans to access live in-game stats, team and player details and play-by-play information while they watch. To access the X-Ray feature, simply click up on the Fire TV remote control while the game is playing. Prime members in the U.S. can subscribe to MLB.TV for $24.99/month, or a one-time payment of $118.99 for a Season Pass, after a 7-day free trial. For more information on MLB.TV, visit www.amazon.com/mlbtv. MLB.TV joins an expanding, top tier selection of live and on-demand sports content available on Prime Video, including NFL Thursday Night Football games, AVP Pro Beach Volleyball tournaments, and the Laver Cup tennis tournament available to Prime members around the world, and English Premier League matches, the US Open, and the men's ATP World Tour available in the UK. Prime members can watch additional sports content by subscribing to CBS All Access, NBA League Pass and PGA TOUR LIVE in the U.S., and the Eurosport Player in the U.K. and Germany. Amazon customers in the U.S. can also purchase UFC pay-per-view events. "Prime Video will be another great distribution platform for out-of-market fans to have daily access to live baseball," said Chris Tully, MLB Executive Vice President, Global Media. "Combining MLB.TV with Prime Video will provide a seamless experience for subscribers to follow their favorite teams and players." About Prime Video Prime Video is a premium streaming service that offers customers a vast collection of digital videos—all with the ease of finding what they love to watch in one place. Included with Prime: Watch thousands of popular movies and TV shows, including our award-winning Prime Originals such as Emmy-winning The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Homecoming, The Man in the High Castle,Bosch, Academy Award-winning Manchester by the Sea and The Salesman,Academy Award-nominated The Big Sick and the critically acclaimed Beautiful Boy, exclusives, live sports and licensed and self-published content available in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. Watch more with Prime Video Channels: Prime members can add 100+ channels like HBO, Cinemax, STARZ, SHOWTIME, CBS All Access, and more—no extra apps to download, and no cable required. Only pay for the ones you want, and cancel anytime. View the full list of channels available at amazon.com/channels. Rent or Buy: Enjoy hundreds of thousands of titles, including new-release movies and entire seasons of current TV episodes, available for all Amazon customers to rent or buy. Instant access: Watch where and when you want with the Prime Video app on your smart TV, mobile device, Fire TV, Fire tablet, Apple TV, game consoles or from the web. For a complete list of compatible devices, visit amazon.com/howtostream. Enhanced experiences: Make the most of every viewing with 4K Ultra HD- and High Dynamic Range (HDR)-compatible content. Go behind the scenes of your favorite movies and TV shows with exclusive X-Ray access, powered by IMDb. Save it for later with select mobile downloads for offline viewing. In addition to access to movies and TV shows included with Prime, the Prime membership includes unlimited fast free shipping options across all categories available on Amazon, more than two million songs and thousands of playlists and stations with Prime Music, secure photo storage with Prime Photos, unlimited reading with Prime Reading, unlimited access to a digital audiobook catalogue with Audible Channels for Prime, a rotating selection of free digital games and in-game loot with Twitch Prime, early access to select Lightning Deals, exclusive access and discounts to select items, and more. To sign-up for Prime or to find out more visit: amazon.com/prime. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190320005746/en/ Source: Amazon.com, Inc. Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr

<p><em>Prime members in the U.S. can subscribe to MLB.TV and stream regular season out-of-market Major League Baseball games</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 20, 2019-- (NASDAQ: AMZN)—Amazon today announced the launch of MLB.TV on Prime Video Channels, allowing Prime members to subscribe to MLB.TV and stream regular season out-of-market baseball games live and on-demand, all from the Prime Video service.</p><p>With MLB.TV, Prime members have a convenient option to watch live out-of-market MLB games while at home or on-the-go. Baseball fans can cheer on their favorite teams with MLB.TV on the Prime Video app across hundreds of devices, including compatible TVs, game consoles, set-top boxes and other connected devices, including Amazon Fire TV, mobile devices and online. MLB.TV will work seamlessly in Prime Video, with no additional apps to download or passwords to remember.</p><p>"Prime members love the convenience of streaming live sports on-the-go—and now with MLB.TV, they won't have to miss watching their favorite teams play," said Marie Donoghue, Vice President, Global Sports Video. "We know Prime members can't get enough of sports, and we're dedicated to providing more access to the Major League Baseball games they want."</p><p>Prime members streaming MLB.TV on Fire TV devices (Fire TV Cube, Fire TV Stick, Fire TV Stick 4K, and Fire TV Edition) will have access to Prime Video's exclusive X-Ray feature, which allows fans to access live in-game stats, team and player details and play-by-play information while they watch. To access the X-Ray feature, simply click up on the Fire TV remote control while the game is playing.</p><p>Prime members in the U.S. can subscribe to MLB.TV for $24.99/month, or a one-time payment of $118.99 for a Season Pass, after a 7-day free trial. For more information on MLB.TV, visit www.amazon.com/mlbtv.</p><p>MLB.TV joins an expanding, top tier selection of live and on-demand sports content available on Prime Video, including NFL Thursday Night Football games, AVP Pro Beach Volleyball tournaments, and the Laver Cup tennis tournament available to Prime members around the world, and English Premier League matches, the US Open, and the men's ATP World Tour available in the UK. Prime members can watch additional sports content by subscribing to CBS All Access, NBA League Pass and PGA TOUR LIVE in the U.S., and the Eurosport Player in the U.K. and Germany. Amazon customers in the U.S. can also purchase UFC pay-per-view events.</p><p>"Prime Video will be another great distribution platform for out-of-market fans to have daily access to live baseball," said Chris Tully, MLB Executive Vice President, Global Media. "Combining MLB.TV with Prime Video will provide a seamless experience for subscribers to follow their favorite teams and players."</p><p>About Prime Video</p><p>Prime Video is a premium streaming service that offers customers a vast collection of digital videos—all with the ease of finding what they love to watch in one place.</p><ul><li>Included with Prime: Watch thousands of popular movies and TV shows, including our award-winning Prime Originals such as Emmy-winning <em>The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel</em>,<em> Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan</em>,<em> Homecoming</em>,<em> The Man in the High Castle</em>,<em>Bosch</em>, Academy Award-winning<em> Manchester by the Sea </em>and<em> The Salesman</em>,Academy Award-nominated <em>The Big Sick </em>and the critically acclaimed <em>Beautiful </em>Boy, exclusives, live sports and licensed and self-published content available in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.</li><li>Watch more with Prime Video Channels: Prime members can add 100+ channels like HBO, Cinemax, STARZ, SHOWTIME, CBS All Access, and more—no extra apps to download, and no cable required. Only pay for the ones you want, and cancel anytime. View the full list of channels available at amazon.com/channels.</li><li>Rent or Buy: Enjoy hundreds of thousands of titles, including new-release movies and entire seasons of current TV episodes, available for all Amazon customers to rent or buy.</li><li>Instant access: Watch where and when you want with the Prime Video app on your smart TV, mobile device, Fire TV, Fire tablet, Apple TV, game consoles or from the web. For a complete list of compatible devices, visit amazon.com/howtostream.</li><li>Enhanced experiences: Make the most of every viewing with 4K Ultra HD- and High Dynamic Range (HDR)-compatible content. Go behind the scenes of your favorite movies and TV shows with exclusive X-Ray access, powered by IMDb. Save it for later with select mobile downloads for offline viewing.</li></ul><p>In addition to access to movies and TV shows included with Prime, the Prime membership includes unlimited fast free shipping options across all categories available on Amazon, more than two million songs and thousands of playlists and stations with Prime Music, secure photo storage with Prime Photos, unlimited reading with Prime Reading, unlimited access to a digital audiobook catalogue with Audible Channels for Prime, a rotating selection of free digital games and in-game loot with Twitch Prime, early access to select Lightning Deals, exclusive access and discounts to select items, and more. To sign-up for Prime or to find out more visit: amazon.com/prime.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190320005746/en/</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p>

All-New Kindle Now With an Adjustable Front Light For Just $89.99

/news/news-details/2019/All-New-Kindle-Now-With-an-Adjustable-Front-Light-For-Just-89.99/default.aspx

All-New-Kindle-Now-With-an-Adjustable-Front-Light-For-Just-89.99

03/20/2019 09:01:00

All-New Kindle Now With an Adjustable Front Light For Just $89.99

03/20/2019

2019

Most affordable Kindle now includes a built-in adjustable front light so you can read comfortably in even more places, day or night Refreshed design that's thin and light so the all-new Kindle is easy to hold for hours of reading Three months of Kindle Unlimited included for free so you can enjoy unlimited access to millions of eBooks and thousands of audiobooks—including titles like The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 20, 2019-- (NASDAQ: AMZN)—Today Amazon introduced the all-new Kindle, the first Kindle with a front light for under $100. Now you can adjust the display brightness to read comfortably in even more places—whether indoors at night or outside in the sun. The all-new Kindle also includes an updated design, the latest electronic ink technology for better contrast, and three months of Kindle Unlimited for free, a $30 value. With Kindle Unlimited, you can read as much as you'd like from a collection of millions of titles at no additional cost. The all-new Kindle comes in black or white for just $89.99 and is available for pre-order today at www.amazon.com/kindle. "Customers consistently tell us how much they appreciate having a front light on Kindle devices so they can read in any environment—from a sunny patio to their bed at night," said Kevin Keith, Vice President, Amazon Devices. "The team worked hard to bring this customer-favorite feature to our most affordable device, and we're excited to introduce the all-new Kindle—the first Kindle under $100 with a built-in adjustable front light." All-New Kindle—Now with a Front Light Like all Kindle devices, the all-new Kindle provides a sanctuary reading experience with no distractions and includes a glare-free display with laser-quality text that's easy to read. The new adjustable front light makes it even more comfortable to read in a variety of places while still delivering weeks of battery life. The all-new Kindle also includes updated electronic ink technology for better contrast and now uses capacitive touch to prevent accidental swipes on the six-inch, 167 ppi display. The refreshed design delivers all these great features while keeping the device thin and light, so it's easy to hold in one hand for long reading sessions. And the all-new Kindle comes with features customers love—storage to hold thousands of books so you can take your library with you, a battery life that lasts weeks not hours, and a durable design that makes it easy to bring with you on the go. Even More Stories with Three Months of Kindle Unlimited for Free Kindle devices already come with instant access to the Kindle store, featuring the world's best selection of content, including books, audiobooks, newspapers, and magazines. For a limited time, you get three months of Kindle Unlimited for free—a $30 value—when you order an all-new Kindle. Kindle Unlimited provides unlimited access to millions of great titles, including books from popular authors like Vince Flynn, so you can read as much as you want at no additional cost. Kindle Unlimited includes titles from a range of genres, including young adult books like The Selection by Kiera Cass, classics like The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, and non-fiction like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. After three months, Kindle Unlimited is just $9.99 per month. New Reading Features that Go Beyond a Book The all-new Kindle helps you go beyond a book with Amazon's newest reading features. Now, when you finish a book, it will automatically be marked as read in your library and synced across your reading devices including Kindle, Fire tablet, and the free Kindle apps for iOS and Android. With just a few taps, you can filter to see which books you've read and which you haven't, so organizing your library has never been easier. Additionally, last year, we introduced a new home experience making it easier to find your next great read. We're continuing to add to the experience and now you will find more recommendations based on your reading history, including new and trending titles in Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Store. These features will be delivered as a free, over-the-air update to the all-new Kindle, Kindle Paperwhite Gen 6 (released in 2013), and newer devices in the coming months. Features Readers Love about Kindle The all-new Kindle includes all the features that have made the Kindle family the best devices for reading: Audible—With Bluetooth built-in, listen to your favorite Audible book and switch seamlessly between reading and listening on a Bluetooth enabled device. Whispersync and Whispersync for Voice—Saves and synchronizes your last page read, bookmarks, and annotations from your Kindle eBooks and Audible books across all of your Kindle devices and apps, so you can always pick up where you left off on any device. Goodreads—Kindle is integrated with the world's largest site for readers and book recommendations, with over 85 million members and 86 million book reviews. X-Ray—Explore the "Bones of the Book"—see all the passages across a book that mention relevant ideas, fictional characters, historical figures, places, or topics of interest. Smart Lookup—Integrates a full dictionary definition with other reference information via X-Ray and Wikipedia. Family Library—With Kindle and Kindle reading apps, you can access not only your own books, but also books from the Amazon account of a spouse or partner. Reading Benefits for Prime—Prime members can enjoy unlimited access to more than 1,000 books and magazines with Prime Reading as well as one free pre-released book a month with Amazon First Reads. The new device joins Kindle Paperwhite, which features a high-resolution, 300 ppi display with a flush-front design and waterproofing, and Kindle Oasis, which includes a seven-inch, high-resolution display, waterproofing, and an ergonomic design. The all-new Kindle is $89.99 and available for pre-order today at www.amazon.com/kindle. It will start shipping on April 10. If you're a previous Kindle owner, you can trade in your device to receive an Amazon.com gift card for the appraised value as well as a 25% discount on a new device, including the all-new Kindle. Additionally, you can purchase a cover for your all-new Kindle for just $29.99. Covers are thin, snap perfectly onto your device, and are made of woven fabric in a variety of colors, including charcoal black, sandstone white, cobalt blue, and punch red. Pre-order now at www.amazon.com/kindle. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190320005410/en/ Source: Amazon Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr

<p><em>Most affordable Kindle now includes a built-in adjustable front light so you can read comfortably in even more places, day or night</em></p><p><em>Refreshed design that's thin and light so the all-new Kindle is easy to hold for hours of reading</em></p><p><em>Three months of Kindle Unlimited included for free so you can enjoy unlimited access to millions of eBooks and thousands of audiobooks—including titles like </em>The Handmaid's Tale<em> by Margaret Atwood and </em>The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People <em>by Stephen R. Covey</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 20, 2019-- (NASDAQ: AMZN)—Today Amazon introduced the all-new Kindle, the first Kindle with a front light for under $100. Now you can adjust the display brightness to read comfortably in even more places—whether indoors at night or outside in the sun. The all-new Kindle also includes an updated design, the latest electronic ink technology for better contrast, and three months of Kindle Unlimited for free, a $30 value. With Kindle Unlimited, you can read as much as you'd like from a collection of millions of titles at no additional cost. The all-new Kindle comes in black or white for just $89.99 and is available for pre-order today at www.amazon.com/kindle.</p><p>"Customers consistently tell us how much they appreciate having a front light on Kindle devices so they can read in any environment—from a sunny patio to their bed at night," said Kevin Keith, Vice President, Amazon Devices. "The team worked hard to bring this customer-favorite feature to our most affordable device, and we're excited to introduce the all-new Kindle—the first Kindle under $100 with a built-in adjustable front light."</p><p>All-New Kindle—Now with a Front Light</p><p>Like all Kindle devices, the all-new Kindle provides a sanctuary reading experience with no distractions and includes a glare-free display with laser-quality text that's easy to read. The new adjustable front light makes it even more comfortable to read in a variety of places while still delivering weeks of battery life. The all-new Kindle also includes updated electronic ink technology for better contrast and now uses capacitive touch to prevent accidental swipes on the six-inch, 167 ppi display.</p><p>The refreshed design delivers all these great features while keeping the device thin and light, so it's easy to hold in one hand for long reading sessions. And the all-new Kindle comes with features customers love—storage to hold thousands of books so you can take your library with you, a battery life that lasts weeks not hours, and a durable design that makes it easy to bring with you on the go.</p><p>Even More Stories with Three Months of Kindle Unlimited for Free</p><p>Kindle devices already come with instant access to the Kindle store, featuring the world's best selection of content, including books, audiobooks, newspapers, and magazines. For a limited time, you get three months of Kindle Unlimited for free—a $30 value—when you order an all-new Kindle. Kindle Unlimited provides unlimited access to millions of great titles, including books from popular authors like Vince Flynn, so you can read as much as you want at no additional cost. Kindle Unlimited includes titles from a range of genres, including young adult books like <em>The Selection</em> by Kiera Cass, classics like <em>The Handmaid's Tale </em>by Margaret Atwood, and non-fiction like <em>The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People</em> by Stephen R. Covey. After three months, Kindle Unlimited is just $9.99 per month.</p><p>New Reading Features that Go Beyond a Book</p><p>The all-new Kindle helps you go beyond a book with Amazon's newest reading features. Now, when you finish a book, it will automatically be marked as read in your library and synced across your reading devices including Kindle, Fire tablet, and the free Kindle apps for iOS and Android. With just a few taps, you can filter to see which books you've read and which you haven't, so organizing your library has never been easier.</p><p>Additionally, last year, we introduced a new home experience making it easier to find your next great read. We're continuing to add to the experience and now you will find more recommendations based on your reading history, including new and trending titles in Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Store.</p><p>These features will be delivered as a free, over-the-air update to the all-new Kindle, Kindle Paperwhite Gen 6 (released in 2013), and newer devices in the coming months.</p><p>Features Readers Love about Kindle</p><p>The all-new Kindle includes all the features that have made the Kindle family the best devices for reading:</p><ul><li>Audible—With Bluetooth built-in, listen to your favorite Audible book and switch seamlessly between reading and listening on a Bluetooth enabled device.</li><li>Whispersync and Whispersync for Voice—Saves and synchronizes your last page read, bookmarks, and annotations from your Kindle eBooks and Audible books across all of your Kindle devices and apps, so you can always pick up where you left off on any device.</li><li>Goodreads—Kindle is integrated with the world's largest site for readers and book recommendations, with over 85 million members and 86 million book reviews.</li><li>X-Ray—Explore the "Bones of the Book"—see all the passages across a book that mention relevant ideas, fictional characters, historical figures, places, or topics of interest.</li><li>Smart Lookup—Integrates a full dictionary definition with other reference information via X-Ray and Wikipedia.</li><li>Family Library—With Kindle and Kindle reading apps, you can access not only your own books, but also books from the Amazon account of a spouse or partner.</li><li>Reading Benefits for Prime—Prime members can enjoy unlimited access to more than 1,000 books and magazines with Prime Reading as well as one free pre-released book a month with Amazon First Reads.</li></ul><p>The new device joins Kindle Paperwhite, which features a high-resolution, 300 ppi display with a flush-front design and waterproofing, and Kindle Oasis, which includes a seven-inch, high-resolution display, waterproofing, and an ergonomic design.</p><p>The all-new Kindle is $89.99 and available for pre-order today at www.amazon.com/kindle. It will start shipping on April 10. If you're a previous Kindle owner, you can trade in your device to receive an Amazon.com gift card for the appraised value as well as a 25% discount on a new device, including the all-new Kindle. Additionally, you can purchase a cover for your all-new Kindle for just $29.99. Covers are thin, snap perfectly onto your device, and are made of woven fabric in a variety of colors, including charcoal black, sandstone white, cobalt blue, and punch red. Pre-order now at www.amazon.com/kindle.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190320005410/en/</p><p>Source: Amazon</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p>

Amazon Kicks Off Spring with the Launch of Belei, its First Dedicated Skincare Line

/news/news-details/2019/Amazon-Kicks-Off-Spring-with-the-Launch-of-Belei-its-First-Dedicated-Skincare-Line/default.aspx

Amazon-Kicks-Off-Spring-with-the-Launch-of-Belei-its-First-Dedicated-Skincare-Line

03/20/2019 09:00:00

Amazon Kicks Off Spring with the Launch of Belei, its First Dedicated Skincare Line

03/20/2019

2019

The new collection is launching with 12 items including moisturizers, serums, eye cream, spot treatments and more Products feature sought-after ingredients such as retinol, hyaluronic acid and vitamin C to help fight acne, dark spots, fine lines, dehydration and dullness SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 20, 2019-- Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced the launch of Belei, a line of high-quality skincare products that offer solutions for various skin types and feature ingredients with proven effectiveness. The collection has 12 different items, including everything from retinol moisturizer to vitamin C serums, to help customers address common skincare concerns like acne, the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, dark spots, dehydration, dullness and more. All Belei products are free of parabens, phthalates, sulfates and fragrance and are not tested on animals. Belei product bottles are made of post-consumer recycled resin and carton packaging is 100% recyclable. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190320005029/en/ From left to right: Belei Retinol Refining Moisturizer, Belei Triple-Peptide Eye Cream, Belei Ferulic Acid + Vitamins C and E Serum, Belei Hydrating Hyaluronic Acid (Photo: Business Wire) "Our goal is to help customers spend less time and money searching for the right skincare solutions," said Kara Trousdale, Head of Beauty for Private Brands on Amazon.com. "We took a simple, no-nonsense approach when creating Belei, developing products with ingredients that are both proven to deliver results and also offer customers great value for the quality." All Belei products are eligible for free shipping, including unlimited FREE Two-Day Shipping with Amazon Prime, and come with our Satisfaction Guarantee. The full collection is available at www.amazon.com/belei. Products include: Micellar Facial Wipes, $9Oil-free micellar wipes that gently remove makeup, dirt, and complexion-dulling impurities. Charcoal Balancing Mask, $18A revitalizing clay mask made with charcoal that leaves skin feeling clean from deep within, and advanced hyaluronic acid to help retain moisture. Oil-Free Face Moisturizer SPF 50, $22A lightweight, oil-free moisturizer to help preserve and protect skin. Contains an advanced formula of fast-absorbing sunscreen for non-greasy daily defense. Blemish Control Spot Treatment, $22A lightweight, acne-fighting formula to help fight blemishes. Apply at the onset of breakouts for maximum effectiveness. Dark Spot Solution Serum, $22A lightweight serum that helps to even pigmentation and lighten the appearance of dark spots caused by acne. Use directly on areas of concern or all over to help even skin tone. Triple-Peptide Eye Cream, $22A lightweight, tri-peptide blend eye cream with hyaluronic acid, caffeine and aloe vera to help minimize the appearance of fine lines, puffiness and dark circles. Vitamin C + HA Serum, $35A silky, lightweight serum with the clarifying power of vitamin C and hyaluronic acid that leaves skin feeling hydrated and refreshed. Vitamin C Moisturizer, $35This moisturizer blends vitamin C and hyaluronic acid with a botanical complex that helps smooth skin with daily use. Retinol Refining Moisturizer, $35A refining moisturizer that uses the latest technology in retinol delivery to release vitamin A to the skin over the course of the day or night. A botanical complex soothes skin, while squalane and hyaluronic acid help skin appear smooth and refined. Bio-Complex Moisturizer, $35A silky moisturizer that contains a high level of an advanced formula of hyaluronic acid. Blended with squalane and glycerin, it locks in valuable moisture for hours to keep skin feeling smooth and refreshed. Hydrating Hyaluronic Acid Serum, $40This serum is a multi-tasker that tackles a multitude of skin needs in a single serum. A long-lasting blend of five specialized hyaluronic acids helps retain moisture, while reducing the appearance of fine lines. Ferulic Acid + Vitamins C and E Serum, $40This serum helps to purify and refine the skin, blending the antioxidant powers of ferulic acid, vitamin C and vitamin E. Combined, these ingredients help even skin tone and leave skin feeling hydrated and refreshed. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190320005029/en/ Source: Amazon.com, Inc. Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr

<p><em>The new collection is launching with 12 items including moisturizers, serums, eye cream, spot treatments and more</em></p><p><em>Products feature sought-after ingredients such as retinol, hyaluronic acid and vitamin C to help fight acne, dark spots, fine lines, dehydration and dullness</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 20, 2019-- Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced the launch of Belei, a line of high-quality skincare products that offer solutions for various skin types and feature ingredients with proven effectiveness. The collection has 12 different items, including everything from retinol moisturizer to vitamin C serums, to help customers address common skincare concerns like acne, the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, dark spots, dehydration, dullness and more. All Belei products are free of parabens, phthalates, sulfates and fragrance and are not tested on animals. Belei product bottles are made of post-consumer recycled resin and carton packaging is 100% recyclable.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190320005029/en/</p><div><p>From left to right: Belei Retinol Refining Moisturizer, Belei Triple-Peptide Eye Cream, Belei Ferulic Acid + Vitamins C and E Serum, Belei Hydrating Hyaluronic Acid (Photo: Business Wire)</p></div><p>"Our goal is to help customers spend less time and money searching for the right skincare solutions," said Kara Trousdale, Head of Beauty for Private Brands on Amazon.com. "We took a simple, no-nonsense approach when creating Belei, developing products with ingredients that are both proven to deliver results and also offer customers great value for the quality."</p><p>All Belei products are eligible for free shipping, including unlimited FREE Two-Day Shipping with Amazon Prime, and come with our Satisfaction Guarantee. The full collection is available at www.amazon.com/belei. Products include:</p><ul><li>Micellar Facial Wipes, $9Oil-free micellar wipes that gently remove makeup, dirt, and complexion-dulling impurities.</li></ul><ul><li>Charcoal Balancing Mask, $18A revitalizing clay mask made with charcoal that leaves skin feeling clean from deep within, and advanced hyaluronic acid to help retain moisture.</li></ul><ul><li>Oil-Free Face Moisturizer SPF 50, $22A lightweight, oil-free moisturizer to help preserve and protect skin. Contains an advanced formula of fast-absorbing sunscreen for non-greasy daily defense.</li></ul><ul><li>Blemish Control Spot Treatment, $22A lightweight, acne-fighting formula to help fight blemishes. Apply at the onset of breakouts for maximum effectiveness.</li></ul><ul><li>Dark Spot Solution Serum, $22A lightweight serum that helps to even pigmentation and lighten the appearance of dark spots caused by acne. Use directly on areas of concern or all over to help even skin tone.</li></ul><ul><li>Triple-Peptide Eye Cream, $22A lightweight, tri-peptide blend eye cream with hyaluronic acid, caffeine and aloe vera to help minimize the appearance of fine lines, puffiness and dark circles.</li></ul><ul><li>Vitamin C + HA Serum, $35A silky, lightweight serum with the clarifying power of vitamin C and hyaluronic acid that leaves skin feeling hydrated and refreshed.</li></ul><ul><li>Vitamin C Moisturizer, $35This moisturizer blends vitamin C and hyaluronic acid with a botanical complex that helps smooth skin with daily use.</li></ul><ul><li>Retinol Refining Moisturizer, $35A refining moisturizer that uses the latest technology in retinol delivery to release vitamin A to the skin over the course of the day or night. A botanical complex soothes skin, while squalane and hyaluronic acid help skin appear smooth and refined.</li></ul><ul><li>Bio-Complex Moisturizer, $35A silky moisturizer that contains a high level of an advanced formula of hyaluronic acid. Blended with squalane and glycerin, it locks in valuable moisture for hours to keep skin feeling smooth and refreshed.</li></ul><ul><li>Hydrating Hyaluronic Acid Serum, $40This serum is a multi-tasker that tackles a multitude of skin needs in a single serum. A long-lasting blend of five specialized hyaluronic acids helps retain moisture, while reducing the appearance of fine lines.</li></ul><ul><li>Ferulic Acid + Vitamins C and E Serum, $40This serum helps to purify and refine the skin, blending the antioxidant powers of ferulic acid, vitamin C and vitamin E. Combined, these ingredients help even skin tone and leave skin feeling hydrated and refreshed.</li></ul><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190320005029/en/</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p>

Gogo Goes All-In on AWS

/news/news-details/2019/Gogo-Goes-All-In-on-AWS/default.aspx

Gogo-Goes-All-In-on-AWS

03/13/2019 09:00:00

Gogo Goes All-In on AWS

03/13/2019

2019

Leading inflight internet and entertainment provider relies on AWS to deploy and develop applications faster, expand globally in minutes, and achieve higher availability of its core services SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 13, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Gogo, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOGO), the leading global provider of broadband connectivity products and services for aviation, is moving its entire infrastructure to AWS, going all-in on the world's leading cloud. Gogo has already migrated the vast majority of its commercial and business aviation divisions to AWS and is leveraging a range of AWS services, including analytics, serverless, database, and storage to improve inflight internet and entertainment experiences for millions of passengers around the world. With AWS, Gogo is able to double the number of airlines it can support without increasing the size of its workforce and take an idea from concept to production much faster. By moving business-critical databases, including payments, orders, user management, and backend services off legacy databases to Amazon Aurora, Gogo lowered its operational overhead and gained the speed and availability of a commercial database with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source. Gogo uses AWS Elemental Live video processing and delivery to provide the consistency and low latency required for live and on-demand video services on board more than 2,500 commercial aircraft at 30,000 feet. Gogo has reduced its ongoing costs by one-third by running its backend data warehousing and analytics on AWS, creating a data lake using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storing and analyzing inflight data. The data is enriched and analyzed using Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Athena, helping Gogo gain visibility across its network to uncover and solve pain points for customers, and drive higher customer adoption of internet and entertainment services while in flight. Moving forward, Gogo expects to leverage AWS's machine learning services to gain deeper insights that will enhance decision making around the inflight customer experience. "We chose AWS because it is the most sophisticated and mature cloud in the industry," said Ravi Balwada, Senior Vice President of Software Development at Gogo. "The change in velocity that we experienced moving from our on-premises environment to AWS has been phenomenal. By operating and innovating on AWS, we've been able to nearly eliminate customer-impacting incidents related to ground-based deployments and increase our deployment cadence sevenfold. And, our database change has made operating at scale much easier and more cost effective." "Organizations are moving away from legacy infrastructure and database solutions to create cloud environments that give builders freedom and control over their own destinies," said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. "By going all-in, Gogo is leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS services, including comprehensive analytics and machine learning services to gain deeper insights and improve passengers' in-flight experiences. We look forward to our continued collaboration with Gogo as they become even more agile by evolving their architecture and integrating more of AWS's services, to create smarter applications and automate historically manual processes."

<p><em>Leading inflight internet and entertainment provider relies on AWS to deploy and develop applications faster, expand globally in minutes, and achieve higher availability of its core services</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 13, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Gogo, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOGO), the leading global provider of broadband connectivity products and services for aviation, is moving its entire infrastructure to AWS, going all-in on the world's leading cloud. Gogo has already migrated the vast majority of its commercial and business aviation divisions to AWS and is leveraging a range of AWS services, including analytics, serverless, database, and storage to improve inflight internet and entertainment experiences for millions of passengers around the world.</p><p>With AWS, Gogo is able to double the number of airlines it can support without increasing the size of its workforce and take an idea from concept to production much faster. By moving business-critical databases, including payments, orders, user management, and backend services off legacy databases to Amazon Aurora, Gogo lowered its operational overhead and gained the speed and availability of a commercial database with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source. Gogo uses AWS Elemental Live video processing and delivery to provide the consistency and low latency required for live and on-demand video services on board more than 2,500 commercial aircraft at 30,000 feet. Gogo has reduced its ongoing costs by one-third by running its backend data warehousing and analytics on AWS, creating a data lake using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storing and analyzing inflight data. The data is enriched and analyzed using Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Athena, helping Gogo gain visibility across its network to uncover and solve pain points for customers, and drive higher customer adoption of internet and entertainment services while in flight. Moving forward, Gogo expects to leverage AWS's machine learning services to gain deeper insights that will enhance decision making around the inflight customer experience.</p><p>"We chose AWS because it is the most sophisticated and mature cloud in the industry," said Ravi Balwada, Senior Vice President of Software Development at Gogo. "The change in velocity that we experienced moving from our on-premises environment to AWS has been phenomenal. By operating and innovating on AWS, we've been able to nearly eliminate customer-impacting incidents related to ground-based deployments and increase our deployment cadence sevenfold. And, our database change has made operating at scale much easier and more cost effective."</p><p>"Organizations are moving away from legacy infrastructure and database solutions to create cloud environments that give builders freedom and control over their own destinies," said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. "By going all-in, Gogo is leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS services, including comprehensive analytics and machine learning services to gain deeper insights and improve passengers' in-flight experiences. We look forward to our continued collaboration with Gogo as they become even more agile by evolving their architecture and integrating more of AWS's services, to create smarter applications and automate historically manual processes."</p>

Greater Adoption of Digital Tools in Rural America Could Add $140 Billion to the U.S. Economy by 2021

/news/news-details/2019/Greater-Adoption-of-Digital-Tools-in-Rural-America-Could-Add-140-Billion-to-the-U.S.-Economy-by-2021/default.aspx

Greater-Adoption-of-Digital-Tools-in-Rural-America-Could-Add-140-Billion-to-the-U.S.-Economy-by-2021

03/13/2019 07:19:00

Greater Adoption of Digital Tools in Rural America Could Add $140 Billion to the U.S. Economy by 2021

03/13/2019

2019

New research by U.S. Chamber of Commerce commissioned by Amazon shows that increased adoption of online tools and digital services for businesses across rural America could create more than 360,000 jobs in the next three years Increased adoption could grow annual revenues of rural small businesses by 21% over the next three years – the equivalent of $84.5 billion per year – with states in the South seeing the greatest benefit Online tools and technology have the highest potential impact on rural small businesses with annual revenue under $100,000 Report outlines recommendations for the private and public sectors, including expanding education and training programs, helping rural areas attract tech talent, and increasing the availability of high-speed internet access and mobile phone connectivity WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 13, 2019-- A new report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce commissioned by Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has revealed that unlocking the digital potential of rural businesses across the U.S. could add over $140 billion to the U.S. economy over the next three years and create an additional 360,000 full-time jobs in rural communities. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005370/en/ There are 37 million working-age adults and 18 million households in the rural U.S. While accounting for close to 15% of the adult population and nearly three-quarters of the country's land mass, annual revenues of rural businesses represent only 3.7% of total gross revenues in the U.S. economy. Despite some improvement in the adoption of digital tools by rural businesses over the past years, this new research shows how increased use of digital technology in rural America could help drive faster growth in the rural economy. Greater adoption of digital technology over the next three years could grow revenues of rural businesses by $84.5 billion each year (+21.0%), with states in the South realizing the greatest benefit. Online tools and technology have the highest potential impact on rural businesses with revenue under $100,000, which could see sales growth surge over 28% over three years. "We've seen firsthand how rural entrepreneurs can transform their businesses through digital technology, from reaching millions of new customers around the world by selling online, to quickly scaling their startups thanks to affordable access to cloud computing," said Jeff Wilke, CEO, Worldwide Consumer, Amazon. "Ensuring that small businesses in rural America have good digital skills, are able to attract tech talent, and benefit from fast connectivity will deliver increased economic prosperity in rural communities." "The opportunity to successfully start and grow a rural small business in our country is a great example of how technology is positively transforming nearly every aspect of our lives," said Tim Day, senior vice president of C_TEC, the Chamber's Technology Engagement Center. "Digital tools and technologies allow rural small businesses to compete in a global economy—regardless of their size or location—which is essential to a vibrant U.S. economy." Potential positive impact of online tools and technology on rural businesses (each year, 2019-2021) Additional AnnualSales ($ billions) Additional AnnualValue-added ($ billions) AdditionalJobs Northeast $8.4 $4.8 38,662 New England (CT, ME, MA, NH, VT) $2.7 $1.6 14,312 Middle Atlantic (NY, PA) $5.7 $3.3 24,350 Midwest $24.8 $13.5 99,669 East-North Central (IL, IN, MI, OH, WI) $15.7 $8.5 64,388 West-North Central (IA, KS, MN, MO, NE, ND, SD) $9.1 $5.0 35,281 South $40.6 $22.5 171,495 South Atlantic (FL, GA, MD, NC, SC, VA, WV) $14.6 $8.2 67,431 East-South Central (AL, KY, MS, TN) $13.5 $7.3 58,127 West-South Central (AR, LA, OK, TX) $12.5 $7.0 45,937 West $10.7 $6.1 50,228 Mountain (AZ, CO, ID, MT, NV, NM, UT, WY) $5.9 $3.4 29,454 Pacific (AK, CA, HI, OR, WA) $4.8 $2.7 20,773 United States $84.5 $46.9 360,054 According to the new research, southern states are among the ones that would benefit the most from increased adoption of online tools and digital services, with rural businesses in West Virginia (+57.6%), Alabama (+32.9%), Mississippi (+32.8%), and Georgia (+31.5%) experiencing some of the largest revenue growths over the next three years. Texas, Ohio, and Mississippi would gain the highest number of new jobs, with the Lone Star state adding an average of 23,400 new jobs per year over the next three years. The report, based on a survey of 5,300 businesses in rural America, outlines a number of recommendations for the public and private sectors to help unlock the unrealized economic potential of rural America, including: Expand rural business access to digital training and digital tools so they can scale their business. Nearly 41% of respondents agree that policymakers should create programs to incentivize rural businesses to incorporate digital technology into their daily operations. Increase the talent pipeline of candidates trained in digital skills. 38% of rural small businesses say they can't hire the talent with the right digital skills in their area. Increase digital connectivity in rural area. Two-thirds of rural small businesses in America say slow internet or cell phone connectivity has a negative impact on their business. "We have been selling our family-farmed garbanzo beans, peas, lentils, and wheat for five generations, and since joining Amazon we have grown exponentially," said Sara Mader of Palouse Brands, located in Palouse, WA. "In addition to growing our sales, Amazon has given our small business in rural Washington the opportunity to hire 15 local employees and reach customers all over the world." Other key findings from the report include: One-in-five rural businesses are already digital. Nearly 20% of rural small businesses in America generate the vast majority of their revenue (at least 80%) by selling their products and services online. Technology is boosting rural business revenues. Rural businesses say adoption of digital technologies are important for their future, with 55.2% of them agreeing that e-commerce helps them grow their customer base and a similar percentage (54.6%) confirming that online tools had a positive impact on their revenue in the past three years. Online services help rural businesses reach customers out of state and overseas. Almost 40% of these small business owners say that digital technology has allowed them to sell beyond their state and 16% of them confirm they are selling internationally due to their access to digital tools. Thirty-three percent sell their products using their own websites, 12.7% use a third-party online sales site, and 35.7% use online marketing, including social media. Digital tools and technology help purchasing and cut costs. 29% of rural businesses say that online tools reduce purchasing costs of products and materials. To download the full report, including research results and state-specific fact sheets, visit: www.empoweringruralbusinesses.com. About the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and C_TEC The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the world's largest business federation representing the interests of more than 3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions, as well as state and local chambers and industry associations. C_TEC promotes the role of technology in our economy and advocates for rational policy solutions that drive economic growth, spur innovation, and create jobs. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005370/en/ Source: Amazon Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr

<p><em>New research by U.S. Chamber of Commerce commissioned by Amazon shows that increased adoption of online tools and digital services for businesses across rural America could create more than 360,000 jobs in the next three years</em></p><p><em>Increased adoption could grow annual revenues of rural small businesses by 21% over the next three years – the equivalent of $84.5 billion per year – with states in the South seeing the greatest benefit</em></p><p><em>Online tools and technology have the highest potential impact on rural small businesses with annual revenue under $100,000</em></p><p><em>Report outlines recommendations for the private and public sectors, including expanding education and training programs, helping rural areas attract tech talent, and increasing the availability of high-speed internet access and mobile phone connectivity</em></p><p>WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 13, 2019-- A new report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce commissioned by Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has revealed that unlocking the digital potential of rural businesses across the U.S. could add over $140 billion to the U.S. economy over the next three years and create an additional 360,000 full-time jobs in rural communities.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005370/en/</p><p>There are 37 million working-age adults and 18 million households in the rural U.S. While accounting for close to 15% of the adult population and nearly three-quarters of the country's land mass, annual revenues of rural businesses represent only 3.7% of total gross revenues in the U.S. economy. Despite some improvement in the adoption of digital tools by rural businesses over the past years, this new research shows how increased use of digital technology in rural America could help drive faster growth in the rural economy. Greater adoption of digital technology over the next three years could grow revenues of rural businesses by $84.5 billion each year (+21.0%), with states in the South realizing the greatest benefit. Online tools and technology have the highest potential impact on rural businesses with revenue under $100,000, which could see sales growth surge over 28% over three years.</p><p>"We've seen firsthand how rural entrepreneurs can transform their businesses through digital technology, from reaching millions of new customers around the world by selling online, to quickly scaling their startups thanks to affordable access to cloud computing," said Jeff Wilke, CEO, Worldwide Consumer, Amazon. "Ensuring that small businesses in rural America have good digital skills, are able to attract tech talent, and benefit from fast connectivity will deliver increased economic prosperity in rural communities."</p><p>"The opportunity to successfully start and grow a rural small business in our country is a great example of how technology is positively transforming nearly every aspect of our lives," said Tim Day, senior vice president of C_TEC, the Chamber's Technology Engagement Center. "Digital tools and technologies allow rural small businesses to compete in a global economy—regardless of their size or location—which is essential to a vibrant U.S. economy."</p><table><tbody><tr><td><p>Potential positive impact of online tools and technology on rural businesses (each year, 2019-2021)</p></td></tr><tr><td><p>Additional AnnualSales ($ billions)</p></td><td><p>Additional AnnualValue-added ($ billions)</p></td><td><p>AdditionalJobs</p></td></tr><tr><td><p>Northeast</p></td><td>$8.4</td><td>$4.8</td><td>38,662</td></tr><tr><td>New England (CT, ME, MA, NH, VT)</td><td>$2.7</td><td>$1.6</td><td>14,312</td></tr><tr><td>Middle Atlantic (NY, PA)</td><td>$5.7</td><td>$3.3</td><td>24,350</td></tr><tr><td><p>Midwest</p></td><td>$24.8</td><td>$13.5</td><td>99,669</td></tr><tr><td>East-North Central (IL, IN, MI, OH, WI)</td><td>$15.7</td><td>$8.5</td><td>64,388</td></tr><tr><td>West-North Central (IA, KS, MN, MO, NE, ND, SD)</td><td>$9.1</td><td>$5.0</td><td>35,281</td></tr><tr><td><p>South</p></td><td>$40.6</td><td>$22.5</td><td>171,495</td></tr><tr><td>South Atlantic (FL, GA, MD, NC, SC, VA, WV)</td><td>$14.6</td><td>$8.2</td><td>67,431</td></tr><tr><td>East-South Central (AL, KY, MS, TN)</td><td>$13.5</td><td>$7.3</td><td>58,127</td></tr><tr><td>West-South Central (AR, LA, OK, TX)</td><td>$12.5</td><td>$7.0</td><td>45,937</td></tr><tr><td><p>West</p></td><td>$10.7</td><td>$6.1</td><td>50,228</td></tr><tr><td>Mountain (AZ, CO, ID, MT, NV, NM, UT, WY)</td><td>$5.9</td><td>$3.4</td><td>29,454</td></tr><tr><td>Pacific (AK, CA, HI, OR, WA)</td><td>$4.8</td><td>$2.7</td><td>20,773</td></tr><tr><td><p>United States</p></td><td>$84.5</td><td>$46.9</td><td>360,054</td></tr></tbody></table><p>According to the new research, southern states are among the ones that would benefit the most from increased adoption of online tools and digital services, with rural businesses in West Virginia (+57.6%), Alabama (+32.9%), Mississippi (+32.8%), and Georgia (+31.5%) experiencing some of the largest revenue growths over the next three years. Texas, Ohio, and Mississippi would gain the highest number of new jobs, with the Lone Star state adding an average of 23,400 new jobs per year over the next three years.</p><p>The report, based on a survey of 5,300 businesses in rural America, outlines a number of recommendations for the public and private sectors to help unlock the unrealized economic potential of rural America, including:</p><ul><li>Expand rural business access to digital training and digital tools so they can scale their business. Nearly 41% of respondents agree that policymakers should create programs to incentivize rural businesses to incorporate digital technology into their daily operations.</li><li>Increase the talent pipeline of candidates trained in digital skills. 38% of rural small businesses say they can't hire the talent with the right digital skills in their area.</li><li>Increase digital connectivity in rural area. Two-thirds of rural small businesses in America say slow internet or cell phone connectivity has a negative impact on their business.</li></ul><p>"We have been selling our family-farmed garbanzo beans, peas, lentils, and wheat for five generations, and since joining Amazon we have grown exponentially," said Sara Mader of Palouse Brands, located in Palouse, WA. "In addition to growing our sales, Amazon has given our small business in rural Washington the opportunity to hire 15 local employees and reach customers all over the world."</p><p>Other key findings from the report include:</p><ul><li>One-in-five rural businesses are already digital. Nearly 20% of rural small businesses in America generate the vast majority of their revenue (at least 80%) by selling their products and services online.</li><li>Technology is boosting rural business revenues. Rural businesses say adoption of digital technologies are important for their future, with 55.2% of them agreeing that e-commerce helps them grow their customer base and a similar percentage (54.6%) confirming that online tools had a positive impact on their revenue in the past three years.</li><li>Online services help rural businesses reach customers out of state and overseas. Almost 40% of these small business owners say that digital technology has allowed them to sell beyond their state and 16% of them confirm they are selling internationally due to their access to digital tools. Thirty-three percent sell their products using their own websites, 12.7% use a third-party online sales site, and 35.7% use online marketing, including social media.</li><li>Digital tools and technology help purchasing and cut costs. 29% of rural businesses say that online tools reduce purchasing costs of products and materials.</li></ul><p>To download the full report, including research results and state-specific fact sheets, visit: www.empoweringruralbusinesses.com.</p><p>About the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and C_TEC</p><p>The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the world's largest business federation representing the interests of more than 3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions, as well as state and local chambers and industry associations. C_TEC promotes the role of technology in our economy and advocates for rational policy solutions that drive economic growth, spur innovation, and create jobs.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005370/en/</p><p>Source: Amazon</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p>

Amazon Prime Members: Pick Your Delivery Day, Plan Your Week

/news/news-details/2019/Amazon-Prime-Members-Pick-Your-Delivery-Day-Plan-Your-Week/default.aspx

Amazon-Prime-Members-Pick-Your-Delivery-Day-Plan-Your-Week

02/28/2019 09:00:00

Amazon Prime Members: Pick Your Delivery Day, Plan Your Week

02/28/2019

2019

Introducing Amazon Day: Bringing a new level of convenience and predictability to delivery Prime members across the U.S. can now get all their week's orders delivered together on the day of their choice, in fewer boxes Amazon Day is one of several initiatives that support the company's Shipment Zero project SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 28, 2019-- (NASDAQ: AMZN)— Amazon is bringing a new level of delivery convenience and predictability to Prime members with the launch of Amazon Day, available today to all Prime members in the U.S. This new delivery innovation enables Prime members to choose a day of the week to be their delivery day, which makes it easier to get purchases grouped and delivered together and, in many cases, in fewer packages. Members can also choose from Prime's fast, free shipping options for any item they don't want to include as part of their Amazon Day shipment. The program is one of many sustainability initiatives to help achieve Shipment Zero, the company's vision to make all Amazon shipments net zero carbon, with 50% of all shipments net zero by 2030. "Amazon Day makes shopping throughout the week so easy," said Susan T. from Wilmington, DE, one of the Prime members who received early access to the service. "Whenever I think of something I need, I just buy it with Amazon Day and know it's going to arrive on the day I work from home." "Amazon Day adds another level of convenience to the many shipping benefits Prime members already enjoy. Prime members can now choose to get their orders delivered together in fewer boxes whenever possible on the day that works best for them," said Maria Renz, Vice President, Delivery Experience at Amazon. "We've been testing this program with a group of Prime members and Amazon Day has already reduced packaging by tens of thousands of boxes – a number that will only continue to grow now that the program is available to Prime members nationwide." Once Prime members select a day of the week that works best for them, adding items to their Amazon Day order is easy, with all items ordered that week arriving together on the designated day. Members can choose to use the Amazon Day delivery option any time they'd like and it's easy to change their Amazon Day at checkout to another day that works best for them. Prime members who enroll in Amazon Day can also take advantage of Prime's other fast, free delivery options by selecting the best option for each eligible item at checkout such as Prime FREE One-Day Shipping and Prime FREE Same-Day Delivery in more than 10,000 cities and towns, two-hour delivery with Prime Now in more than 30 major cities, and unlimited Free Two-Day Shipping on more than 100 million items. "As a working mom of a two-year-old living in Manhattan, I order from Amazon multiple times a week for my family's needs," said Sindy L. from New York City, another Prime member who received early access to the service. "With Amazon Day, all my orders now arrive on Mondays and in fewer boxes — that's less for me to break down for recycling and less trips for the delivery driver." To learn more and select an Amazon Day, Prime members can visit amazon.com/amazonday. Customers who are not yet Prime members can sign up or start a 30-day free trial at amazon.com/prime. Every Day Made Better with Prime Prime was designed to make your life better every single day. Over 100 million paid members around the world enjoy the many benefits of Prime, including the best of shopping and entertainment from Amazon. In the U.S. that includes unlimited access to award-winning movies and TV episodes with Prime Video; unlimited access to Prime Music, Prime Reading, Amazon Photos, Twitch Prime; early access to select Lightning Deals, one free pre-released book a month with Amazon First Reads, and more. Prime members can also get deep discounts on select popular products at Whole Foods Market plus an additional 10 percent off hundreds of sale items. Prime was built on the foundation of unlimited fast, free shipping and members receive Prime FREE One-Day Shipping and Prime FREE Same-Day Delivery in more than 10,000 cities and towns, two-hour delivery with Prime Now in more than 30 major cities and unlimited Free Two-Day Shipping on more than 100 million items. Start a free trial of Amazon Prime at amazon.com/prime. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190228005194/en/ Source: Amazon Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr

<p><em>Introducing Amazon Day: Bringing a new level of convenience and predictability to delivery</em></p><p><em>Prime members across the U.S. can now get all their week's orders delivered together on the day of their choice, in fewer boxes</em></p><p><em>Amazon Day is one of several initiatives that support the company's Shipment Zero project</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 28, 2019-- (NASDAQ: AMZN)— Amazon is bringing a new level of delivery convenience and predictability to Prime members with the launch of Amazon Day, available today to all Prime members in the U.S. This new delivery innovation enables Prime members to choose a day of the week to be their delivery day, which makes it easier to get purchases grouped and delivered together and, in many cases, in fewer packages. Members can also choose from Prime's fast, free shipping options for any item they don't want to include as part of their Amazon Day shipment. The program is one of many sustainability initiatives to help achieve Shipment Zero, the company's vision to make all Amazon shipments net zero carbon, with 50% of all shipments net zero by 2030.</p><p>"Amazon Day makes shopping throughout the week so easy," said Susan T. from Wilmington, DE, one of the Prime members who received early access to the service. "Whenever I think of something I need, I just buy it with Amazon Day and know it's going to arrive on the day I work from home."</p><p>"Amazon Day adds another level of convenience to the many shipping benefits Prime members already enjoy. Prime members can now choose to get their orders delivered together in fewer boxes whenever possible on the day that works best for them," said Maria Renz, Vice President, Delivery Experience at Amazon. "We've been testing this program with a group of Prime members and Amazon Day has already reduced packaging by tens of thousands of boxes – a number that will only continue to grow now that the program is available to Prime members nationwide."</p><p>Once Prime members select a day of the week that works best for them, adding items to their Amazon Day order is easy, with all items ordered that week arriving together on the designated day. Members can choose to use the Amazon Day delivery option any time they'd like and it's easy to change their Amazon Day at checkout to another day that works best for them. Prime members who enroll in Amazon Day can also take advantage of Prime's other fast, free delivery options by selecting the best option for each eligible item at checkout such as Prime FREE One-Day Shipping and Prime FREE Same-Day Delivery in more than 10,000 cities and towns, two-hour delivery with Prime Now in more than 30 major cities, and unlimited Free Two-Day Shipping on more than 100 million items.</p><p>"As a working mom of a two-year-old living in Manhattan, I order from Amazon multiple times a week for my family's needs," said Sindy L. from New York City, another Prime member who received early access to the service. "With Amazon Day, all my orders now arrive on Mondays and in fewer boxes — that's less for me to break down for recycling and less trips for the delivery driver."</p><p>To learn more and select an Amazon Day, Prime members can visit amazon.com/amazonday. Customers who are not yet Prime members can sign up or start a 30-day free trial at amazon.com/prime.</p><p>Every Day Made Better with Prime</p><p>Prime was designed to make your life better every single day. Over 100 million paid members around the world enjoy the many benefits of Prime, including the best of shopping and entertainment from Amazon. In the U.S. that includes unlimited access to award-winning movies and TV episodes with Prime Video; unlimited access to Prime Music, Prime Reading, Amazon Photos, Twitch Prime; early access to select Lightning Deals, one free pre-released book a month with Amazon First Reads, and more. Prime members can also get deep discounts on select popular products at Whole Foods Market plus an additional 10 percent off hundreds of sale items. Prime was built on the foundation of unlimited fast, free shipping and members receive Prime FREE One-Day Shipping and Prime FREE Same-Day Delivery in more than 10,000 cities and towns, two-hour delivery with Prime Now in more than 30 major cities and unlimited Free Two-Day Shipping on more than 100 million items. Start a free trial of Amazon Prime at amazon.com/prime.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190228005194/en/</p><p>Source: Amazon</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p>

Lyft Goes All-In on AWS

/news/news-details/2019/Lyft-Goes-All-In-on-AWS/default.aspx

Lyft-Goes-All-In-on-AWS

02/26/2019 09:00:00

Lyft Goes All-In on AWS

02/26/2019

2019

Lyft uses the breadth of functionality and highly reliable infrastructure of AWS to enhance rider experience and accelerate self-driving technologies in the cloud SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 26, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Lyft, Inc. is going all-in on the world's leading cloud—to enhance Lyft's ridesharing marketplace which is available to an estimated 95 percent of the U.S. population, as well as in select Canadian cities, drive growth of its bike and scooters businesses, and enable its self-driving technology. Since its inception, Lyft has leveraged AWS's unmatched performance and scalability to power its on-demand transportation platform, which facilitates more than 50 million rides a month. Lyft runs its operations, which provides a multimodal platform for drivers and riders in the U.S. and Canada, as well as backend platform systems, financial applications, and website on AWS. The company is leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS's services, including database, serverless, machine learning, and analytics, to automate and enhance on-demand, multimodal transportation for riders and drive innovation in its autonomous vehicles business. Running on AWS's fault-tolerant, highly performant infrastructure, helps support Lyft's everyday business, and scales easily for peak periods, where demand can skyrocket on weekends and holidays. In addition, Lyft relies on Amazon DynamoDB, a database that delivers high performance at scale, to support its mission-critical workloads, including a ride-tracking system that enables the company to provide more precise vehicle routing. By leveraging Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) and AWS Lambda, Lyft migrated to a microservices architecture to create more than 150 microservices that independently scale workloads while reducing complexity in the cloud to enhance every element of the rider experience. Lyft also has a data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and leverages Amazon Redshift to analyze the vast amount of data it is storing in the cloud, delivering insights that uncover riding patterns and predict pick-up and drop-off locations. This technology supported the introduction of the company's Shared ride service, Lyft Line. Lyft is looking to leverage machine learning services such as Amazon SageMaker to help provide fare estimates, enable fraud detection, and optimize pick-up and drop-off spots, to achieve its goal of building a cost-effective and reliable self-driving system for ridesharing. "We built our business on AWS from the very beginning, taking advantage of their extensive compute power, depth and breadth of services, and expertise to develop an effective cloud infrastructure to support our growing business and goal of improving people's lives with transportation," said Chris Lambert, Chief Technology Officer at Lyft. "By operating on AWS, we are able to scale and innovate quickly to provide new features and improvements to our services and deliver exceptional transportation experiences to our growing community of Lyft riders. With AWS, we don't have to focus on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing our infrastructure, and can concentrate instead on developing and improving services with the goal of providing the best transportation experiences for riders and drivers, and take advantage of the opportunity for Lyft to develop best-in-class self-driving technology." "The rise of ridesharing companies like Lyft has been transformational – changing the transportation model from one that revolved around cities to a new personalized, convenient, on-demand experience. With AWS, Lyft is poised to lead the next major transformation in autonomous motor vehicle technology, by leveraging our industry-leading portfolio of cloud services, proven operational expertise, and unmatched reliability," said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. "By choosing to go all-in on AWS, Lyft is able to innovate, get-to-market quickly, scale, and expand globally, as they invent new ways to make transportation safer and more enjoyable for riders."

<p><em>Lyft uses the breadth of functionality and highly reliable infrastructure of AWS to enhance rider experience and accelerate self-driving technologies in the cloud</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 26, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Lyft, Inc. is going all-in on the world's leading cloud—to enhance Lyft's ridesharing marketplace which is available to an estimated 95 percent of the U.S. population, as well as in select Canadian cities, drive growth of its bike and scooters businesses, and enable its self-driving technology. Since its inception, Lyft has leveraged AWS's unmatched performance and scalability to power its on-demand transportation platform, which facilitates more than 50 million rides a month. Lyft runs its operations, which provides a multimodal platform for drivers and riders in the U.S. and Canada, as well as backend platform systems, financial applications, and website on AWS. The company is leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS's services, including database, serverless, machine learning, and analytics, to automate and enhance on-demand, multimodal transportation for riders and drive innovation in its autonomous vehicles business.</p><p>Running on AWS's fault-tolerant, highly performant infrastructure, helps support Lyft's everyday business, and scales easily for peak periods, where demand can skyrocket on weekends and holidays. In addition, Lyft relies on Amazon DynamoDB, a database that delivers high performance at scale, to support its mission-critical workloads, including a ride-tracking system that enables the company to provide more precise vehicle routing. By leveraging Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (<em>Amazon EKS) </em>and AWS Lambda, Lyft migrated to a microservices architecture to create more than 150 microservices that independently scale workloads while reducing complexity in the cloud to enhance every element of the rider experience. Lyft also has a data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and leverages Amazon Redshift to analyze the vast amount of data it is storing in the cloud, delivering insights that uncover riding patterns and predict pick-up and drop-off locations. This technology supported the introduction of the company's Shared ride service, Lyft Line. Lyft is looking to leverage machine learning services such as Amazon SageMaker to help provide fare estimates, enable fraud detection, and optimize pick-up and drop-off spots, to achieve its goal of building a cost-effective and reliable self-driving system for ridesharing.</p><p>"We built our business on AWS from the very beginning, taking advantage of their extensive compute power, depth and breadth of services, and expertise to develop an effective cloud infrastructure to support our growing business and goal of improving people's lives with transportation," said Chris Lambert, Chief Technology Officer at Lyft. "By operating on AWS, we are able to scale and innovate quickly to provide new features and improvements to our services and deliver exceptional transportation experiences to our growing community of Lyft riders. With AWS, we don't have to focus on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing our infrastructure, and can concentrate instead on developing and improving services with the goal of providing the best transportation experiences for riders and drivers, and take advantage of the opportunity for Lyft to develop best-in-class self-driving technology."</p><p>"The rise of ridesharing companies like Lyft has been transformational – changing the transportation model from one that revolved around cities to a new personalized, convenient, on-demand experience. With AWS, Lyft is poised to lead the next major transformation in autonomous motor vehicle technology, by leveraging our industry-leading portfolio of cloud services, proven operational expertise, and unmatched reliability," said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. "By choosing to go all-in on AWS, Lyft is able to innovate, get-to-market quickly, scale, and expand globally, as they invent new ways to make transportation safer and more enjoyable for riders."</p>

Amazon Future Engineer Brings Computer Science Courses to More Than 1,000 High Schools in Underprivileged Communities Across All 50 States

/news/news-details/2019/Amazon-Future-Engineer-Brings-Computer-Science-Courses-to-More-Than-1000-High-Schools-in-Underprivileged-Communities-Across-All-50-States/default.aspx

Amazon-Future-Engineer-Brings-Computer-Science-Courses-to-More-Than-1000-High-Schools-in-Underprivileged-Communities-Across-All-50-States

02/21/2019 09:30:00

Amazon Future Engineer Brings Computer Science Courses to More Than 1,000 High Schools in Underprivileged Communities Across All 50 States

02/21/2019

2019

By this fall, more than 1,000 high schools will offer Introductory and Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science courses funded by the Amazon Future Engineer program – part of Amazon's $50 million investment in computer science and STEM education More than 700 of the of high schools participating in Amazon Future Engineer serve students from low-income communities, as indicated by the school's Title I status Amazon Future Engineer is a four-part, childhood-to-career program that works to inspire and educate 10 million children and young adults each year from underprivileged, underrepresented, and underserved communities to pursue careers in the fast-growing field of computer science and coding SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 21, 2019-- Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced it will fund computer science courses in more than 1,000 high schools across all 50 states and the District of Columbia reaching tens of thousands of students from underprivileged, underrepresented, or underserved communities, through its Amazon Future Engineer program. Of the more than 1,000 high schools, more than 700 are classified as Title I schools. Amazon's funding provides full-year courses designed to inspire, prepare and propel students of all backgrounds to pursue a computer science education and career. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190221005309/en/ Amazon Future Engineer students (Photo: Business Wire) The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by 2020 there will be 1.4 million computer-science-related jobs available and only 400,000 computer science graduates with the skills to apply for those jobs. Computer science is the fastest-growing profession within the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) field, but only 8% of STEM graduates earn a computer science degree, with a tiny minority from underprivileged backgrounds. Students from underprivileged backgrounds are 8 to 10 times more likely to pursue college degrees in computer science if they have taken AP computer science in high school. "Our students are hungry for computer science education, but we could not get the funding to bring this class to our school," said Chad Bobb, a teacher at Pike High School, a Title I school in Indianapolis, Indiana. "Amazon Future Engineer allows us to open our students' eyes to something that is both interesting and can lead them into rewarding, thriving careers." "It is so important to ensure that every student in the U.S. has the opportunity to be well-prepared for the highly technical jobs of the present and future," said Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (Texas), Chair of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. "I welcome initiatives such as the Amazon Future Engineer program that can increase opportunities for young people who have too long been underrepresented in STEM jobs due to race, gender, or socioeconomic status. I'd like to offer my congratulations to the schools in Dallas, and across the country, who have taken the lead in working to promote solutions to this issue by increasing access to computer science education." "The U.S. Chamber's Technology Engagement Center is pleased to see Amazon expand this program, as computer science and all STEM education programs are critical to the workforce of the future," said Tim Day, Senior Vice President of the Chamber Technology Engagement Center (C_TEC). "More students will have access to the tools they need to be successful, and more businesses will be able to hire employees with the skills necessary to compete in a data driven economy." "We want to ensure that every child, especially those from underprivileged communities, has an opportunity to study computer science," said Jeff Wilke, CEO Worldwide Consumer, Amazon. "We are excited more than 1,000 schools will now provide these courses, and look forward to adding 1,000 more schools over the coming months." The more than 1,000 high schools will offer Intro to Computer Science and AP Computer Science classes through curriculum provider, Edhesive. Amazon's funding provides preparatory lessons, tutorials, professional development for teachers, fully sequenced and paced digital curriculum for students, and live online support every day of the week for both teachers and students. All students participating in this program will receive a free membership to AWS Educate, which provides them with free access to computing power in the AWS Cloud for their coding projects and content to learn about cloud computing. Launched in November, 2018, Amazon Future Engineer is a four-part childhood-to-career program intended to inspire, educate, and prepare children and young adults from underprivileged, underrepresented, and underserved communities to pursue careers in the fast-growing field of computer science. Each year, Amazon Future Engineer aims to inspire more than 10 million kids to explore computer science; provide over 100,000 young people in over 2,000 high schools access to Intro or AP Computer Science courses; award 100 students with four-year $10,000 scholarships, as well as offer guaranteed and paid Amazon internships to gain work experience. Amazon Future Engineer is part of Amazon's $50 million investment in computer science/STEM education. In addition, Amazon Future Engineer has donated more than $10 million to organizations that promote computer science/STEM education across the country. Schools, administrators, and teachers interested in applying to any stage of the Amazon Future Engineer program can apply and learn more here. For more information about Amazon Future Engineer, check out About Amazon. About ‘Amazon in the Community' Amazon is committed to ensuring all children and young adults, especially those from underprivileged, underrepresented, and underserved communities, have the resources and skills they need to build their best future. Amazon focuses on building long-term, innovative, and high impact programs that leverage Amazon's unique assets and culture. Programs include Amazon Future Engineer, designed to inspire and excite children and young adults from underprivileged and underrepresented communities to pursue an education in computer science, as well as programs that support "Right Now Needs," fighting childhood hunger, family homelessness, and disaster relief. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190221005309/en/ Source: Amazon.com, Inc. Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr

<p><em>By this fall, more than 1,000 high schools will offer Introductory and Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science courses funded by the Amazon Future Engineer program – part of Amazon's $50 million investment in computer science and STEM education</em></p><p><em>More than 700 of the of high schools participating in Amazon Future Engineer serve students from low-income communities, as indicated by the school's Title I status</em></p><p><em>Amazon Future Engineer is a four-part, childhood-to-career program that works to inspire and educate 10 million children and young adults each year from underprivileged, underrepresented, and underserved communities to pursue careers in the fast-growing field of computer science and coding</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 21, 2019-- Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced it will fund computer science courses in more than 1,000 high schools across all 50 states and the District of Columbia reaching tens of thousands of students from underprivileged, underrepresented, or underserved communities, through its Amazon Future Engineer program. Of the more than 1,000 high schools, more than 700 are classified as Title I schools. Amazon's funding provides full-year courses designed to inspire, prepare and propel students of all backgrounds to pursue a computer science education and career.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190221005309/en/</p><div><p>Amazon Future Engineer students (Photo: Business Wire)</p></div><p>The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by 2020 there will be 1.4 million computer-science-related jobs available and only 400,000 computer science graduates with the skills to apply for those jobs. Computer science is the fastest-growing profession within the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) field, but only 8% of STEM graduates earn a computer science degree, with a tiny minority from underprivileged backgrounds. Students from underprivileged backgrounds are 8 to 10 times more likely to pursue college degrees in computer science if they have taken AP computer science in high school.</p><p>"Our students are hungry for computer science education, but we could not get the funding to bring this class to our school," said Chad Bobb, a teacher at Pike High School, a Title I school in Indianapolis, Indiana. "Amazon Future Engineer allows us to open our students' eyes to something that is both interesting and can lead them into rewarding, thriving careers."</p><p>"It is so important to ensure that every student in the U.S. has the opportunity to be well-prepared for the highly technical jobs of the present and future," said Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (Texas), Chair of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. "I welcome initiatives such as the Amazon Future Engineer program that can increase opportunities for young people who have too long been underrepresented in STEM jobs due to race, gender, or socioeconomic status. I'd like to offer my congratulations to the schools in Dallas, and across the country, who have taken the lead in working to promote solutions to this issue by increasing access to computer science education."</p><p>"The U.S. Chamber's Technology Engagement Center is pleased to see Amazon expand this program, as computer science and all STEM education programs are critical to the workforce of the future," said Tim Day, Senior Vice President of the Chamber Technology Engagement Center (C_TEC). "More students will have access to the tools they need to be successful, and more businesses will be able to hire employees with the skills necessary to compete in a data driven economy."</p><p>"We want to ensure that every child, especially those from underprivileged communities, has an opportunity to study computer science," said Jeff Wilke, CEO Worldwide Consumer, Amazon. "We are excited more than 1,000 schools will now provide these courses, and look forward to adding 1,000 more schools over the coming months."</p><p>The more than 1,000 high schools will offer Intro to Computer Science and AP Computer Science classes through curriculum provider, Edhesive. Amazon's funding provides preparatory lessons, tutorials, professional development for teachers, fully sequenced and paced digital curriculum for students, and live online support every day of the week for both teachers and students. All students participating in this program will receive a free membership to AWS Educate, which provides them with free access to computing power in the AWS Cloud for their coding projects and content to learn about cloud computing.</p><p>Launched in November, 2018, Amazon Future Engineer is a four-part childhood-to-career program intended to inspire, educate, and prepare children and young adults from underprivileged, underrepresented, and underserved communities to pursue careers in the fast-growing field of computer science. Each year, Amazon Future Engineer aims to inspire more than 10 million kids to explore computer science; provide over 100,000 young people in over 2,000 high schools access to Intro or AP Computer Science courses; award 100 students with four-year $10,000 scholarships, as well as offer guaranteed and paid Amazon internships to gain work experience. Amazon Future Engineer is part of Amazon's $50 million investment in computer science/STEM education. In addition, Amazon Future Engineer has donated more than $10 million to organizations that promote computer science/STEM education across the country.</p><p>Schools, administrators, and teachers interested in applying to any stage of the Amazon Future Engineer program can apply and learn more here.</p><p>For more information about Amazon Future Engineer, check out About Amazon.</p><p>About ‘Amazon in the Community'</p><p>Amazon is committed to ensuring all children and young adults, especially those from underprivileged, underrepresented, and underserved communities, have the resources and skills they need to build their best future. Amazon focuses on building long-term, innovative, and high impact programs that leverage Amazon's unique assets and culture. Programs include Amazon Future Engineer, designed to inspire and excite children and young adults from underprivileged and underrepresented communities to pursue an education in computer science, as well as programs that support "Right Now Needs," fighting childhood hunger, family homelessness, and disaster relief.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190221005309/en/</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p>

Second Spectrum and L.A. Clippers Select AWS as Official Cloud and Machine Learning Provider of Clippers CourtVision

/news/news-details/2019/Second-Spectrum-and-L.A.-Clippers-Select-AWS-as-Official-Cloud-and-Machine-Learning-Provider-of-Clippers-CourtVision/default.aspx

Second-Spectrum-and-L.A.-Clippers-Select-AWS-as-Official-Cloud-and-Machine-Learning-Provider-of-Clippers-CourtVision

02/15/2019 09:00:00

Second Spectrum and L.A. Clippers Select AWS as Official Cloud and Machine Learning Provider of Clippers CourtVision

02/15/2019

2019

Sports software engineering leader and National Basketball Association (NBA) team grow relationship with AWS, maximizing its services to bring fans deeper into the game SEATTLE & LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 15, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that AWS is now the primary cloud computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence provider of Clippers CourtVision, the live, augmented game-watching platform created by the Los Angeles (L.A.) Clippers and Second Spectrum, the official video tracking technology provider for the NBA. The Clippers and Second Spectrum will use AWS machine learning and data analytics services to advance game analyses and drive new experiences for Clippers CourtVision, which launched to great acclaim at the start of the 2018-19 basketball season and has been billed by experts as the future of sports viewing. In addition, Clippers CourtVision will test Amazon SageMaker to build, train, and deploy machine learning-driven stats which will appear on live broadcasts and on-demand NBA game videos. Second Spectrum uses cameras in all 29 NBA arenas to collect 3D spatial data including ball and player locations and movements, which is stored and analyzed on AWS in real time. With help from AWS's broad range of services, Second Spectrum uses that data to generate augmented graphical overlays on Clippers broadcasts in real time, offering users an array of content options and Clippers CourtVision Modes with features ranging from live layouts of basketball plays, to the frame-by-frame probability of a shot going in, to a suite of graphics that animate based on conditions both simple and complex, giving fans a deeper understanding of and interaction with the game as the action unfurls on the court. Clippers CourtVision uses AWS Elemental Media Services to deliver the live game-watching experience. "Innovation only happens when big vision is integrated with technological capabilities to bring that vision to life. Our goal in launching Clippers CourtVision with Second Spectrum was to evolve the sports broadcasting experience. That goal has been realized in large part due to a collaborative approach to computing solutions built utilizing AWS," said Clippers Chief Global Partnerships Officer Scott Sonnenberg. "Using AWS, Second Spectrum is optimizing the speed and capabilities of Clippers CourtVision's technology. Ultimately, we believe this technology powered by AWS will drive a revolution in the broadcast experience that translates Second Spectrum's cutting edge machine learning and augmented reality to all sports, so that fans can watch their game, their way." "The combination of cloud computing and machine learning has the potential to fundamentally redefine how fans experience the sports they love," said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. "With AWS, Second Spectrum and the L.A. Clippers leverage Amazon's 20 years of experience in machine learning and AWS's comprehensive suite of cloud services to provide fans with a deeper understanding of the action on the court. We look forward to working closely with both organizations as they invent new ways for fans to enjoy the game of basketball." "AWS makes it easy to build innovative products and quickly get those products to market," said Rajiv Maheswaran, CEO of Second Spectrum. "The breadth and depth of AWS services and their pace of innovation for new capabilities have allowed us to consistently improve the quality and speed of the Clippers CourtVision product and we are looking forward to deepening this relationship to drive even more powerful results for sports fans." The Clippers CourtVision digital viewing experience, now ‘powered by Amazon Web Services,' is available to FOX Sports Prime Ticket subscribers via the FOX Sports mobile application as well as in a limited Beta release, which has additional customization features that include the choice of seven different camera angles and three different audio experiences, including the sneaker squeaks of in-arena sound. For more information about Clippers CourtVision, visit www.ClippersCourtVision.com. About Second Spectrum Second Spectrum is the world leader in building machines that understand sports. As the Official Tracking and Analytics Provider of the NBA and partner of professional and college teams around the world, Second Spectrum creates tools that help teams save time and discover new insights by making data and video easily accessible and actionable. Second Spectrum's media products help content owners and distributors automatically create augmented video and interactive, personalized, OTT experiences. Founded in 2013, the company works with clients around the globe from its five offices in Los Angeles, New York, Lausanne, Manchester, and Shanghai. For more information, visit http://www.secondspectrum.com. About the L.A. Clippers Led by Chairman Steve Ballmer, the L.A. Clippers in 2018-19 are competing in the franchise's 49th season and 35th in Los Angeles. They recently extended a franchise record, completing their seventh consecutive winning season in 2017-18. The team has logged the NBA's 5th-best record over the course of head coach Doc Rivers' five-year tenure. The Clippers are committed to the city of Los Angeles and through the L.A. Clippers Foundation, provide resources and opportunities that make a positive difference toward leveling the playing field for youth in Southern California. Visit the Clippers online at www.clippers.com or follow them on social media @LAClippers.

<p><em>Sports software engineering leader and National Basketball Association (NBA) team grow relationship with AWS, maximizing its services to bring fans deeper into the game</em></p><p>SEATTLE &amp; LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 15, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that AWS is now the primary cloud computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence provider of Clippers CourtVision, the live, augmented game-watching platform created by the Los Angeles (L.A.) Clippers and Second Spectrum, the official video tracking technology provider for the NBA. The Clippers and Second Spectrum will use AWS machine learning and data analytics services to advance game analyses and drive new experiences for Clippers CourtVision, which launched to great acclaim at the start of the 2018-19 basketball season and has been billed by experts as the future of sports viewing. In addition, Clippers CourtVision will test Amazon SageMaker to build, train, and deploy machine learning-driven stats which will appear on live broadcasts and on-demand NBA game videos.</p><p>Second Spectrum uses cameras in all 29 NBA arenas to collect 3D spatial data including ball and player locations and movements, which is stored and analyzed on AWS in real time. With help from AWS's broad range of services, Second Spectrum uses that data to generate augmented graphical overlays on Clippers broadcasts in real time, offering users an array of content options and Clippers CourtVision Modes with features ranging from live layouts of basketball plays, to the frame-by-frame probability of a shot going in, to a suite of graphics that animate based on conditions both simple and complex, giving fans a deeper understanding of and interaction with the game as the action unfurls on the court. Clippers CourtVision uses AWS Elemental Media Services to deliver the live game-watching experience.</p><p>"Innovation only happens when big vision is integrated with technological capabilities to bring that vision to life. Our goal in launching Clippers CourtVision with Second Spectrum was to evolve the sports broadcasting experience. That goal has been realized in large part due to a collaborative approach to computing solutions built utilizing AWS," said Clippers Chief Global Partnerships Officer Scott Sonnenberg. "Using AWS, Second Spectrum is optimizing the speed and capabilities of Clippers CourtVision's technology. Ultimately, we believe this technology powered by AWS will drive a revolution in the broadcast experience that translates Second Spectrum's cutting edge machine learning and augmented reality to all sports, so that fans can watch their game, their way."</p><p>"The combination of cloud computing and machine learning has the potential to fundamentally redefine how fans experience the sports they love," said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. "With AWS, Second Spectrum and the L.A. Clippers leverage Amazon's 20 years of experience in machine learning and AWS's comprehensive suite of cloud services to provide fans with a deeper understanding of the action on the court. We look forward to working closely with both organizations as they invent new ways for fans to enjoy the game of basketball."</p><p>"AWS makes it easy to build innovative products and quickly get those products to market," said Rajiv Maheswaran, CEO of Second Spectrum. "The breadth and depth of AWS services and their pace of innovation for new capabilities have allowed us to consistently improve the quality and speed of the Clippers CourtVision product and we are looking forward to deepening this relationship to drive even more powerful results for sports fans."</p><p>The Clippers CourtVision digital viewing experience, now ‘powered by Amazon Web Services,' is available to FOX Sports Prime Ticket subscribers via the FOX Sports mobile application as well as in a limited Beta release, which has additional customization features that include the choice of seven different camera angles and three different audio experiences, including the sneaker squeaks of in-arena sound. For more information about Clippers CourtVision, visit www.ClippersCourtVision.com.</p><p>About Second Spectrum</p><p>Second Spectrum is the world leader in building machines that understand sports. As the Official Tracking and Analytics Provider of the NBA and partner of professional and college teams around the world, Second Spectrum creates tools that help teams save time and discover new insights by making data and video easily accessible and actionable. Second Spectrum's media products help content owners and distributors automatically create augmented video and interactive, personalized, OTT experiences. Founded in 2013, the company works with clients around the globe from its five offices in Los Angeles, New York, Lausanne, Manchester, and Shanghai. For more information, visit http://www.secondspectrum.com.</p><p>About the L.A. Clippers</p><p>Led by Chairman Steve Ballmer, the L.A. Clippers in 2018-19 are competing in the franchise's 49th season and 35th in Los Angeles. They recently extended a franchise record, completing their seventh consecutive winning season in 2017-18. The team has logged the NBA's 5^th-best record over the course of head coach Doc Rivers' five-year tenure. The Clippers are committed to the city of Los Angeles and through the L.A. Clippers Foundation, provide resources and opportunities that make a positive difference toward leveling the playing field for youth in Southern California. Visit the Clippers online at www.clippers.com or follow them on social media @LAClippers.</p>

Forgot Sunscreen, Sandals or Sunglasses? Customers Can Shop and Ship to an Amazon Locker at the 2019 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival

/news/news-details/2019/Forgot-Sunscreen-Sandals-or-Sunglasses-Customers-Can-Shop-and-Ship-to-an-Amazon-Locker-at-the-2019-Coachella-Valley-Music-and-Arts-Festival/default.aspx

Forgot-Sunscreen-Sandals-or-Sunglasses-Customers-Can-Shop-and-Ship-to-an-Amazon-Locker-at-the-2019-Coachella-Valley-Music-and-Arts-Festival

02/12/2019 09:05:00

Forgot Sunscreen, Sandals or Sunglasses? Customers Can Shop and Ship to an Amazon Locker at the 2019 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival

02/12/2019

2019

For the first time ever, customers will be able to ship festival essentials to an Amazon Locker located inside the festival — order in advance for delivery during the festival or order onsite for same-day delivery Amazon Lockers will be available both weekends at no additional cost — customers simply order from Amazon's curated storefront for Coachella SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 12, 2019-- (NASDAQ: AMZN) – Today, Amazon announced that, for the first time ever, Amazon Lockers will be available as a convenient and secure delivery option for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Customers will have the ability to ship everything they need from sun hats and phone chargers to lip balm and portable fans directly to an Amazon Locker at no additional cost during both festival weekends – April 12-14 and April 19-21. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190212005538/en/ Amazon Lockers, for the first time ever, will be available as a convenient and secure delivery option for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival from April 12-14 and April 19-21. (Photo: Business Wire) "We want customers to make the most out of their weekend at Coachella," explains Patrick Supanc, Amazon Worldwide Director of Lockers and Pickup. "Bringing the convenience of Amazon Lockers to Coachella will help customers focus on their experience instead of worrying about forgetting something at home or having to carry it in with them." Amazon will introduce a curated Amazon.com storefront to help customers shop for items they need and discover other festival-inspired products. It will feature a selection of essentials from categories including fashion & accessories, beauty, health & wellness, tech, and camping. The storefront will open in the weeks leading up to the festival at amazon.com/Coachella. Shipping to an Amazon Locker at Coachella will be easy and secure. During checkout, customers will select one of the Amazon Lockers at Coachella as their shipping address. Once their package is ready for pickup, customers will receive an e-mail along with a barcode that they'll use to pick up their package. Amazon Lockers will have a designated space within the festival gates and Amazon team members will be onsite to answer any questions from customers picking up their package. Amazon Lockers are available in more than 900 cities and towns across the U.S. as an alternative, secure, and convenient delivery option available at no additional cost. Amazon Lockers are one of the many pickup points that Amazon offers to bring the ultimate convenience to customers. Other pickup points include Amazon Pickup Locations in neighborhoods, cities and campuses across the U.S., and Hub by Amazon for apartment buildings. For more information about Amazon Lockers at Coachella, visit amazon.com/Coachella. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190212005538/en/ Source: Amazon.com, Inc. Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr

<p><em>For the first time ever, customers will be able to ship festival essentials to an Amazon Locker located inside the festival — order in advance for delivery during the festival or order onsite for same-day delivery</em></p><p><em>Amazon Lockers will be available both weekends at no additional cost — customers simply order from Amazon's curated storefront for Coachella</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 12, 2019-- (NASDAQ: AMZN) – Today, Amazon announced that, for the first time ever, Amazon Lockers will be available as a convenient and secure delivery option for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Customers will have the ability to ship everything they need from sun hats and phone chargers to lip balm and portable fans directly to an Amazon Locker at no additional cost during both festival weekends – April 12-14 and April 19-21.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190212005538/en/</p><div><p>Amazon Lockers, for the first time ever, will be available as a convenient and secure delivery option for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival from April 12-14 and April 19-21. (Photo: Business Wire)</p></div><p>"We want customers to make the most out of their weekend at Coachella," explains Patrick Supanc, Amazon Worldwide Director of Lockers and Pickup. "Bringing the convenience of Amazon Lockers to Coachella will help customers focus on their experience instead of worrying about forgetting something at home or having to carry it in with them."</p><p>Amazon will introduce a curated Amazon.com storefront to help customers shop for items they need and discover other festival-inspired products. It will feature a selection of essentials from categories including fashion &amp; accessories, beauty, health &amp; wellness, tech, and camping. The storefront will open in the weeks leading up to the festival at amazon.com/Coachella.</p><p>Shipping to an Amazon Locker at Coachella will be easy and secure. During checkout, customers will select one of the Amazon Lockers at Coachella as their shipping address. Once their package is ready for pickup, customers will receive an e-mail along with a barcode that they'll use to pick up their package. Amazon Lockers will have a designated space within the festival gates and Amazon team members will be onsite to answer any questions from customers picking up their package.</p><p>Amazon Lockers are available in more than 900 cities and towns across the U.S. as an alternative, secure, and convenient delivery option available at no additional cost. Amazon Lockers are one of the many pickup points that Amazon offers to bring the ultimate convenience to customers. Other pickup points include Amazon Pickup Locations in neighborhoods, cities and campuses across the U.S., and Hub by Amazon for apartment buildings.</p><p>For more information about Amazon Lockers at Coachella, visit amazon.com/Coachella.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190212005538/en/</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p>

Amazon to Acquire eero to Help Customers Better Connect Smart Home Devices

/news/news-details/2019/Amazon-to-Acquire-eero-to-Help-Customers-Better-Connect-Smart-Home-Devices/default.aspx

Amazon-to-Acquire-eero-to-Help-Customers-Better-Connect-Smart-Home-Devices

02/11/2019 16:50:00

Amazon to Acquire eero to Help Customers Better Connect Smart Home Devices

02/11/2019

2019

Amazon announced today that it has signed an agreement to acquire eero, a company that offers products and services for high-performing, reliable, and simple home WiFi SEATTLE & SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 11, 2019-- Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and eero today announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire eero. eero's home mesh WiFi systems set up in minutes and blanket every room of a customer's home in high-performing, reliable WiFi. eero is already delighting Amazon customers with its products and services, as indicated by eero's 4.6-star product rating on Amazon.com. "We are incredibly impressed with the eero team and how quickly they invented a WiFi solution that makes connected devices just work," said Dave Limp, SVP of Amazon Devices and Services. "We have a shared vision that the smart home experience can get even easier, and we're committed to continue innovating on behalf of customers." "From the beginning, eero's mission has been to make the technology in homes just work," said Nick Weaver, Co-Founder and CEO of eero. "We started with WiFi because it's the foundation of the modern home. Every customer deserves reliable and secure WiFi in every room. By joining the Amazon family, we're excited to learn from and work closely with a team that is defining the future of the home, accelerate our mission, and bring eero systems to more customers around the globe." eero uses multiple access points that work together as a system to blanket a home in high-performing, reliable, and simple home WiFi. Customers can customize an eero system to meet the needs of their home—regardless of shape or size—eliminating dead zones, ensuring perfect streaming video in every room, and delivering the bandwidth all connected devices need. With the easy-to-use eero app, customers can set up the system in under 10 minutes, share their network, program parental controls, and run speed tests on demand. Additionally, eero communicates with the cloud to receive instructions and updates. This means eero systems are self-updating, self-fixing, and self-improving all the time. Completion of this transaction is subject to customary closing conditions. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. About eero The first mesh home WiFi system, eero blankets any home in reliable and secure WiFi. eero's digital security service, eero Plus, protects connected devices, privacy, and family. eero is simple to set up, even easier to manage, and improves over time with regular, automatic software updates. Founded in San Francisco in 2014 by Amos Schallich, Nate Hardison, and Nick Weaver, eero's goal is to make WiFi so good that you'll never think about WiFi again. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190211005750/en/ Source: Amazon.com, Inc. Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr

<p><em>Amazon announced today that it has signed an agreement to acquire eero, a company that offers products and services for high-performing, reliable, and simple home WiFi</em></p><p>SEATTLE &amp; SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 11, 2019-- Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and eero today announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire eero. eero's home mesh WiFi systems set up in minutes and blanket every room of a customer's home in high-performing, reliable WiFi. eero is already delighting Amazon customers with its products and services, as indicated by eero's 4.6-star product rating on Amazon.com.</p><p>"We are incredibly impressed with the eero team and how quickly they invented a WiFi solution that makes connected devices just work," said Dave Limp, SVP of Amazon Devices and Services. "We have a shared vision that the smart home experience can get even easier, and we're committed to continue innovating on behalf of customers."</p><p>"From the beginning, eero's mission has been to make the technology in homes just work," said Nick Weaver, Co-Founder and CEO of eero. "We started with WiFi because it's the foundation of the modern home. Every customer deserves reliable and secure WiFi in every room. By joining the Amazon family, we're excited to learn from and work closely with a team that is defining the future of the home, accelerate our mission, and bring eero systems to more customers around the globe."</p><p>eero uses multiple access points that work together as a system to blanket a home in high-performing, reliable, and simple home WiFi. Customers can customize an eero system to meet the needs of their home—regardless of shape or size—eliminating dead zones, ensuring perfect streaming video in every room, and delivering the bandwidth all connected devices need.</p><p>With the easy-to-use eero app, customers can set up the system in under 10 minutes, share their network, program parental controls, and run speed tests on demand. Additionally, eero communicates with the cloud to receive instructions and updates. This means eero systems are self-updating, self-fixing, and self-improving all the time.</p><p>Completion of this transaction is subject to customary closing conditions.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>About eero</p><p>The first mesh home WiFi system, eero blankets any home in reliable and secure WiFi. eero's digital security service, eero Plus, protects connected devices, privacy, and family. eero is simple to set up, even easier to manage, and improves over time with regular, automatic software updates. Founded in San Francisco in 2014 by Amos Schallich, Nate Hardison, and Nick Weaver, eero's goal is to make WiFi so good that you'll never think about WiFi again.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190211005750/en/</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p>

Amazon Crossing To Publish a True Crime Story From the Archives of Stieg Larsson, the International Best-Selling Author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

/news/news-details/2019/Amazon-Crossing-To-Publish-a-True-Crime-Story-From-the-Archives-of-Stieg-Larsson-the-International-Best-Selling-Author-of-The-Girl-with-the-Dragon-Tattoo/default.aspx

Amazon-Crossing-To-Publish-a-True-Crime-Story-From-the-Archives-of-Stieg-Larsson-the-International-Best-Selling-Author-of-The-Girl-with-the-Dragon-Tattoo

02/06/2019 08:45:00

Amazon Crossing To Publish a True Crime Story From the Archives of Stieg Larsson, the International Best-Selling Author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

02/06/2019

2019

In The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson's Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin, journalist and author Jan Stocklassa uncovers Larsson's unknown research into the unsolved murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 6, 2019-- (NASDAQ: AMZN) — Amazon Crossing, the literature in translation imprint of Amazon Publishing, announced today the acquisition of The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson's Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin by Jan Stocklassa, translated by Tara F. Chace for publication on October 1, 2019. Ten years after The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo author Stieg Larsson's death, journalist Jan Stocklassa gained exclusive access to Larsson's private archive, uncovering Larsson's unknown project—research and investigation into the unsolved assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. Stocklassa picks up on Larsson's extensive research and quest to solve one of the most enigmatic murder mysteries in European history. Amazon Crossing Senior Editor Elizabeth DeNoma acquired global English rights from Judith Toth at The Nordin Agency. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190206005130/en/ The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson's Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin written by Jan Stocklassa and translated by Tara F. Chace (Graphic: Business Wire) On February 28, 1986, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was shot dead on the streets of Stockholm and the crime is still unsolved today. Before authoring his international best-selling Millennium Trilogy, Stieg Larsson began his own intense investigation into the assassination. He continued his search for the murderer for years—until his own death in 2004. In 2014, the journalist and documentary filmmaker Jan Stocklassa gained access to Larsson's files through Larsson's former employer, the anti-fascist magazine Expo, and discovered his private investigation into the Olof Palme homicide case in twenty cardboard boxes. In The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson and the Hunt for an Assassin, Stocklassa reveals new facts about the case and reveals the hitherto unknown research of the best-selling author in a fascinating true crime story. For the first time in many years, the police in Sweden have taken active measures to investigate a new suspect in the murder case and are pursuing leads based on the research revealed in Stocklassa's book. "The explosive cocktail of a world-famous crime writer and an unsolved murder of a Prime Minister makes for a truly unique story," said Jan Stocklassa. "Add in the biggest publisher of literature in translation in the U.S., Amazon Crossing, for the English-language edition and I couldn't wish for more." "Jan Stocklassa's access to Stieg Larsson's investigation and his own years-long intrepid, exciting exploration into the suspects, motives, and connections gives readers a true crime story about one of the most gripping unsolved murder mysteries of modern times, investigated by one of the most well-known authors of all time," said Elizabeth DeNoma, Senior Editor of Amazon Crossing. "We can't wait to share this story with Stieg Larsson's English-language fans who will be struck by the parallels between the famous author and his famous character, Mikael Blomkvist." Published originally in Swedish in November 2018, Jan Stocklassa's book has now been published in Dutch, Finnish, Danish, German, Polish, Norwegian, French, and Estonian with another 16 languages to follow. Jan Stocklassa is also executive producer of a documentary film focusing on Larsson's research into extreme right-wing groups. The documentary, titled The Man Who Played with Fire, premiered internationally at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2019. About Amazon Publishing Amazon Publishing is a leading publisher of trade fiction, nonfiction, and children's books with a mission to empower outstanding storytellers and connect them with readers worldwide. The Amazon Publishing teams based in Seattle, New York, Grand Haven, Luxembourg, London, Paris, Madrid, Milan and Munich publish emerging, bestselling and critically-acclaimed authors in digital, print and audio formats. For more information, visit apub.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190206005130/en/ Source: Amazon.com, Inc. Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr

<p><em>In </em>The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson's Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin, <em>journalist and author Jan Stocklassa uncovers Larsson's unknown research into the unsolved murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 6, 2019-- (NASDAQ: AMZN) — Amazon Crossing, the literature in translation imprint of Amazon Publishing, announced today the acquisition of <em>The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson's Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin</em> by Jan Stocklassa, translated by Tara F. Chace for publication on October 1, 2019. Ten years after <em>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</em> author Stieg Larsson's death, journalist Jan Stocklassa gained exclusive access to Larsson's private archive, uncovering Larsson's unknown project—research and investigation into the unsolved assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. Stocklassa picks up on Larsson's extensive research and quest to solve one of the most enigmatic murder mysteries in European history. Amazon Crossing Senior Editor Elizabeth DeNoma acquired global English rights from Judith Toth at The Nordin Agency.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190206005130/en/</p><div><p>The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson's Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin written by Jan Stocklassa and translated by Tara F. Chace (Graphic: Business Wire)</p></div><p>On February 28, 1986, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was shot dead on the streets of Stockholm and the crime is still unsolved today. Before authoring his international best-selling Millennium Trilogy, Stieg Larsson began his own intense investigation into the assassination. He continued his search for the murderer for years—until his own death in 2004. In 2014, the journalist and documentary filmmaker Jan Stocklassa gained access to Larsson's files through Larsson's former employer, the anti-fascist magazine <em>Expo</em>, and discovered his private investigation into the Olof Palme homicide case in twenty cardboard boxes. In <em>The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson and the Hunt for an Assassin</em>, Stocklassa reveals new facts about the case and reveals the hitherto unknown research of the best-selling author in a fascinating true crime story. For the first time in many years, the police in Sweden have taken active measures to investigate a new suspect in the murder case and are pursuing leads based on the research revealed in Stocklassa's book.</p><p>"The explosive cocktail of a world-famous crime writer and an unsolved murder of a Prime Minister makes for a truly unique story," said Jan Stocklassa. "Add in the biggest publisher of literature in translation in the U.S., Amazon Crossing, for the English-language edition and I couldn't wish for more."</p><p>"Jan Stocklassa's access to Stieg Larsson's investigation and his own years-long intrepid, exciting exploration into the suspects, motives, and connections gives readers a true crime story about one of the most gripping unsolved murder mysteries of modern times, investigated by one of the most well-known authors of all time," said Elizabeth DeNoma, Senior Editor of Amazon Crossing. "We can't wait to share this story with Stieg Larsson's English-language fans who will be struck by the parallels between the famous author and his famous character, Mikael Blomkvist."</p><p>Published originally in Swedish in November 2018, Jan Stocklassa's book has now been published in Dutch, Finnish, Danish, German, Polish, Norwegian, French, and Estonian with another 16 languages to follow. Jan Stocklassa is also executive producer of a documentary film focusing on Larsson's research into extreme right-wing groups. The documentary, titled <em>The Man Who Played with Fire</em>, premiered internationally at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2019.</p><p>About Amazon Publishing</p><p>Amazon Publishing is a leading publisher of trade fiction, nonfiction, and children's books with a mission to empower outstanding storytellers and connect them with readers worldwide. The Amazon Publishing teams based in Seattle, New York, Grand Haven, Luxembourg, London, Paris, Madrid, Milan and Munich publish emerging, bestselling and critically-acclaimed authors in digital, print and audio formats. For more information, visit apub.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190206005130/en/</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p>

Guinness Six Nations Championship to use AWS Analytics, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning Technologies to Revolutionize the Rugby Viewing Experience

/news/news-details/2019/Guinness-Six-Nations-Championship-to-use-AWS-Analytics-Machine-Learning-and-Deep-Learning-Technologies-to-Revolutionize-the-Rugby-Viewing-Experience/default.aspx

Guinness-Six-Nations-Championship-to-use-AWS-Analytics-Machine-Learning-and-Deep-Learning-Technologies-to-Revolutionize-the-Rugby-Viewing-Experience

02/01/2019 02:00:00

Guinness Six Nations Championship to use AWS Analytics, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning Technologies to Revolutionize the Rugby Viewing Experience

02/01/2019

2019

Rugby's greatest Championship announces AWS as official technology provider SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 1, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that the Guinness Six Nations Championship has selected AWS analytics, machine learning, and deep learning services todeliver more in-depth insight into the Championship and enhance the match experience for rugby fans around the world. As well as providing the technology behind the live broadcast of on-screen match data and statistics, AWS will also power other aspects of the Six Nations Championship across the official website. In doing so, AWS will become the official technology provider of the Six Nations. For years, rugby has embraced new technologies to continually evolve the game. It was one of the first sports to introduce a video match official, and now with AWS, Six Nations plan on bringing a number of other technological firsts to the sport, including using predictive analytics for the first time. For the 2019 Six Nations Championship, seven new kinds of statistics will be launched that are significantly more dynamic than those featured in previous broadcasts. New statistics will look at scrum analysis, play patterns, try origins, team trends, ruck analysis, tackle analysis, and field position analysis. Through the use of advanced AWS technology it will be possible to predict the success of a scrum through the analysis of pack weights, player experience, and historical data as well as give a complete analysis of the ruck. This will analyze speed, cleanouts, steals, infringements, and time spent in the ruck to show the relative dominance of teams in the most important areas of the game. The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning technology from AWS will drive new insights into the game and will set the standard for what rugby fans around the world expect from their sports broadcasters. These new statistics will be generated by gathering live data from the game, streaming them into AWS to store and do analytics, and then delivering these insights back to the live broadcast for viewers in over 170 countries to enjoy. "I am excited to welcome AWS to the Six Nations family," said Ben Morel, CEO, Six Nations Rugby. "With AWS now powering the Championship, we have the opportunity to place unparalleled innovation at the core of our rugby experience, for fans around the world. This is a major boost for our Championship and a clear signal of our ambition to embrace innovation in all areas that will benefit our fans." "We are delighted to be working alongside one of the world's most storied, most iconic, and most respected sporting events," said Andy Isherwood, Vice President and Managing Director EMEA, AWS. "Throughout this year's Championship, and into future seasons, the Six Nations team will be able to develop new, advanced statistics that give unprecedented insight and understanding to the game. As we continue to add greater capabilities to our Machine Learning services, we will bring these to rugby fans, around the world."

<p><em>Rugby's greatest Championship announces AWS as official technology provider</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 1, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that the Guinness Six Nations Championship has selected AWS analytics, machine learning, and deep learning services todeliver more in-depth insight into the Championship and enhance the match experience for rugby fans around the world. As well as providing the technology behind the live broadcast of on-screen match data and statistics, AWS will also power other aspects of the Six Nations Championship across the official website. In doing so, AWS will become the official technology provider of the Six Nations.</p><p>For years, rugby has embraced new technologies to continually evolve the game. It was one of the first sports to introduce a video match official, and now with AWS, Six Nations plan on bringing a number of other technological firsts to the sport, including using predictive analytics for the first time. For the 2019 Six Nations Championship, seven new kinds of statistics will be launched that are significantly more dynamic than those featured in previous broadcasts. New statistics will look at scrum analysis, play patterns, try origins, team trends, ruck analysis, tackle analysis, and field position analysis.</p><p>Through the use of advanced AWS technology it will be possible to predict the success of a scrum through the analysis of pack weights, player experience, and historical data as well as give a complete analysis of the ruck. This will analyze speed, cleanouts, steals, infringements, and time spent in the ruck to show the relative dominance of teams in the most important areas of the game. The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning technology from AWS will drive new insights into the game and will set the standard for what rugby fans around the world expect from their sports broadcasters. These new statistics will be generated by gathering live data from the game, streaming them into AWS to store and do analytics, and then delivering these insights back to the live broadcast for viewers in over 170 countries to enjoy.</p><p>"I am excited to welcome AWS to the Six Nations family," said Ben Morel, CEO, Six Nations Rugby. "With AWS now powering the Championship, we have the opportunity to place unparalleled innovation at the core of our rugby experience, for fans around the world. This is a major boost for our Championship and a clear signal of our ambition to embrace innovation in all areas that will benefit our fans."</p><p>"We are delighted to be working alongside one of the world's most storied, most iconic, and most respected sporting events," said Andy Isherwood, Vice President and Managing Director EMEA, AWS. "Throughout this year's Championship, and into future seasons, the Six Nations team will be able to develop new, advanced statistics that give unprecedented insight and understanding to the game. As we continue to add greater capabilities to our Machine Learning services, we will bring these to rugby fans, around the world."</p>

Amazon.com Announces Fourth Quarter Sales up 20% to $72.4 Billion

/news/news-details/2019/Amazon.com-Announces-Fourth-Quarter-Sales-up-20-to-72.4-Billion/default.aspx

Amazon.com-Announces-Fourth-Quarter-Sales-up-20-to-72.4-Billion

01/31/2019 16:01:00

Amazon.com Announces Fourth Quarter Sales up 20% to $72.4 Billion

01/31/2019

2019

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 31, 2019-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced financial results for its fourth quarter ended December 31, 2018. Operating cash flow increased 67% to $30.7 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $18.4 billion for the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2017. Free cash flow increased to $19.4 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $8.3 billion for the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2017. Free cash flow less lease principal repayments increased to $11.6 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $3.3 billion for the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2017. Free cash flow less finance lease principal repayments and assets acquired under capital leases increased to an inflow of $8.4 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with an outflow of $1.5 billion for the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2017. Common shares outstanding plus shares underlying stock-based awards totaled 507 million on December 31, 2018, compared with 504 million one year ago. Fourth Quarter 2018 Net sales increased 20% to $72.4 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with $60.5 billion in fourth quarter 2017. Excluding the $801 million unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, net sales increased 21% compared with fourth quarter 2017. Operating income increased to $3.8 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with operating income of $2.1 billion in fourth quarter 2017. Net income increased to $3.0 billion in the fourth quarter, or $6.04 per diluted share, compared with net income of $1.9 billion, or $3.75 per diluted share, in fourth quarter 2017. The fourth quarter 2017 included a provisional tax benefit for the impact of the U.S. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 of approximately $789 million. Full Year 2018 Net sales increased 31% to $232.9 billion, compared with $177.9 billion in 2017. Excluding the $1.3 billion favorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the year, net sales increased 30% compared with 2017. Operating income increased to $12.4 billion, compared with operating income of $4.1 billion in 2017. Net income increased to $10.1 billion, or $20.14 per diluted share, compared with net income of $3.0 billion, or $6.15 per diluted share, in 2017. "Alexa was very busy during her holiday season. Echo Dot was the best-selling item across all products on Amazon globally, and customers purchased millions more devices from the Echo family compared to last year," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. "The number of research scientists working on Alexa has more than doubled in the past year, and the results of the team's hard work are clear. In 2018, we improved Alexa's ability to understand requests and answer questions by more than 20% through advances in machine learning, we added billions of facts making Alexa more knowledgeable than ever, developers doubled the number of Alexa skills to over 80,000, and customers spoke to Alexa tens of billions more times in 2018 compared to 2017. We're energized by and grateful for the response, and you can count on us to keep working hard to bring even more invention to customers." Highlights For the second year in a row, Amazon was ranked the company Americans love most on Morning Consult's Brands that Defined 2018, and it was named America's Most JUST Company in Retail on JUST Capital's Just 100 list. The Just 100 award recognizes companies for the areas that matter most to customers, including jobs created, treatment of workers and customers, environmental and community engagement efforts, and more. Amazon launched Amazon Future Engineer, a childhood-to-career program that aims to inspire and educate millions of children and young adults about computer science and coding each year from underserved and low-income communities. Through this program, Amazon will fund coding camps and online lessons, pay for introductory and Advanced Placement courses in computer science for over 100,000 underprivileged young people in 2,000 low-income high schools across the U.S., and award 100 students annually from underserved communities pursuing degrees in computer science with four-year $10,000 annual scholarships, as well as paid internships at Amazon. Amazon's $15 hourly minimum wage went into effect in the U.S. and the U.K. (£10.50 in the London area and £9.50 in the rest of the U.K.) on November 1st for all full-time, part-time, temporary (including those hired by agencies), and seasonal employees. The new Amazon minimum wage benefits more than 250,000 employees in the U.S. and 17,000 employees in the U.K., as well as over 200,000 seasonal employees who were hired this holiday. Following the announcement to increase the minimum wage to $15, Amazon received a company record of approximately 850,000 work applications for hourly positions in the U.S. in October 2018, more than double the previous record for the most applications received in a month. Amazon announced plans to install solar panels on its fulfillment centers across the U.K., with an installed capacity of 20 megawatts – enough clean energy to power over 4,500 U.K. homes. Currently, Amazon hosts solar panels on 43 fulfillment centers worldwide. Amazon continued to invest in helping selling partners increase their sales in our stores, including introducing a USPS Priority Mail Cubic ship method for Seller Fulfilled Prime and merchant fulfilled sellers, which offers a lower cost, volume-based pricing ship option; launching a new FedEx One Rate, a weight agnostic ship method that enables sellers to fulfill Prime orders nationwide; and reducing Fulfillment by Amazon storage fees in the U.S., EU, and Japan. During the holiday season alone, tens of millions of customers worldwide started Prime free trials or began paid memberships. More customers signed up for Prime worldwide in 2018 than ever before. Small and medium-sized businesses had their best holiday season ever in Amazon's stores. More than 50% of units sold in Amazon's stores this holiday season came from small and medium-sized businesses. Third-party sales are growing faster than first-party sales, and nearly 200,000 small and medium-sized businesses surpassed $100,000 in sales in Amazon's stores in 2018. Amazon launched Amazon Pop-Up stores to customers in six countries across Europe during the holiday season. For the first time, Amazon presented a curated selection of over 2,000 products and carried out 136 events and workshops for its customers in Amsterdam, London, Madrid, Milan, Berlin, and Paris. This was the biggest holiday shopping season ever for Amazon devices, with customers purchasing millions more devices compared to the 2017 holiday shopping season. The all-new Echo Dot was the #1 selling product on Amazon globally, from any manufacturer, in any category this holiday season. Amazon introduced new smart home features for Alexa. Customers can now choose from more than 28,000 Alexa-compatible smart home devices from more than 4,500 unique brands, and Alexa Guard helps invited Echo customers keep their homes safe through Smart Alerts, Away Lighting, and voice control of security systems from Ring and ADT. Ring had its best quarter ever, selling millions of devices globally. The Ring Video Doorbell 2 was the best-selling Ring product this holiday season, and the Ring Stick Up Cam, Ring's first indoor/outdoor camera, began shipping to customers. Key by Amazon introduced new ways for customers to control and monitor their homes, including the Schlage Encode Smart Wi-Fi Deadbolt for Key; integration with the Ring app; Key for Garage, which includes remote monitoring and in-garage delivery for eligible Prime members; and Key for Business, a new B2B pillar for the service. The number of devices with Alexa built-in more than doubled in 2018. There are now more than 150 different products available with Alexa built-in, from headphones and PCs to cars and smart home devices. Device makers announced more new Alexa products at CES 2019, including the Lenovo Smart Tab and new devices from brands like First Alert, Jabra, JBL, Kohler, LG, and Razer. Amazon launched Echo and Alexa experiences built from the ground up for Italy, Spain, and Mexico, offering a wide selection of locally-relevant services, features, and skills from local brands. More than one million customers requested an invitation for Echo Auto, and more than a dozen automotive partners announced support for Alexa at CES 2019, including device makers like BOSS Audio, iOttie, and Jensen, and software and service providers like HERE Technologies, Luxoft, P3, Qualcomm, and Telenav. Alexa is getting even smarter. The Alexa Skills Store now offers more than 80,000 skills and Alexa customers can now access Apple Music's library of 50 million songs on their Echo devices. Alexa also answers more questions with the help of customers through Alexa Answers; knows more about math and science with the addition of a new knowledge resource, Wolfram Alpha; helps customers get more done with location-based reminders and routines; connects people across the world with the launch of Skype; and more. Amazon made new scientific advancements with Alexa, including a new unsupervised self-learning system that detects the defects in Alexa's understanding and automatically recovers from these errors, helping Alexa learn at a faster pace. Amazon also introduced a new text-to-speech system, which uses a generative neural network and produces more natural speech, paving the way for Alexa and other services to adopt different speaking styles based on different contexts. Amazon introduced new tools for Alexa developers to make it easier to build engaging skills, including automatic provisioning of cloud resources through Alexa-hosted skills; new tools for monetization, testing, and debugging; location services to provide customers with real-time responses based on their location; and the ability for developers to proactively notify customers with timely and important information. Amazon announced it will host re:MARS, a new global Artificial Intelligence (AI) conference on Machine Learning (ML), Automation, Robotics, and Space, on June 4-7 at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. re:MARS will bring together leaders across science, academia, and business to explore innovation, scientific advancements, and practical applications of AI and ML. IMDb announced the launch of IMDb Freedive, a free streaming video channel available in the U.S. on the IMDb website via laptop or personal computer and on all Fire TV devices. IMDb Freedive, an ad-supported channel, enables customers to watch hit TV shows as well as top Hollywood hits without purchasing a subscription. Prime Video is now available on Comcast's Xfinity X1 in the U.S., giving Prime members with Xfinity easy access to thousands of additional premium shows and movies online. Additionally, Amazon launched NBA League Pass and PGA TOUR LIVE on Prime Video Channels. Prime members can now stream hundreds of out-of-market NBA games live or on-demand with a subscription to NBA League Pass for $28.99/month or $169.99 for a Season Pass. Prime members in the U.S. can also subscribe to PGA TOUR LIVE to watch live coverage across 28 PGA TOUR tournaments per year for $9.99/month or $64.99 per season. Amazon Studios' Cold War was recognized for three Academy Award nominations – Best Foreign Language Film, Best Director for Pawel Pawlikowski, and Best Cinematography for Lukasz Zal. Amazon Studios was recognized with 10 Golden Globe Awards nominations and two wins: Rachel Brosnahan won Best Actress in a Television Series – Comedy or Musical for her performance in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel for the second year in a row and Ben Whishaw won Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Limited Series, or Motion Picture Made for Television for his role in A Very English Scandal. Prime Video Original Series Inside Edge became the first Indian show from a video streaming service to be nominated for the International Emmy Awards. Prime Video introduced localized Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu language user interfaces in India. Prime members can now experience their favorite blockbuster titles and Prime Original series with a Hindi, Tamil, or Telugu user interface, including search, navigation, browse, and customer support. Amazon partnered with ICICI Bank to launch the Amazon ICICI Bank credit card to preselected customers in India. This is the first card in the country to offer Prime members 5% in reward points for their purchases on Amazon.in and reward points for all other payments where Visa is accepted. Amazon announced further expansion in Brazil, with fast and free delivery on hundreds of thousands of in-stock items sold and shipped by Amazon. Customers can now shop from 12 categories, with products shipped across Brazil from a new Amazon fulfillment center located in the Greater São Pauloarea, the first fulfillment center in South America. With this launch, Amazon.com.br now offers consumers 15 categories with total selection of more than 20 million products from Amazon and its selling partners. Amazon Fashion launched Prime Wardrobe in Japan and the U.K., allowing Prime members to order clothing, shoes, and accessories and only pay for what they keep. Amazon expanded free grocery delivery and pickup from Whole Foods Market through Prime Now, allowing customers to place their order via the Prime Now app and choose delivery in as fast as an hour or pickup in as little as 30 minutes. Grocery delivery is available in more than 60 U.S. metros and pickup service is available in more than 20 U.S. metros with plans for continued expansion. Prime FREE Same-Day Delivery and Prime FREE One-Day Shipping expanded this year to more than 10,000 cities and towns in the U.S. Now a majority of Prime members in the U.S. have access to free one-day shipping or faster. Amazon Air announced an expansion of its partnership with Air Transport Services Group, Inc. (ATSG) by leasing an additional 10 aircrafts to support Amazon's growth. The 10 additional cargo planes will consist of Boeing 767-300 aircraft, will be operated on Amazon's behalf by an ATSG airline, and will join the air cargo operation over the next two years. Amazon Air launched a new gateway operation, in Riverside, CA and announced three additional gateway operations that will launch in 2019: Wilmington, OH; Alliance, TX; and Rockford, IL. Amazon Air provides gateway operations – onsite airport facilities to load, unload, and sort packages – at over 20 airports, making two-day shipping possible almost anywhere in the U.S. In 2018, authors earned more than $260 million from the Kindle Direct Publishing Select Global Fund, totaling more than $840 million since the launch of Kindle Unlimited. Hundreds of thousands of authors have self-published millions of books through KDP since launching the service in 2007. Additionally, thousands of independent authors earned more than $50,000, with more than a thousand surpassing $100,000 in royalties in 2018 through KDP. Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced several enterprise customers during the quarter: Ellie Mae, Korean Air, Santander's Openbank, and Pac-12 are going all-in on AWS; Mobileye and Guardian Life Insurance named AWS their preferred public cloud provider; Amgen will leverage AWS as its strategic infrastructure provider for the vast majority of its cloud infrastructure; and National Australia Bank announced they've chosen AWS as their long-term strategic cloud provider. AWS continued to expand its infrastructure in 2018 to best serve customers, launching the AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS Europe (Stockholm) Regions, and announcing plans for both the AWS Africa (Cape Town) as well as the AWS Europe (Milan) Regions. AWS now provides 60 Availability Zones across 20 infrastructure regions globally, with another 12 Availability Zones and four regions in Bahrain, Hong Kong SAR, Italy, and South Africa all coming online by the first half of 2020. AWS added significant Amazon SageMaker capabilities, making it easier for customers to build, train, and run machine learning models: Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth produces high-quality labeled training data with easy access to public and private human labelers, saving time and complexity, and reducing costs by up to 70% when compared to human annotation; AWS Marketplace for Machine Learning includes over 150 algorithms and models (with more coming every day) that can be deployed directly to Amazon SageMaker; Amazon SageMaker Neo is a deep learning model compiler that lets customers train models once, and run them anywhere with up to 2x improvement in performance. AWS placed reinforcement learning in the hands of all developers for the first time with the announcement of Amazon SageMaker RL, AWS DeepRacer, and the AWS DeepRacer League. Amazon SageMaker RL is the cloud's first managed reinforcement learning service that allows any developer to build, train, and deploy with reinforcement learning through managed reinforcement learning algorithms; AWS DeepRacer is a 1/18th scale autonomous model race car driven using reinforcement learning models, trained using Amazon SageMaker, and is designed to give developers hands-on experience with machine learning; and the AWS DeepRacer League is the world's first global autonomous racing league, open to everyone, allowing developers to put their skills to the test and race their cars and models against one another for a chance at prizes and glory. AWSannounced AWS Outposts, fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks that allow customers to run compute and storage on-premises, while seamlessly connecting to the rest of AWS's broad array of services in the cloud. AWS Outposts come in two variants; first, an extension of the fast-growing VMware Cloud on AWS service that runs on AWS Outposts; second, AWS Native Outposts that allow customers to run compute and storage on-premises using the same native AWS APIs and control plane used in the AWS cloud. At re:Invent, AWS announced two purpose-built database services, Amazon Timestream, a fast, scalable, and fully managed time series database for IoT, industrial telematics, application monitoring, and DevOps applications, and Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), a highly scalable, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable ledger. AWS also announced Amazon DocumentDB, a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. Developers can use the same MongoDB application code, drivers, and tools as they do today to run, manage, and scale workloads on Amazon DocumentDB and enjoy improved performance, scalability, and availability without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure. AWS introduced Amazon Managed Blockchain a new service to help companies build applications where multiple parties can execute transactions without the need for a trusted, central authority. Amazon Managed Blockchain makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks using the popular, open source Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric frameworks. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can set up a blockchain network that can span multiple AWS accounts and scale to support thousands of applications and millions of transactions. AWS announced six new instance offerings for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2): A1 instances, which are powered by custom-designed AWS Graviton processors, based on the Arm architecture, for scale-out workloads; P3dn GPU instances, which are ideal for distributed machine learning and high performance computing applications, feature 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) network bandwidth, and give customers the most powerful and capable machine learning instances in the cloud; C5n instances, which deliver 100 Gbps network bandwidth, the most in the public cloud, for running advanced compute-intensive workloads; as well as new general purpose (M5 and T3) and memory-optimized (R5) instance types with AMD EPYC processors that are 10% less expensive than the current M5, T3, and R5 instances. The AMD-based instances provide additional options for customers who are looking to achieve cost savings on their Amazon EC2 compute environment for a variety of workloads, such as microservices, low-latency interactive applications, small and medium databases, virtual desktops, development and test environments, code repositories, and business applications. AWS announced two custom chips: AWS Inferentia and AWS Graviton. AWS Inferentia is a high performance machine learning inference chip, custom designed by AWS, to help customers improve performance and lower the cost of running their inference workloads. AWS Inferentia will provide hundreds of teraflops per chip and thousands of teraflops per Amazon EC2 instance for multiple frameworks (including TensorFlow, Apache MXNet, and PyTorch), and multiple data types (including INT-8 and mixed precision FP-16 and bfloat16). AWS Graviton is a custom designed general purpose processor that uses the Arm instruction set. Offered in the new A1 instance family, AWS Graviton leverages AWS's expertise in building hyperscale cloud systems, and is ideal for customers with scale out workloads. AWS announced four new services that provide automation and prescriptive guidance to help customers build more quickly on AWS: AWS Control Tower, AWS Security Hub, AWS Lake Formation, and AWS Backup. AWS Control Tower gives customers an automated "landing zone" that makes it easy to set up their multi-account environment and continuously govern their AWS workloads with rules for security, operations, and compliance; AWS Security Hub is a central place to manage security and compliance across an AWS environment so that customers can quickly see their AWS security and compliance state in one comprehensive view; AWS Lake Formation makes it much easier for customers to build a secure data lake by simplifying and automating many of the complex manual steps usually required, including collecting, cleaning, and cataloging data; and AWS Backup is a centralized backup service that makes it faster and simpler for customers to back up their data across AWS services and on-premises, helping them more easily meet their business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. AWS continued to expand on the industry's broadest and most capable set of storage offerings with the introduction of the Amazon FSx family and additional storage classes for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Amazon FSx for Windows File Server and Amazon FSx for Lustre are fully managed file system services that provide cost effective, scalable file storage for Windows and compute-intensive workloads. Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically optimizes customers' storage costs for data with unknown or changing access patterns by moving data to the most cost-effective storage tier; Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive delivers the lowest cost storage from any cloud provider at just $0.00099 per GB per month, making it ideal for customers who have large data sets they want to retain for a long time, letting them eliminate the cost and management of tape infrastructure, while ensuring that their data is well preserved for future use and analysis. Financial Guidance The following forward-looking statements reflect Amazon.com's expectations as of January 31, 2019, and are subject to substantial uncertainty. Our results are inherently unpredictable and may be materially affected by many factors, such as fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, changes in global economic conditions and customer spending, world events, the rate of growth of the Internet, online commerce, and cloud services, and the various factors detailed below. First Quarter 2019 Guidance Net sales are expected to be between $56 billion and $60 billion, or to grow between 10% and 18% compared with first quarter 2018. This guidance anticipates an unfavorable impact of approximately 210 basis points from foreign exchange rates. Operating income is expected to be between $2.3 billion and $3.3 billion, compared with $1.9 billion in first quarter 2018. This guidance assumes, among other things, that no additional business acquisitions, investments, restructurings, or legal settlements are concluded. A conference call will be webcast live today at 2:30 p.m. PT/5:30 p.m. ET, and will be available for at least three months at amazon.com/ir. This call will contain forward-looking statements and other material information regarding the Company's financial and operating results. These forward-looking statements are inherently difficult to predict. Actual results could differ materially for a variety of reasons, including, in addition to the factors discussed above, the amount that Amazon.com invests in new business opportunities and the timing of those investments, the mix of products and services sold to customers, the mix of net sales derived from products as compared with services, the extent to which we owe income or other taxes, competition, management of growth, potential fluctuations in operating results, international growth and expansion, the outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment, sortation, delivery, and data center optimization, risks of inventory management, seasonality, the degree to which the Company enters into, maintains, and develops commercial agreements, proposed and completed acquisitions and strategic transactions, payments risks, and risks of fulfillment throughput and productivity. Other risks and uncertainties include, among others, risks related to new products, services, and technologies, system interruptions, government regulation and taxation, and fraud. In addition, the current global economic climate amplifies many of these risks. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings. Our investor relations website is amazon.com/ir and we encourage investors to use it as a way of easily finding information about us. We promptly make available on this website, free of charge, the reports that we file or furnish with the SEC, corporate governance information (including our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics), and select press releases, which may contain material information about us, and you may subscribe to be notified of new information posted to this site. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. AMAZON.COM, INC. Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows (in millions) Three Months EndedDecember 31, Twelve Months EndedDecember 31, 2017 2018 2017 2018 (unaudited) CASH, CASH EQUIVALENTS, AND RESTRICTED CASH, BEGINNING OF PERIOD $ 13,960 $ 21,032 $ 19,934 $ 21,856 OPERATING ACTIVITIES: Net income 1,856 3,027 3,033 10,073 Adjustments to reconcile net income to net cash from operating activities: Depreciation of property and equipment and other amortization, including capitalized content costs 3,498 4,262 11,478 15,341 Stock-based compensation 1,179 1,417 4,215 5,418 Other operating expense, net 56 72 202 274 Other expense (income), net (5 ) 197 (292 ) 219 Deferred income taxes (308 ) 173 (29 ) 441 Changes in operating assets and liabilities: Inventories (2,255 ) (1,350 ) (3,583 ) (1,314 ) Accounts receivable, net and other (2,764 ) (1,395 ) (4,780 ) (4,615 ) Accounts payable 8,904 6,882 7,100 3,263 Accrued expenses and other 2,061 2,665 283 472 Unearned revenue 136 528 738 1,151 Net cash provided by (used in) operating activities 12,358 16,478 18,365 30,723 INVESTING ACTIVITIES: Purchases of property and equipment (3,619 ) (3,733 ) (11,955 ) (13,427 ) Proceeds from property and equipment incentives 583 614 1,897 2,104 Acquisitions, net of cash acquired, and other (81 ) (331 ) (13,972 ) (2,186 ) Sales and maturities of marketable securities 3,485 1,938 9,677 8,240 Purchases of marketable securities (2,349 ) (2,060 ) (12,731 ) (7,100 ) Net cash provided by (used in) investing activities (1,981 ) (3,572 ) (27,084 ) (12,369 ) FINANCING ACTIVITIES: Proceeds from long-term debt and other 109 406 16,228 768 Repayments of long-term debt and other (1,142 ) (134 ) (1,301 ) (668 ) Principal repayments of capital lease obligations (1,472 ) (1,906 ) (4,799 ) (7,449 ) Principal repayments of finance lease obligations (66 ) (126 ) (200 ) (337 ) Net cash provided by (used in) financing activities (2,571 ) (1,760 ) 9,928 (7,686 ) Foreign currency effect on cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash 90 (5 ) 713 (351 ) Net increase (decrease) in cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash 7,896 11,141 1,922 10,317 CASH, CASH EQUIVALENTS, AND RESTRICTED CASH, END OF PERIOD $ 21,856 $ 32,173 $ 21,856 $ 32,173 SUPPLEMENTAL CASH FLOW INFORMATION: Cash paid for interest on long-term debt $ 174 $ 121 $ 328 $ 854 Cash paid for interest on capital and finance lease obligations 84 156 319 575 Cash paid for income taxes, net of refunds 92 171 957 1,184 Property and equipment acquired under capital leases 2,770 3,680 9,637 10,615 Property and equipment acquired under build-to-suit leases 843 1,143 3,541 3,641 ______________________________ As a result of the adoption of new accounting guidance, we retrospectively adjusted our consolidated statements of cash flows to add restricted cash to cash and cash equivalents. AMAZON.COM, INC. Consolidated Statements of Operations (in millions, except per share data) Three Months EndedDecember 31, Twelve Months EndedDecember 31, 2017 2018 2017 2018 (unaudited) Net product sales $ 41,325 $ 44,700 $ 118,573 $ 141,915 Net service sales 19,128 27,683 59,293 90,972 Total net sales 60,453 72,383 177,866 232,887 Operating expenses: Cost of sales 38,494 44,786 111,934 139,156 Fulfillment 8,974 10,028 25,249 34,027 Marketing 3,440 4,911 10,069 13,814 Technology and content 6,314 7,669 22,620 28,837 General and administrative 1,044 1,117 3,674 4,336 Other operating expense, net 60 86 214 296 Total operating expenses 58,326 68,597 173,760 220,466 Operating income 2,127 3,786 4,106 12,421 Interest income 66 150 202 440 Interest expense (339 ) (387 ) (848 ) (1,417 ) Other income (expense), net 18 (199 ) 346 (183 ) Total non-operating income (expense) (255 ) (436 ) (300 ) (1,160 ) Income before income taxes 1,872 3,350 3,806 11,261 Provision for income taxes (16 ) (327 ) (769 ) (1,197 ) Equity-method investment activity, net of tax — 4 (4 ) 9 Net income $ 1,856 $ 3,027 $ 3,033 $ 10,073 Basic earnings per share $ 3.85 $ 6.18 $ 6.32 $ 20.68 Diluted earnings per share $ 3.75 $ 6.04 $ 6.15 $ 20.14 Weighted-average shares used in computation of earnings per share: Basic 483 490 480 487 Diluted 496 501 493 500 AMAZON.COM, INC. Consolidated Statements of Comprehensive Income (in millions) Three Months EndedDecember 31, Twelve Months EndedDecember 31, 2017 2018 2017 2018 (unaudited) Net income $ 1,856 $ 3,027 $ 3,033 $ 10,073 Other comprehensive income (loss): Foreign currency translation adjustments, net of tax of $10, $(13), $5, and $6 47 (25 ) 533 (538 ) Net change in unrealized gains (losses) on available-for-sale debt securities: Unrealized gains (losses), net of tax of $4, $0, $5, and $0 (29 ) 5 (39 ) (17 ) Reclassification adjustment for losses (gains) included in "Other income (expense), net," net of tax of $0, $0, $0, and $0 (1 ) 2 7 8 Net unrealized gains (losses) on available-for-sale debt securities (30 ) 7 (32 ) (9 ) Total other comprehensive income (loss) 17 (18 ) 501 (547 ) Comprehensive income $ 1,873 $ 3,009 $ 3,534 $ 9,526 AMAZON.COM, INC. Segment Information (in millions) Three Months EndedDecember 31, Twelve Months EndedDecember 31, 2017 2018 2017 2018 (unaudited) North America Net sales $ 37,302 $ 44,124 $ 106,110 $ 141,366 Operating expenses 35,610 41,873 103,273 134,099 Operating income $ 1,692 $ 2,251 $ 2,837 $ 7,267 International Net sales $ 18,038 $ 20,829 $ 54,297 $ 65,866 Operating expenses 18,957 21,471 57,359 68,008 Operating income (loss) $ (919 ) $ (642 ) $ (3,062 ) $ (2,142 ) AWS Net sales $ 5,113 $ 7,430 $ 17,459 $ 25,655 Operating expenses 3,759 5,253 13,128 18,359 Operating income $ 1,354 $ 2,177 $ 4,331 $ 7,296 Consolidated Net sales $ 60,453 $ 72,383 $ 177,866 $ 232,887 Operating expenses 58,326 68,597 173,760 220,466 Operating income 2,127 3,786 4,106 12,421 Total non-operating income (expense) (255 ) (436 ) (300 ) (1,160 ) Provision for income taxes (16 ) (327 ) (769 ) (1,197 ) Equity-method investment activity, net of tax — 4 (4 ) 9 Net income $ 1,856 $ 3,027 $ 3,033 $ 10,073 Segment Highlights: Y/Y net sales growth: North America 42 % 18 % 33 % 33 % International 29 15 23 21 AWS 45 45 43 47 Consolidated 38 20 31 31 Net sales mix: North America 62 % 61 % 60 % 61 % International 30 29 30 28 AWS 8 10 10 11 Consolidated 100 % 100 % 100 % 100 % AMAZON.COM, INC. Consolidated Balance Sheets (in millions, except per share data) December 31, 2017 December 31, 2018 ASSETS Current assets: Cash and cash equivalents $ 20,522 $ 31,750 Marketable securities 10,464 9,500 Inventories 16,047 17,174 Accounts receivable, net and other 13,164 16,677 Total current assets 60,197 75,101 Property and equipment, net 48,866 61,797 Goodwill 13,350 14,548 Other assets 8,897 11,202 Total assets $ 131,310 $ 162,648 LIABILITIES AND STOCKHOLDERS' EQUITY Current liabilities: Accounts payable $ 34,616 $ 38,192 Accrued expenses and other 18,170 23,663 Unearned revenue 5,097 6,536 Total current liabilities 57,883 68,391 Long-term debt 24,743 23,495 Other long-term liabilities 20,975 27,213 Commitments and contingencies Stockholders' equity: Preferred stock, $0.01 par value: Authorized shares — 500 Issued and outstanding shares — none — — Common stock, $0.01 par value: Authorized shares — 5,000 Issued shares — 507 and 514 Outstanding shares — 484 and 491 5 5 Treasury stock, at cost (1,837 ) (1,837 ) Additional paid-in capital 21,389 26,791 Accumulated other comprehensive loss (484 ) (1,035 ) Retained earnings 8,636 19,625 Total stockholders' equity 27,709 43,549 Total liabilities and stockholders' equity $ 131,310 $ 162,648 AMAZON.COM, INC. Supplemental Financial Information and Business Metrics (in millions, except per share data) (unaudited) Q3 2017 Q4 2017 Q1 2018 Q2 2018 Q3 2018 Q4 2018 Y/Y %Change Cash Flows and Shares Operating cash flow -- trailing twelve months (TTM) (1) $ 16,996 $ 18,365 $ 18,194 $ 21,793 $ 26,604 $ 30,723 67 % Operating cash flow -- TTM Y/Y growth 13 % 7 % 4 % 22 % 57 % 67 % N/A Purchases of property and equipment, net of proceeds from property and equipment incentives -- TTM $ 9,027 $ 10,058 $ 10,924 $ 11,372 $ 11,239 $ 11,323 13 % Principal repayments of capital lease obligations -- TTM $ 4,331 $ 4,799 $ 5,981 $ 6,037 $ 7,016 $ 7,449 55 % Principal repayments of finance lease obligations -- TTM $ 175 $ 200 $ 235 $ 244 $ 277 $ 337 69 % Property and equipment acquired under capital leases -- TTM $ 8,905 $ 9,637 $ 10,020 $ 9,631 $ 9,704 $ 10,615 10 % Free cash flow -- TTM (1) (2) $ 7,969 $ 8,307 $ 7,270 $ 10,421 $ 15,365 $ 19,400 134 % Free cash flow less lease principal repayments -- TTM (1) (3) $ 3,463 $ 3,308 $ 1,054 $ 4,140 $ 8,072 $ 11,614 251 % Free cash flow less finance lease principal repayments and assets acquired under capital leases -- TTM (1) (4) $ (1,111 ) $ (1,530 ) $ (2,985 ) $ 546 $ 5,384 $ 8,448 N/A Invested capital (5) $ 52,690 $ 60,368 $ 68,377 $ 76,600 $ 85,059 $ 90,849 50 % Common shares and stock-based awards outstanding 503 504 504 506 507 507 1 % Common shares outstanding 482 484 485 487 489 491 1 % Stock-based awards outstanding 21 20 19 19 18 16 (21 )% Stock-based awards outstanding -- % of common shares outstanding 4.4 % 4.2 % 3.9 % 3.9 % 3.7 % 3.2 % N/A Results of Operations Worldwide (WW) net sales $ 43,744 $ 60,453 $ 51,042 $ 52,886 $ 56,576 $ 72,383 20 % WW net sales -- Y/Y growth, excluding F/X 33 % 36 % 39 % 37 % 30 % 21 % N/A WW net sales -- TTM $ 161,154 $ 177,866 $ 193,194 $ 208,125 $ 220,958 $ 232,887 31 % WW net sales -- TTM Y/Y growth, excluding F/X 27 % 31 % 34 % 36 % 35 % 30 % N/A Operating income $ 347 $ 2,127 $ 1,927 $ 2,983 $ 3,724 $ 3,786 78 % F/X impact -- favorable (unfavorable) $ (39 ) $ (33 ) $ (29 ) $ 42 $ 90 $ 123 N/A Operating income -- Y/Y growth (decline), excluding F/X (33 )% 72 % 95 % 369 % 948 % 72 % N/A Operating margin -- % of WW net sales 0.8 % 3.5 % 3.8 % 5.6 % 6.6 % 5.2 % N/A Operating income -- TTM $ 3,234 $ 4,106 $ 5,028 $ 7,384 $ 10,762 $ 12,421 203 % Operating income -- TTM Y/Y growth (decline), excluding F/X (17 )% 1 % 25 % 115 % 231 % 197 % N/A Operating margin -- TTM % of WW net sales 2.0 % 2.3 % 2.6 % 3.5 % 4.9 % 5.3 % N/A Net income $ 256 $ 1,856 $ 1,629 $ 2,534 $ 2,883 $ 3,027 63 % Net income per diluted share $ 0.52 $ 3.75 $ 3.27 $ 5.07 $ 5.75 $ 6.04 61 % Net income -- TTM $ 1,926 $ 3,033 $ 3,938 $ 6,275 $ 8,902 $ 10,073 232 % Net income per diluted share -- TTM $ 3.94 $ 6.15 $ 7.90 $ 12.63 $ 17.85 $ 20.14 228 % ______________________________ (1) As a result of the adoption of new accounting guidance, we retrospectively adjusted our consolidated statements of cash flows to add restricted cash to cash and cash equivalents. (2) Free cash flow is cash flow from operations reduced by "Purchases of property and equipment, net of proceeds from property and equipment incentives," which both are included in cash flow from investing activities. (3) Free cash flow less lease principal repayments is free cash flow reduced by "Principal repayments of capital lease obligations," and "Principal repayments of finance lease obligations," which are included in cash flow from financing activities. (4) Free cash flow less finance lease principal repayments and assets acquired under capital leases is free cash flow reduced by "Principal repayments of finance lease obligations," which is included in cash flow from financing activities, and property and equipment acquired under capital leases. In this measure, property and equipment acquired under capital leases is reflected as if these assets had been purchased with cash, which is not the case as these assets have been leased. (5) Average Total Assets minus Current Liabilities (excluding current portion of Long-Term Debt and current portion of capital lease obligations and finance lease obligations) over five quarter ends. AMAZON.COM, INC. Supplemental Financial Information and Business Metrics (in millions) (unaudited) Q3 2017 Q4 2017 Q1 2018 Q2 2018 Q3 2018 Q4 2018 Y/Y %Change Segments North America Segment: Net sales $ 25,446 $ 37,302 $ 30,725 $ 32,169 $ 34,348 $ 44,124 18 % Net sales -- Y/Y growth, excluding F/X 35 % 42 % 46 % 44 % 35 % 18 % N/A Net sales -- TTM $ 95,048 $ 106,110 $ 115,843 $ 125,642 $ 134,545 $ 141,366 33 % Operating income $ 112 $ 1,692 $ 1,149 $ 1,835 $ 2,032 $ 2,251 33 % F/X impact -- favorable (unfavorable) $ (12 ) $ (8 ) $ (10 ) $ 1 $ 9 $ 17 N/A Operating income -- Y/Y growth (decline), excluding F/X (51 )% 108 % 95 % 321 % N/A 32 % N/A Operating margin -- % of North America net sales 0.4 % 4.5 % 3.7 % 5.7 % 5.9 % 5.1 % N/A Operating income -- TTM $ 1,960 $ 2,837 $ 3,390 $ 4,788 $ 6,708 $ 7,267 156 % Operating margin -- TTM % of North America net sales 2.1 % 2.7 % 2.9 % 3.8 % 5.0 % 5.1 % N/A International Segment: Net sales $ 13,714 $ 18,038 $ 14,875 $ 14,612 $ 15,549 $ 20,829 15 % Net sales -- Y/Y growth, excluding F/X 28 % 22 % 21 % 21 % 15 % 19 % N/A Net sales -- TTM $ 50,224 $ 54,297 $ 58,111 $ 61,239 $ 63,074 $ 65,866 21 % Operating income (loss) $ (936 ) $ (919 ) $ (622 ) $ (494 ) $ (385 ) $ (642 ) (30 )% F/X impact -- favorable (unfavorable) $ (13 ) $ 20 $ 70 $ 86 $ 47 $ 55 N/A Operating income/loss -- Y/Y growth (decline), excluding F/X 71 % 93 % 44 % (20 )% (54 )% (24 )% N/A Operating margin -- % of International net sales (6.8 )% (5.1 )% (4.2 )% (3.4 )% (2.5 )% (3.1 )% N/A Operating income (loss) -- TTM $ (2,629 ) $ (3,062 ) $ (3,202 ) $ (2,971 ) $ (2,420 ) $ (2,142 ) (30 )% Operating margin -- TTM % of International net sales (5.2 )% (5.6 )% (5.5 )% (4.9 )% (3.8 )% (3.3 )% N/A AWS Segment: Net sales $ 4,584 $ 5,113 $ 5,442 $ 6,105 $ 6,679 $ 7,430 45 % Net sales -- Y/Y growth, excluding F/X 42 % 44 % 48 % 49 % 46 % 46 % N/A Net sales -- TTM $ 15,882 $ 17,459 $ 19,240 $ 21,244 $ 23,339 $ 25,655 47 % Operating income $ 1,171 $ 1,354 $ 1,400 $ 1,642 $ 2,077 $ 2,177 61 % F/X impact -- favorable (unfavorable) $ (14 ) $ (45 ) $ (89 ) $ (45 ) $ 34 $ 51 N/A Operating income -- Y/Y growth, excluding F/X 38 % 51 % 67 % 84 % 75 % 57 % N/A Operating margin -- % of AWS net sales 25.5 % 26.5 % 25.7 % 26.9 % 31.1 % 29.3 % N/A Operating income -- TTM $ 3,903 $ 4,331 $ 4,840 $ 5,567 $ 6,473 $ 7,296 68 % Operating margin -- TTM % of AWS net sales 24.6 % 24.8 % 25.2 % 26.2 % 27.7 % 28.4 % N/A AMAZON.COM, INC. Supplemental Financial Information and Business Metrics (in millions, except employee data) (unaudited) Q3 2017 Q4 2017 Q1 2018 Q2 2018 Q3 2018 Q4 2018 Y/Y %Change Net Sales: Online stores (1) $ 26,392 $ 35,383 $ 26,939 $ 27,165 $ 29,061 $ 39,822 13 % Online stores - Y/Y growth, excluding F/X 22 % 17 % 13 % 12 % 11 % 14 % N/A Physical stores (2) $ 1,276 $ 4,522 $ 4,263 $ 4,312 $ 4,248 $ 4,401 (3 )% Physical Stores - Y/Y growth, excluding F/X N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A (3 )% N/A Third-party seller services (3) $ 7,928 $ 10,523 $ 9,265 $ 9,702 $ 10,395 $ 13,383 27 % Third-party seller services - Y/Y growth, excluding F/X 40 % 38 % 39 % 36 % 32 % 28 % N/A Subscription services (4) $ 2,441 $ 3,177 $ 3,102 $ 3,408 $ 3,698 $ 3,959 25 % Subscription services - Y/Y growth, excluding F/X 59 % 47 % 56 % 55 % 52 % 26 % N/A AWS $ 4,584 $ 5,113 $ 5,442 $ 6,105 $ 6,679 $ 7,430 45 % AWS - Y/Y growth, excluding F/X 42 % 44 % 48 % 49 % 46 % 46 % N/A Other (5) $ 1,123 $ 1,735 $ 2,031 $ 2,194 $ 2,495 $ 3,388 95 % Other - Y/Y growth, excluding F/X 58 % 60 % 132 % 129 % 123 % 97 % N/A Stock-based Compensation Expense Cost of sales $ 13 $ 14 $ 15 $ 19 $ 19 $ 21 54 % Fulfillment $ 230 $ 256 $ 244 $ 320 $ 269 $ 287 12 % Marketing $ 135 $ 148 $ 161 $ 190 $ 201 $ 217 46 % Technology and content $ 595 $ 637 $ 631 $ 788 $ 719 $ 750 18 % General and administrative $ 112 $ 124 $ 132 $ 151 $ 142 $ 142 14 % Total stock-based compensation expense $ 1,085 $ 1,179 $ 1,183 $ 1,468 $ 1,350 $ 1,417 20 % Other WW shipping costs $ 5,401 $ 7,368 $ 6,069 $ 5,990 $ 6,568 $ 9,041 23 % WW shipping costs -- Y/Y growth 39 % 31 % 38 % 31 % 22 % 23 % N/A WW paid units -- Y/Y growth (6) 25 % 23 % 22 % 17 % 15 % 14 % N/A WW seller unit mix -- % of WW paid units (6) 50 % 51 % 52 % 53 % 53 % 52 % N/A Employees (full-time and part-time; excludes contractors & temporary personnel) 541,900 566,000 563,100 575,700 613,300 647,500 14 % Employees (full-time and part-time; excludes contractors & temporary personnel) -- Y/Y growth 77 % 66 % 60 % 51 % 13 % 14 % N/A ________________________ (1) Includes product sales and digital media content where we record revenue gross. We leverage our retail infrastructure to offer a wide selection of consumable and durable goods that includes media products available in both a physical and digital format, such as books, music, videos, games, and software. These product sales include digital products sold on a transactional basis. Digital product subscriptions that provide unlimited viewing or usage rights are included in Subscription services. (2) Includes product sales where our customers physically select items in a store. (3) Includes commissions and any related fulfillment and shipping fees, and other third-party seller services. (4) Includes annual and monthly fees associated with Amazon Prime memberships, as well as audiobook, digital video, e-book, digital music, and other non-AWS subscription services. (5) Primarily includes sales of advertising services, as well as sales related to our other service offerings. (6) Excludes the impact of Whole Foods Market. Amazon.com, Inc.Certain Definitions Customer Accounts References to customers mean customer accounts, which are unique e-mail addresses, established either when a customer places an order or when a customer orders from other sellers on our websites. Customer accounts exclude certain customers, including customers associated with certain of our acquisitions, Amazon Payments customers, AWS customers, and the customers of select companies with whom we have a technology alliance or marketing and promotional relationship. Customers are considered active when they have placed an order during the preceding twelve-month period. Seller Accounts References to sellers means seller accounts, which are established when a seller receives an order from a customer account. Sellers are considered active when they have received an order from a customer during the preceding twelve-month period. AWS Customers References to AWS customers mean unique AWS customer accounts, which are unique customer account IDs that are eligible to use AWS services. This includes AWS accounts in the AWS free tier. Multiple users accessing AWS services via one account ID are counted as a single account. Customers are considered active when they have had AWS usage activity during the preceding one-month period. Units References to units mean physical and digital units sold (net of returns and cancellations) by us and sellers at Amazon domains worldwide as well as Amazon-owned items sold through non-Amazon domains. Units sold are paid units and do not include units associated with AWS, certain acquisitions, rental businesses, or advertising businesses, or Amazon gift cards. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190131005900/en/ Source: Amazon.com, Inc. Amazon.com Investor RelationsDave Fildes, amazon-ir@amazon.comamazon.com/ir Amazon.com Public RelationsDan Perlet, amazon-pr@amazon.comamazon.com/pr

<p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 31, 2019-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced financial results for its fourth quarter ended December 31, 2018.</p><p>Operating cash flow increased 67% to $30.7 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $18.4 billion for the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2017. Free cash flow increased to $19.4 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $8.3 billion for the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2017. Free cash flow less lease principal repayments increased to $11.6 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $3.3 billion for the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2017. Free cash flow less finance lease principal repayments and assets acquired under capital leases increased to an inflow of $8.4 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with an outflow of $1.5 billion for the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2017.</p><p>Common shares outstanding plus shares underlying stock-based awards totaled 507 million on December 31, 2018, compared with 504 million one year ago.</p><p><em>Fourth Quarter 2018</em></p><p>Net sales increased 20% to $72.4 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with $60.5 billion in fourth quarter 2017. Excluding the $801 million unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, net sales increased 21% compared with fourth quarter 2017.</p><p>Operating income increased to $3.8 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with operating income of $2.1 billion in fourth quarter 2017.</p><p>Net income increased to $3.0 billion in the fourth quarter, or $6.04 per diluted share, compared with net income of $1.9 billion, or $3.75 per diluted share, in fourth quarter 2017. The fourth quarter 2017 included a provisional tax benefit for the impact of the U.S. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 of approximately $789 million.</p><p><em>Full Year 2018</em></p><p>Net sales increased 31% to $232.9 billion, compared with $177.9 billion in 2017. Excluding the $1.3 billion favorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the year, net sales increased 30% compared with 2017.</p><p>Operating income increased to $12.4 billion, compared with operating income of $4.1 billion in 2017.</p><p>Net income increased to $10.1 billion, or $20.14 per diluted share, compared with net income of $3.0 billion, or $6.15 per diluted share, in 2017.</p><p>"Alexa was very busy during her holiday season. Echo Dot was the best-selling item across all products on Amazon globally, and customers purchased millions more devices from the Echo family compared to last year," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. "The number of research scientists working on Alexa has more than doubled in the past year, and the results of the team's hard work are clear. In 2018, we improved Alexa's ability to understand requests and answer questions by more than 20% through advances in machine learning, we added billions of facts making Alexa more knowledgeable than ever, developers doubled the number of Alexa skills to over 80,000, and customers spoke to Alexa tens of billions more times in 2018 compared to 2017. We're energized by and grateful for the response, and you can count on us to keep working hard to bring even more invention to customers."</p><p>Highlights</p><ul><li>For the second year in a row, Amazon was ranked the company Americans love most on Morning Consult's Brands that Defined 2018, and it was named America's Most JUST Company in Retail on JUST Capital's Just 100 list. The Just 100 award recognizes companies for the areas that matter most to customers, including jobs created, treatment of workers and customers, environmental and community engagement efforts, and more.</li><li>Amazon launched Amazon Future Engineer, a childhood-to-career program that aims to inspire and educate millions of children and young adults about computer science and coding each year from underserved and low-income communities. Through this program, Amazon will fund coding camps and online lessons, pay for introductory and Advanced Placement courses in computer science for over 100,000 underprivileged young people in 2,000 low-income high schools across the U.S., and award 100 students annually from underserved communities pursuing degrees in computer science with four-year $10,000 annual scholarships, as well as paid internships at Amazon.</li><li>Amazon's $15 hourly minimum wage went into effect in the U.S. and the U.K. (£10.50 in the London area and £9.50 in the rest of the U.K.) on November 1st for all full-time, part-time, temporary (including those hired by agencies), and seasonal employees. The new Amazon minimum wage benefits more than 250,000 employees in the U.S. and 17,000 employees in the U.K., as well as over 200,000 seasonal employees who were hired this holiday. Following the announcement to increase the minimum wage to $15, Amazon received a company record of approximately 850,000 work applications for hourly positions in the U.S. in October 2018, more than double the previous record for the most applications received in a month.</li><li>Amazon announced plans to install solar panels on its fulfillment centers across the U.K., with an installed capacity of 20 megawatts – enough clean energy to power over 4,500 U.K. homes. Currently, Amazon hosts solar panels on 43 fulfillment centers worldwide.</li><li>Amazon continued to invest in helping selling partners increase their sales in our stores, including introducing a USPS Priority Mail Cubic ship method for Seller Fulfilled Prime and merchant fulfilled sellers, which offers a lower cost, volume-based pricing ship option; launching a new FedEx One Rate, a weight agnostic ship method that enables sellers to fulfill Prime orders nationwide; and reducing Fulfillment by Amazon storage fees in the U.S., EU, and Japan.</li><li>During the holiday season alone, tens of millions of customers worldwide started Prime free trials or began paid memberships. More customers signed up for Prime worldwide in 2018 than ever before.</li><li>Small and medium-sized businesses had their best holiday season ever in Amazon's stores. More than 50% of units sold in Amazon's stores this holiday season came from small and medium-sized businesses. Third-party sales are growing faster than first-party sales, and nearly 200,000 small and medium-sized businesses surpassed $100,000 in sales in Amazon's stores in 2018.</li><li>Amazon launched Amazon Pop-Up stores to customers in six countries across Europe during the holiday season. For the first time, Amazon presented a curated selection of over 2,000 products and carried out 136 events and workshops for its customers in Amsterdam, London, Madrid, Milan, Berlin, and Paris.</li><li>This was the biggest holiday shopping season ever for Amazon devices, with customers purchasing millions more devices compared to the 2017 holiday shopping season. The all-new Echo Dot was the #1 selling product on Amazon globally, from any manufacturer, in any category this holiday season.</li><li>Amazon introduced new smart home features for Alexa. Customers can now choose from more than 28,000 Alexa-compatible smart home devices from more than 4,500 unique brands, and Alexa Guard helps invited Echo customers keep their homes safe through Smart Alerts, Away Lighting, and voice control of security systems from Ring and ADT.</li><li>Ring had its best quarter ever, selling millions of devices globally. The Ring Video Doorbell 2 was the best-selling Ring product this holiday season, and the Ring Stick Up Cam, Ring's first indoor/outdoor camera, began shipping to customers.</li><li>Key by Amazon introduced new ways for customers to control and monitor their homes, including the Schlage Encode Smart Wi-Fi Deadbolt for Key; integration with the Ring app; Key for Garage, which includes remote monitoring and in-garage delivery for eligible Prime members; and Key for Business, a new B2B pillar for the service.</li><li>The number of devices with Alexa built-in more than doubled in 2018. There are now more than 150 different products available with Alexa built-in, from headphones and PCs to cars and smart home devices. Device makers announced more new Alexa products at CES 2019, including the Lenovo Smart Tab and new devices from brands like First Alert, Jabra, JBL, Kohler, LG, and Razer.</li><li>Amazon launched Echo and Alexa experiences built from the ground up for Italy, Spain, and Mexico, offering a wide selection of locally-relevant services, features, and skills from local brands.</li><li>More than one million customers requested an invitation for Echo Auto, and more than a dozen automotive partners announced support for Alexa at CES 2019, including device makers like BOSS Audio, iOttie, and Jensen, and software and service providers like HERE Technologies, Luxoft, P3, Qualcomm, and Telenav.</li><li>Alexa is getting even smarter. The Alexa Skills Store now offers more than 80,000 skills and Alexa customers can now access Apple Music's library of 50 million songs on their Echo devices. Alexa also answers more questions with the help of customers through Alexa Answers; knows more about math and science with the addition of a new knowledge resource, Wolfram Alpha; helps customers get more done with location-based reminders and routines; connects people across the world with the launch of Skype; and more.</li><li>Amazon made new scientific advancements with Alexa, including a new unsupervised self-learning system that detects the defects in Alexa's understanding and automatically recovers from these errors, helping Alexa learn at a faster pace. Amazon also introduced a new text-to-speech system, which uses a generative neural network and produces more natural speech, paving the way for Alexa and other services to adopt different speaking styles based on different contexts.</li><li>Amazon introduced new tools for Alexa developers to make it easier to build engaging skills, including automatic provisioning of cloud resources through Alexa-hosted skills; new tools for monetization, testing, and debugging; location services to provide customers with real-time responses based on their location; and the ability for developers to proactively notify customers with timely and important information.</li><li>Amazon announced it will host re:MARS, a new global Artificial Intelligence (AI) conference on Machine Learning (ML), Automation, Robotics, and Space, on June 4-7 at the ARIA Resort &amp; Casino in Las Vegas. re:MARS will bring together leaders across science, academia, and business to explore innovation, scientific advancements, and practical applications of AI and ML.</li><li>IMDb announced the launch of IMDb Freedive, a free streaming video channel available in the U.S. on the IMDb website via laptop or personal computer and on all Fire TV devices. IMDb Freedive, an ad-supported channel, enables customers to watch hit TV shows as well as top Hollywood hits without purchasing a subscription.</li><li>Prime Video is now available on Comcast's Xfinity X1 in the U.S., giving Prime members with Xfinity easy access to thousands of additional premium shows and movies online. Additionally, Amazon launched NBA League Pass and PGA TOUR LIVE on Prime Video Channels. Prime members can now stream hundreds of out-of-market NBA games live or on-demand with a subscription to NBA League Pass for $28.99/month or $169.99 for a Season Pass. Prime members in the U.S. can also subscribe to PGA TOUR LIVE to watch live coverage across 28 PGA TOUR tournaments per year for $9.99/month or $64.99 per season.</li><li>Amazon Studios' <em>Cold War</em> was recognized for three Academy Award nominations – Best Foreign Language Film, Best Director for Pawel Pawlikowski, and Best Cinematography for Lukasz Zal.</li><li>Amazon Studios was recognized with 10 Golden Globe Awards nominations and two wins: Rachel Brosnahan won Best Actress in a Television Series – Comedy or Musical for her performance in <em>The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel</em> for the second year in a row and Ben Whishaw won Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Limited Series, or Motion Picture Made for Television for his role in <em>A Very English Scandal</em>.</li><li>Prime Video Original Series <em>Inside Edge</em> became the first Indian show from a video streaming service to be nominated for the International Emmy Awards.</li><li>Prime Video introduced localized Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu language user interfaces in India. Prime members can now experience their favorite blockbuster titles and Prime Original series with a Hindi, Tamil, or Telugu user interface, including search, navigation, browse, and customer support.</li><li>Amazon partnered with ICICI Bank to launch the Amazon ICICI Bank credit card to preselected customers in India. This is the first card in the country to offer Prime members 5% in reward points for their purchases on Amazon.in and reward points for all other payments where Visa is accepted.</li><li>Amazon announced further expansion in Brazil, with fast and free delivery on hundreds of thousands of in-stock items sold and shipped by Amazon. Customers can now shop from 12 categories, with products shipped across Brazil from a new Amazon fulfillment center located in the Greater São Pauloarea, the first fulfillment center in South America. With this launch, Amazon.com.br now offers consumers 15 categories with total selection of more than 20 million products from Amazon and its selling partners.</li><li>Amazon Fashion launched Prime Wardrobe in Japan and the U.K., allowing Prime members to order clothing, shoes, and accessories and only pay for what they keep.</li><li>Amazon expanded free grocery delivery and pickup from Whole Foods Market through Prime Now, allowing customers to place their order via the Prime Now app and choose delivery in as fast as an hour or pickup in as little as 30 minutes. Grocery delivery is available in more than 60 U.S. metros and pickup service is available in more than 20 U.S. metros with plans for continued expansion.</li><li>Prime FREE Same-Day Delivery and Prime FREE One-Day Shipping expanded this year to more than 10,000 cities and towns in the U.S. Now a majority of Prime members in the U.S. have access to free one-day shipping or faster.</li><li>Amazon Air announced an expansion of its partnership with Air Transport Services Group, Inc. (ATSG) by leasing an additional 10 aircrafts to support Amazon's growth. The 10 additional cargo planes will consist of Boeing 767-300 aircraft, will be operated on Amazon's behalf by an ATSG airline, and will join the air cargo operation over the next two years.</li><li>Amazon Air launched a new gateway operation, in Riverside, CA and announced three additional gateway operations that will launch in 2019: Wilmington, OH; Alliance, TX; and Rockford, IL. Amazon Air provides gateway operations – onsite airport facilities to load, unload, and sort packages – at over 20 airports, making two-day shipping possible almost anywhere in the U.S.</li><li>In 2018, authors earned more than $260 million from the Kindle Direct Publishing Select Global Fund, totaling more than $840 million since the launch of Kindle Unlimited. Hundreds of thousands of authors have self-published millions of books through KDP since launching the service in 2007. Additionally, thousands of independent authors earned more than $50,000, with more than a thousand surpassing $100,000 in royalties in 2018 through KDP.</li><li>Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced several enterprise customers during the quarter: Ellie Mae, Korean Air, Santander's Openbank, and Pac-12 are going all-in on AWS; Mobileye and Guardian Life Insurance named AWS their preferred public cloud provider; Amgen will leverage AWS as its strategic infrastructure provider for the vast majority of its cloud infrastructure; and National Australia Bank announced they've chosen AWS as their long-term strategic cloud provider.</li><li>AWS continued to expand its infrastructure in 2018 to best serve customers, launching the AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS Europe (Stockholm) Regions, and announcing plans for both the AWS Africa (Cape Town) as well as the AWS Europe (Milan) Regions. AWS now provides 60 Availability Zones across 20 infrastructure regions globally, with another 12 Availability Zones and four regions in Bahrain, Hong Kong SAR, Italy, and South Africa all coming online by the first half of 2020.</li><li>AWS added significant Amazon SageMaker capabilities, making it easier for customers to build, train, and run machine learning models: Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth produces high-quality labeled training data with easy access to public and private human labelers, saving time and complexity, and reducing costs by up to 70% when compared to human annotation; AWS Marketplace for Machine Learning includes over 150 algorithms and models (with more coming every day) that can be deployed directly to Amazon SageMaker; Amazon SageMaker Neo is a deep learning model compiler that lets customers train models once, and run them anywhere with up to 2x improvement in performance.</li><li>AWS placed reinforcement learning in the hands of all developers for the first time with the announcement of Amazon SageMaker RL, AWS DeepRacer, and the AWS DeepRacer League. Amazon SageMaker RL is the cloud's first managed reinforcement learning service that allows any developer to build, train, and deploy with reinforcement learning through managed reinforcement learning algorithms; AWS DeepRacer is a 1/18th scale autonomous model race car driven using reinforcement learning models, trained using Amazon SageMaker, and is designed to give developers hands-on experience with machine learning; and the AWS DeepRacer League is the world's first global autonomous racing league, open to everyone, allowing developers to put their skills to the test and race their cars and models against one another for a chance at prizes and glory.</li><li>AWSannounced AWS Outposts, fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks that allow customers to run compute and storage on-premises, while seamlessly connecting to the rest of AWS's broad array of services in the cloud. AWS Outposts come in two variants; first, an extension of the fast-growing VMware Cloud on AWS service that runs on AWS Outposts; second, AWS Native Outposts that allow customers to run compute and storage on-premises using the same native AWS APIs and control plane used in the AWS cloud.</li><li>At re:Invent, AWS announced two purpose-built database services, Amazon Timestream, a fast, scalable, and fully managed time series database for IoT, industrial telematics, application monitoring, and DevOps applications, and Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), a highly scalable, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable ledger. AWS also announced Amazon DocumentDB, a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. Developers can use the same MongoDB application code, drivers, and tools as they do today to run, manage, and scale workloads on Amazon DocumentDB and enjoy improved performance, scalability, and availability without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure.</li><li>AWS introduced Amazon Managed Blockchain a new service to help companies build applications where multiple parties can execute transactions without the need for a trusted, central authority. Amazon Managed Blockchain makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks using the popular, open source Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric frameworks. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can set up a blockchain network that can span multiple AWS accounts and scale to support thousands of applications and millions of transactions.</li><li>AWS announced six new instance offerings for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2): A1 instances, which are powered by custom-designed AWS Graviton processors, based on the Arm architecture, for scale-out workloads; P3dn GPU instances, which are ideal for distributed machine learning and high performance computing applications, feature 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) network bandwidth, and give customers the most powerful and capable machine learning instances in the cloud; C5n instances, which deliver 100 Gbps network bandwidth, the most in the public cloud, for running advanced compute-intensive workloads; as well as new general purpose (M5 and T3) and memory-optimized (R5) instance types with AMD EPYC processors that are 10% less expensive than the current M5, T3, and R5 instances. The AMD-based instances provide additional options for customers who are looking to achieve cost savings on their Amazon EC2 compute environment for a variety of workloads, such as microservices, low-latency interactive applications, small and medium databases, virtual desktops, development and test environments, code repositories, and business applications.</li><li>AWS announced two custom chips: AWS Inferentia and AWS Graviton. AWS Inferentia is a high performance machine learning inference chip, custom designed by AWS, to help customers improve performance and lower the cost of running their inference workloads. AWS Inferentia will provide hundreds of teraflops per chip and thousands of teraflops per Amazon EC2 instance for multiple frameworks (including TensorFlow, Apache MXNet, and PyTorch), and multiple data types (including INT-8 and mixed precision FP-16 and bfloat16). AWS Graviton is a custom designed general purpose processor that uses the Arm instruction set. Offered in the new A1 instance family, AWS Graviton leverages AWS's expertise in building hyperscale cloud systems, and is ideal for customers with scale out workloads.</li><li>AWS announced four new services that provide automation and prescriptive guidance to help customers build more quickly on AWS: AWS Control Tower, AWS Security Hub, AWS Lake Formation, and AWS Backup. AWS Control Tower gives customers an automated "landing zone" that makes it easy to set up their multi-account environment and continuously govern their AWS workloads with rules for security, operations, and compliance; AWS Security Hub is a central place to manage security and compliance across an AWS environment so that customers can quickly see their AWS security and compliance state in one comprehensive view; AWS Lake Formation makes it much easier for customers to build a secure data lake by simplifying and automating many of the complex manual steps usually required, including collecting, cleaning, and cataloging data; and AWS Backup is a centralized backup service that makes it faster and simpler for customers to back up their data across AWS services and on-premises, helping them more easily meet their business and regulatory backup compliance requirements.</li><li>AWS continued to expand on the industry's broadest and most capable set of storage offerings with the introduction of the Amazon FSx family and additional storage classes for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Amazon FSx for Windows File Server and Amazon FSx for Lustre are fully managed file system services that provide cost effective, scalable file storage for Windows and compute-intensive workloads. Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically optimizes customers' storage costs for data with unknown or changing access patterns by moving data to the most cost-effective storage tier; Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive delivers the lowest cost storage from any cloud provider at just $0.00099 per GB per month, making it ideal for customers who have large data sets they want to retain for a long time, letting them eliminate the cost and management of tape infrastructure, while ensuring that their data is well preserved for future use and analysis.</li></ul><p>Financial Guidance</p><p>The following forward-looking statements reflect Amazon.com's expectations as of January 31, 2019, and are subject to substantial uncertainty. Our results are inherently unpredictable and may be materially affected by many factors, such as fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, changes in global economic conditions and customer spending, world events, the rate of growth of the Internet, online commerce, and cloud services, and the various factors detailed below.</p><p>First Quarter 2019 Guidance</p><ul><li>Net sales are expected to be between $56 billion and $60 billion, or to grow between 10% and 18% compared with first quarter 2018. This guidance anticipates an unfavorable impact of approximately 210 basis points from foreign exchange rates.</li><li>Operating income is expected to be between $2.3 billion and $3.3 billion, compared with $1.9 billion in first quarter 2018.</li><li>This guidance assumes, among other things, that no additional business acquisitions, investments, restructurings, or legal settlements are concluded.</li></ul><p>A conference call will be webcast live today at 2:30 p.m. PT/5:30 p.m. ET, and will be available for at least three months at amazon.com/ir. This call will contain forward-looking statements and other material information regarding the Company's financial and operating results.</p><p><em>These forward-looking statements are inherently difficult to predict. Actual results could differ materially for a variety of reasons, including, in addition to the factors discussed above, the amount that Amazon.com invests in new business opportunities and the timing of those investments, the mix of products and services sold to customers, the mix of net sales derived from products as compared with services, the extent to which we owe income or other taxes, competition, management of growth, potential fluctuations in operating results, international growth and expansion, the outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment, sortation, delivery, and data center optimization, risks of inventory management, seasonality, the degree to which the Company enters into, maintains, and develops commercial agreements, proposed and completed acquisitions and strategic transactions, payments risks, and risks of fulfillment throughput and productivity. Other risks and uncertainties include, among others, risks related to new products, services, and technologies, system interruptions, government regulation and taxation, and fraud. In addition, the current global economic climate amplifies many of these risks. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.</em></p><p>Our investor relations website is amazon.com/ir and we encourage investors to use it as a way of easily finding information about us. We promptly make available on this website, free of charge, the reports that we file or furnish with the SEC, corporate governance information (including our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics), and select press releases, which may contain material information about us, and you may subscribe to be notified of new information posted to this site.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><table><tbody><tr><td>AMAZON.COM, INC.</td></tr><tr><td>Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows</td></tr><tr><td>(in millions)</td></tr><tr><td>Three Months EndedDecember 31,</td><td>Twelve Months EndedDecember 31,</td></tr><tr><td>2017</td><td>2018</td><td>2017</td><td>2018</td></tr><tr><td>(unaudited)</td></tr><tr><td>CASH, CASH EQUIVALENTS, AND RESTRICTED CASH, BEGINNING OF PERIOD</td><td>$</td><td>13,960</td><td>$</td><td>21,032</td><td>$</td><td>19,934</td><td>$</td><td>21,856</td></tr><tr><td>OPERATING ACTIVITIES:</td></tr><tr><td>Net income</td><td>1,856</td><td>3,027</td><td>3,033</td><td>10,073</td></tr><tr><td>Adjustments to reconcile net income to net cash from operating activities:</td></tr><tr><td>Depreciation of property and equipment and other amortization, including capitalized content costs</td><td>3,498</td><td>4,262</td><td>11,478</td><td>15,341</td></tr><tr><td>Stock-based compensation</td><td>1,179</td><td>1,417</td><td>4,215</td><td>5,418</td></tr><tr><td>Other operating expense, net</td><td>56</td><td>72</td><td>202</td><td>274</td></tr><tr><td>Other expense (income), net</td><td>(5</td><td>)</td><td>197</td><td>(292</td><td>)</td><td>219</td></tr><tr><td>Deferred income taxes</td><td>(308</td><td>)</td><td>173</td><td>(29</td><td>)</td><td>441</td></tr><tr><td>Changes in operating assets and liabilities:</td></tr><tr><td>Inventories</td><td>(2,255</td><td>)</td><td>(1,350</td><td>)</td><td>(3,583</td><td>)</td><td>(1,314</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Accounts receivable, net and other</td><td>(2,764</td><td>)</td><td>(1,395</td><td>)</td><td>(4,780</td><td>)</td><td>(4,615</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Accounts payable</td><td>8,904</td><td>6,882</td><td>7,100</td><td>3,263</td></tr><tr><td>Accrued expenses and other</td><td>2,061</td><td>2,665</td><td>283</td><td>472</td></tr><tr><td>Unearned revenue</td><td>136</td><td>528</td><td>738</td><td>1,151</td></tr><tr><td>Net cash provided by (used in) operating activities</td><td>12,358</td><td>16,478</td><td>18,365</td><td>30,723</td></tr><tr><td>INVESTING ACTIVITIES:</td></tr><tr><td>Purchases of property and equipment</td><td>(3,619</td><td>)</td><td>(3,733</td><td>)</td><td>(11,955</td><td>)</td><td>(13,427</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Proceeds from property and equipment incentives</td><td>583</td><td>614</td><td>1,897</td><td>2,104</td></tr><tr><td>Acquisitions, net of cash acquired, and other</td><td>(81</td><td>)</td><td>(331</td><td>)</td><td>(13,972</td><td>)</td><td>(2,186</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Sales and maturities of marketable securities</td><td>3,485</td><td>1,938</td><td>9,677</td><td>8,240</td></tr><tr><td>Purchases of marketable securities</td><td>(2,349</td><td>)</td><td>(2,060</td><td>)</td><td>(12,731</td><td>)</td><td>(7,100</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Net cash provided by (used in) investing activities</td><td>(1,981</td><td>)</td><td>(3,572</td><td>)</td><td>(27,084</td><td>)</td><td>(12,369</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>FINANCING ACTIVITIES:</td></tr><tr><td>Proceeds from long-term debt and other</td><td>109</td><td>406</td><td>16,228</td><td>768</td></tr><tr><td>Repayments of long-term debt and other</td><td>(1,142</td><td>)</td><td>(134</td><td>)</td><td>(1,301</td><td>)</td><td>(668</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Principal repayments of capital lease obligations</td><td>(1,472</td><td>)</td><td>(1,906</td><td>)</td><td>(4,799</td><td>)</td><td>(7,449</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Principal repayments of finance lease obligations</td><td>(66</td><td>)</td><td>(126</td><td>)</td><td>(200</td><td>)</td><td>(337</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Net cash provided by (used in) financing activities</td><td>(2,571</td><td>)</td><td>(1,760</td><td>)</td><td>9,928</td><td>(7,686</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Foreign currency effect on cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash</td><td>90</td><td>(5</td><td>)</td><td>713</td><td>(351</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Net increase (decrease) in cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash</td><td>7,896</td><td>11,141</td><td>1,922</td><td>10,317</td></tr><tr><td>CASH, CASH EQUIVALENTS, AND RESTRICTED CASH, END OF PERIOD</td><td>$</td><td>21,856</td><td>$</td><td>32,173</td><td>$</td><td>21,856</td><td>$</td><td>32,173</td></tr><tr><td>SUPPLEMENTAL CASH FLOW INFORMATION:</td></tr><tr><td>Cash paid for interest on long-term debt</td><td>$</td><td>174</td><td>$</td><td>121</td><td>$</td><td>328</td><td>$</td><td>854</td></tr><tr><td>Cash paid for interest on capital and finance lease obligations</td><td>84</td><td>156</td><td>319</td><td>575</td></tr><tr><td>Cash paid for income taxes, net of refunds</td><td>92</td><td>171</td><td>957</td><td>1,184</td></tr><tr><td>Property and equipment acquired under capital leases</td><td>2,770</td><td>3,680</td><td>9,637</td><td>10,615</td></tr><tr><td>Property and equipment acquired under build-to-suit leases</td><td>843</td><td>1,143</td><td>3,541</td><td>3,641</td></tr></tbody></table><table><tbody><tr><td>______________________________</td></tr><tr><td>As a result of the adoption of new accounting guidance, we retrospectively adjusted our consolidated statements of cash flows to add restricted cash to cash and cash equivalents.</td></tr></tbody></table><table><tbody><tr><td>AMAZON.COM, INC.</td></tr><tr><td>Consolidated Statements of Operations</td></tr><tr><td>(in millions, except per share data)</td></tr><tr><td>Three Months EndedDecember 31,</td><td>Twelve Months EndedDecember 31,</td></tr><tr><td>2017</td><td>2018</td><td>2017</td><td>2018</td></tr><tr><td>(unaudited)</td></tr><tr><td>Net product sales</td><td>$</td><td>41,325</td><td>$</td><td>44,700</td><td>$</td><td>118,573</td><td>$</td><td>141,915</td></tr><tr><td>Net service sales</td><td>19,128</td><td>27,683</td><td>59,293</td><td>90,972</td></tr><tr><td>Total net sales</td><td>60,453</td><td>72,383</td><td>177,866</td><td>232,887</td></tr><tr><td>Operating expenses:</td></tr><tr><td>Cost of sales</td><td>38,494</td><td>44,786</td><td>111,934</td><td>139,156</td></tr><tr><td>Fulfillment</td><td>8,974</td><td>10,028</td><td>25,249</td><td>34,027</td></tr><tr><td>Marketing</td><td>3,440</td><td>4,911</td><td>10,069</td><td>13,814</td></tr><tr><td>Technology and content</td><td>6,314</td><td>7,669</td><td>22,620</td><td>28,837</td></tr><tr><td>General and administrative</td><td>1,044</td><td>1,117</td><td>3,674</td><td>4,336</td></tr><tr><td>Other operating expense, net</td><td>60</td><td>86</td><td>214</td><td>296</td></tr><tr><td>Total operating expenses</td><td>58,326</td><td>68,597</td><td>173,760</td><td>220,466</td></tr><tr><td>Operating income</td><td>2,127</td><td>3,786</td><td>4,106</td><td>12,421</td></tr><tr><td>Interest income</td><td>66</td><td>150</td><td>202</td><td>440</td></tr><tr><td>Interest expense</td><td>(339</td><td>)</td><td>(387</td><td>)</td><td>(848</td><td>)</td><td>(1,417</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Other income (expense), net</td><td>18</td><td>(199</td><td>)</td><td>346</td><td>(183</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Total non-operating income (expense)</td><td>(255</td><td>)</td><td>(436</td><td>)</td><td>(300</td><td>)</td><td>(1,160</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Income before income taxes</td><td>1,872</td><td>3,350</td><td>3,806</td><td>11,261</td></tr><tr><td>Provision for income taxes</td><td>(16</td><td>)</td><td>(327</td><td>)</td><td>(769</td><td>)</td><td>(1,197</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Equity-method investment activity, net of tax</td><td>—</td><td>4</td><td>(4</td><td>)</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>Net income</td><td>$</td><td>1,856</td><td>$</td><td>3,027</td><td>$</td><td>3,033</td><td>$</td><td>10,073</td></tr><tr><td>Basic earnings per share</td><td>$</td><td>3.85</td><td>$</td><td>6.18</td><td>$</td><td>6.32</td><td>$</td><td>20.68</td></tr><tr><td>Diluted earnings per share</td><td>$</td><td>3.75</td><td>$</td><td>6.04</td><td>$</td><td>6.15</td><td>$</td><td>20.14</td></tr><tr><td>Weighted-average shares used in computation of earnings per share:</td></tr><tr><td>Basic</td><td>483</td><td>490</td><td>480</td><td>487</td></tr><tr><td>Diluted</td><td>496</td><td>501</td><td>493</td><td>500</td></tr></tbody></table><table><tbody><tr><td>AMAZON.COM, INC.</td></tr><tr><td>Consolidated Statements of Comprehensive Income</td></tr><tr><td>(in millions)</td></tr><tr><td>Three Months EndedDecember 31,</td><td>Twelve Months EndedDecember 31,</td></tr><tr><td>2017</td><td>2018</td><td>2017</td><td>2018</td></tr><tr><td>(unaudited)</td></tr><tr><td>Net income</td><td>$</td><td>1,856</td><td>$</td><td>3,027</td><td>$</td><td>3,033</td><td>$</td><td>10,073</td></tr><tr><td>Other comprehensive income (loss):</td></tr><tr><td>Foreign currency translation adjustments, net of tax of $10, $(13), $5, and $6</td><td>47</td><td>(25</td><td>)</td><td>533</td><td>(538</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Net change in unrealized gains (losses) on available-for-sale debt securities:</td></tr><tr><td>Unrealized gains (losses), net of tax of $4, $0, $5, and $0</td><td>(29</td><td>)</td><td>5</td><td>(39</td><td>)</td><td>(17</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Reclassification adjustment for losses (gains) included in "Other income (expense), net," net of tax of $0, $0, $0, and $0</td><td>(1</td><td>)</td><td>2</td><td>7</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><td>Net unrealized gains (losses) on available-for-sale debt securities</td><td>(30</td><td>)</td><td>7</td><td>(32</td><td>)</td><td>(9</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Total other comprehensive income (loss)</td><td>17</td><td>(18</td><td>)</td><td>501</td><td>(547</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Comprehensive income</td><td>$</td><td>1,873</td><td>$</td><td>3,009</td><td>$</td><td>3,534</td><td>$</td><td>9,526</td></tr></tbody></table><table><tbody><tr><td>AMAZON.COM, INC.</td></tr><tr><td><p>Segment Information</p></td></tr><tr><td>(in millions)</td></tr><tr><td>Three Months EndedDecember 31,</td><td>Twelve Months EndedDecember 31,</td></tr><tr><td>2017</td><td>2018</td><td>2017</td><td>2018</td></tr><tr><td>(unaudited)</td></tr><tr><td>North America</td></tr><tr><td>Net sales</td><td>$</td><td>37,302</td><td>$</td><td>44,124</td><td>$</td><td>106,110</td><td>$</td><td>141,366</td></tr><tr><td>Operating expenses</td><td>35,610</td><td>41,873</td><td>103,273</td><td>134,099</td></tr><tr><td>Operating income</td><td>$</td><td>1,692</td><td>$</td><td>2,251</td><td>$</td><td>2,837</td><td>$</td><td>7,267</td></tr><tr><td>International</td></tr><tr><td>Net sales</td><td>$</td><td>18,038</td><td>$</td><td>20,829</td><td>$</td><td>54,297</td><td>$</td><td>65,866</td></tr><tr><td>Operating expenses</td><td>18,957</td><td>21,471</td><td>57,359</td><td>68,008</td></tr><tr><td>Operating income (loss)</td><td>$</td><td>(919</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(642</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(3,062</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(2,142</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>AWS</td></tr><tr><td>Net sales</td><td>$</td><td>5,113</td><td>$</td><td>7,430</td><td>$</td><td>17,459</td><td>$</td><td>25,655</td></tr><tr><td>Operating expenses</td><td>3,759</td><td>5,253</td><td>13,128</td><td>18,359</td></tr><tr><td>Operating income</td><td>$</td><td>1,354</td><td>$</td><td>2,177</td><td>$</td><td>4,331</td><td>$</td><td>7,296</td></tr><tr><td>Consolidated</td></tr><tr><td>Net sales</td><td>$</td><td>60,453</td><td>$</td><td>72,383</td><td>$</td><td>177,866</td><td>$</td><td>232,887</td></tr><tr><td>Operating expenses</td><td>58,326</td><td>68,597</td><td>173,760</td><td>220,466</td></tr><tr><td>Operating income</td><td>2,127</td><td>3,786</td><td>4,106</td><td>12,421</td></tr><tr><td>Total non-operating income (expense)</td><td>(255</td><td>)</td><td>(436</td><td>)</td><td>(300</td><td>)</td><td>(1,160</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Provision for income taxes</td><td>(16</td><td>)</td><td>(327</td><td>)</td><td>(769</td><td>)</td><td>(1,197</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Equity-method investment activity, net of tax</td><td>—</td><td>4</td><td>(4</td><td>)</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>Net income</td><td>$</td><td>1,856</td><td>$</td><td>3,027</td><td>$</td><td>3,033</td><td>$</td><td>10,073</td></tr><tr><td>Segment Highlights:</td></tr><tr><td>Y/Y net sales growth:</td></tr><tr><td>North America</td><td>42</td><td>%</td><td>18</td><td>%</td><td>33</td><td>%</td><td>33</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>International</td><td>29</td><td>15</td><td>23</td><td>21</td></tr><tr><td>AWS</td><td>45</td><td>45</td><td>43</td><td>47</td></tr><tr><td>Consolidated</td><td>38</td><td>20</td><td>31</td><td>31</td></tr><tr><td>Net sales mix:</td></tr><tr><td>North America</td><td>62</td><td>%</td><td>61</td><td>%</td><td>60</td><td>%</td><td>61</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>International</td><td>30</td><td>29</td><td>30</td><td>28</td></tr><tr><td>AWS</td><td>8</td><td>10</td><td>10</td><td>11</td></tr><tr><td>Consolidated</td><td>100</td><td>%</td><td>100</td><td>%</td><td>100</td><td>%</td><td>100</td><td>%</td></tr></tbody></table><table><tbody><tr><td>AMAZON.COM, INC.</td></tr><tr><td><p>Consolidated Balance Sheets</p></td></tr><tr><td>(in millions, except per share data)</td></tr><tr><td>December 31, 2017</td><td>December 31, 2018</td></tr><tr><td><p>ASSETS</p></td></tr><tr><td>Current assets:</td></tr><tr><td>Cash and cash equivalents</td><td>$</td><td>20,522</td><td>$</td><td>31,750</td></tr><tr><td>Marketable securities</td><td>10,464</td><td>9,500</td></tr><tr><td>Inventories</td><td>16,047</td><td>17,174</td></tr><tr><td>Accounts receivable, net and other</td><td>13,164</td><td>16,677</td></tr><tr><td>Total current assets</td><td>60,197</td><td>75,101</td></tr><tr><td>Property and equipment, net</td><td>48,866</td><td>61,797</td></tr><tr><td>Goodwill</td><td>13,350</td><td>14,548</td></tr><tr><td>Other assets</td><td>8,897</td><td>11,202</td></tr><tr><td>Total assets</td><td>$</td><td>131,310</td><td>$</td><td>162,648</td></tr><tr><td><p>LIABILITIES AND STOCKHOLDERS' EQUITY</p></td></tr><tr><td>Current liabilities:</td></tr><tr><td>Accounts payable</td><td>$</td><td>34,616</td><td>$</td><td>38,192</td></tr><tr><td>Accrued expenses and other</td><td>18,170</td><td>23,663</td></tr><tr><td>Unearned revenue</td><td>5,097</td><td>6,536</td></tr><tr><td>Total current liabilities</td><td>57,883</td><td>68,391</td></tr><tr><td>Long-term debt</td><td>24,743</td><td>23,495</td></tr><tr><td>Other long-term liabilities</td><td>20,975</td><td>27,213</td></tr><tr><td>Commitments and contingencies</td></tr><tr><td>Stockholders' equity:</td></tr><tr><td>Preferred stock, $0.01 par value:</td></tr><tr><td>Authorized shares — 500</td></tr><tr><td>Issued and outstanding shares — none</td><td>—</td><td>—</td></tr><tr><td>Common stock, $0.01 par value:</td></tr><tr><td>Authorized shares — 5,000</td></tr><tr><td>Issued shares — 507 and 514</td></tr><tr><td>Outstanding shares — 484 and 491</td><td>5</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>Treasury stock, at cost</td><td>(1,837</td><td>)</td><td>(1,837</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Additional paid-in capital</td><td>21,389</td><td>26,791</td></tr><tr><td>Accumulated other comprehensive loss</td><td>(484</td><td>)</td><td>(1,035</td><td>)</td></tr><tr><td>Retained earnings</td><td>8,636</td><td>19,625</td></tr><tr><td>Total stockholders' equity</td><td>27,709</td><td>43,549</td></tr><tr><td>Total liabilities and stockholders' equity</td><td>$</td><td>131,310</td><td>$</td><td>162,648</td></tr></tbody></table><table><tbody><tr><td>AMAZON.COM, INC.</td></tr><tr><td>Supplemental Financial Information and Business Metrics</td></tr><tr><td>(in millions, except per share data)</td></tr><tr><td>(unaudited)</td></tr><tr><td>Q3 2017</td><td>Q4 2017</td><td>Q1 2018</td><td>Q2 2018</td><td>Q3 2018</td><td>Q4 2018</td><td><p>Y/Y %Change</p></td></tr><tr><td>Cash Flows and Shares</td></tr><tr><td>Operating cash flow -- trailing twelve months (TTM) (1)</td><td>$</td><td>16,996</td><td>$</td><td>18,365</td><td>$</td><td>18,194</td><td>$</td><td>21,793</td><td>$</td><td>26,604</td><td>$</td><td>30,723</td><td>67</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Operating cash flow -- TTM Y/Y growth</td><td>13</td><td>%</td><td>7</td><td>%</td><td>4</td><td>%</td><td>22</td><td>%</td><td>57</td><td>%</td><td>67</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Purchases of property and equipment, net of proceeds from property and equipment incentives -- TTM</td><td>$</td><td>9,027</td><td>$</td><td>10,058</td><td>$</td><td>10,924</td><td>$</td><td>11,372</td><td>$</td><td>11,239</td><td>$</td><td>11,323</td><td>13</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Principal repayments of capital lease obligations -- TTM</td><td>$</td><td>4,331</td><td>$</td><td>4,799</td><td>$</td><td>5,981</td><td>$</td><td>6,037</td><td>$</td><td>7,016</td><td>$</td><td>7,449</td><td>55</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Principal repayments of finance lease obligations -- TTM</td><td>$</td><td>175</td><td>$</td><td>200</td><td>$</td><td>235</td><td>$</td><td>244</td><td>$</td><td>277</td><td>$</td><td>337</td><td>69</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Property and equipment acquired under capital leases -- TTM</td><td>$</td><td>8,905</td><td>$</td><td>9,637</td><td>$</td><td>10,020</td><td>$</td><td>9,631</td><td>$</td><td>9,704</td><td>$</td><td>10,615</td><td>10</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Free cash flow -- TTM (1) (2)</td><td>$</td><td>7,969</td><td>$</td><td>8,307</td><td>$</td><td>7,270</td><td>$</td><td>10,421</td><td>$</td><td>15,365</td><td>$</td><td>19,400</td><td>134</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Free cash flow less lease principal repayments -- TTM (1) (3)</td><td>$</td><td>3,463</td><td>$</td><td>3,308</td><td>$</td><td>1,054</td><td>$</td><td>4,140</td><td>$</td><td>8,072</td><td>$</td><td>11,614</td><td>251</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Free cash flow less finance lease principal repayments and assets acquired under capital leases -- TTM (1) (4)</td><td>$</td><td>(1,111</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(1,530</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(2,985</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>546</td><td>$</td><td>5,384</td><td>$</td><td>8,448</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Invested capital (5)</td><td>$</td><td>52,690</td><td>$</td><td>60,368</td><td>$</td><td>68,377</td><td>$</td><td>76,600</td><td>$</td><td>85,059</td><td>$</td><td>90,849</td><td>50</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Common shares and stock-based awards outstanding</td><td>503</td><td>504</td><td>504</td><td>506</td><td>507</td><td>507</td><td>1</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Common shares outstanding</td><td>482</td><td>484</td><td>485</td><td>487</td><td>489</td><td>491</td><td>1</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Stock-based awards outstanding</td><td>21</td><td>20</td><td>19</td><td>19</td><td>18</td><td>16</td><td>(21</td><td>)%</td></tr><tr><td>Stock-based awards outstanding -- % of common shares outstanding</td><td>4.4</td><td>%</td><td>4.2</td><td>%</td><td>3.9</td><td>%</td><td>3.9</td><td>%</td><td>3.7</td><td>%</td><td>3.2</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Results of Operations</td></tr><tr><td>Worldwide (WW) net sales</td><td>$</td><td>43,744</td><td>$</td><td>60,453</td><td>$</td><td>51,042</td><td>$</td><td>52,886</td><td>$</td><td>56,576</td><td>$</td><td>72,383</td><td>20</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>WW net sales -- Y/Y growth, excluding F/X</td><td>33</td><td>%</td><td>36</td><td>%</td><td>39</td><td>%</td><td>37</td><td>%</td><td>30</td><td>%</td><td>21</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>WW net sales -- TTM</td><td>$</td><td>161,154</td><td>$</td><td>177,866</td><td>$</td><td>193,194</td><td>$</td><td>208,125</td><td>$</td><td>220,958</td><td>$</td><td>232,887</td><td>31</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>WW net sales -- TTM Y/Y growth, excluding F/X</td><td>27</td><td>%</td><td>31</td><td>%</td><td>34</td><td>%</td><td>36</td><td>%</td><td>35</td><td>%</td><td>30</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Operating income</td><td>$</td><td>347</td><td>$</td><td>2,127</td><td>$</td><td>1,927</td><td>$</td><td>2,983</td><td>$</td><td>3,724</td><td>$</td><td>3,786</td><td>78</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>F/X impact -- favorable (unfavorable)</td><td>$</td><td>(39</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(33</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(29</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>42</td><td>$</td><td>90</td><td>$</td><td>123</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Operating income -- Y/Y growth (decline), excluding F/X</td><td>(33</td><td>)%</td><td>72</td><td>%</td><td>95</td><td>%</td><td>369</td><td>%</td><td>948</td><td>%</td><td>72</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Operating margin -- % of WW net sales</td><td>0.8</td><td>%</td><td>3.5</td><td>%</td><td>3.8</td><td>%</td><td>5.6</td><td>%</td><td>6.6</td><td>%</td><td>5.2</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Operating income -- TTM</td><td>$</td><td>3,234</td><td>$</td><td>4,106</td><td>$</td><td>5,028</td><td>$</td><td>7,384</td><td>$</td><td>10,762</td><td>$</td><td>12,421</td><td>203</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Operating income -- TTM Y/Y growth (decline), excluding F/X</td><td>(17</td><td>)%</td><td>1</td><td>%</td><td>25</td><td>%</td><td>115</td><td>%</td><td>231</td><td>%</td><td>197</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Operating margin -- TTM % of WW net sales</td><td>2.0</td><td>%</td><td>2.3</td><td>%</td><td>2.6</td><td>%</td><td>3.5</td><td>%</td><td>4.9</td><td>%</td><td>5.3</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Net income</td><td>$</td><td>256</td><td>$</td><td>1,856</td><td>$</td><td>1,629</td><td>$</td><td>2,534</td><td>$</td><td>2,883</td><td>$</td><td>3,027</td><td>63</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Net income per diluted share</td><td>$</td><td>0.52</td><td>$</td><td>3.75</td><td>$</td><td>3.27</td><td>$</td><td>5.07</td><td>$</td><td>5.75</td><td>$</td><td>6.04</td><td>61</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Net income -- TTM</td><td>$</td><td>1,926</td><td>$</td><td>3,033</td><td>$</td><td>3,938</td><td>$</td><td>6,275</td><td>$</td><td>8,902</td><td>$</td><td>10,073</td><td>232</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Net income per diluted share -- TTM</td><td>$</td><td>3.94</td><td>$</td><td>6.15</td><td>$</td><td>7.90</td><td>$</td><td>12.63</td><td>$</td><td>17.85</td><td>$</td><td>20.14</td><td>228</td><td>%</td></tr></tbody></table><table><tbody><tr><td><p>______________________________</p></td></tr><tr><td>(1)</td><td>As a result of the adoption of new accounting guidance, we retrospectively adjusted our consolidated statements of cash flows to add restricted cash to cash and cash equivalents.</td></tr><tr><td>(2)</td><td>Free cash flow is cash flow from operations reduced by "Purchases of property and equipment, net of proceeds from property and equipment incentives," which both are included in cash flow from investing activities.</td></tr><tr><td>(3)</td><td>Free cash flow less lease principal repayments is free cash flow reduced by "Principal repayments of capital lease obligations," and "Principal repayments of finance lease obligations," which are included in cash flow from financing activities.</td></tr><tr><td>(4)</td><td>Free cash flow less finance lease principal repayments and assets acquired under capital leases is free cash flow reduced by "Principal repayments of finance lease obligations," which is included in cash flow from financing activities, and property and equipment acquired under capital leases. In this measure, property and equipment acquired under capital leases is reflected as if these assets had been purchased with cash, which is not the case as these assets have been leased.</td></tr><tr><td>(5)</td><td>Average Total Assets minus Current Liabilities (excluding current portion of Long-Term Debt and current portion of capital lease obligations and finance lease obligations) over five quarter ends.</td></tr></tbody></table><table><tbody><tr><td>AMAZON.COM, INC.</td></tr><tr><td>Supplemental Financial Information and Business Metrics</td></tr><tr><td>(in millions)</td></tr><tr><td>(unaudited)</td></tr><tr><td>Q3 2017</td><td>Q4 2017</td><td>Q1 2018</td><td>Q2 2018</td><td>Q3 2018</td><td>Q4 2018</td><td><p>Y/Y %Change</p></td></tr><tr><td>Segments</td></tr><tr><td>North America Segment:</td></tr><tr><td>Net sales</td><td>$</td><td>25,446</td><td>$</td><td>37,302</td><td>$</td><td>30,725</td><td>$</td><td>32,169</td><td>$</td><td>34,348</td><td>$</td><td>44,124</td><td>18</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Net sales -- Y/Y growth, excluding F/X</td><td>35</td><td>%</td><td>42</td><td>%</td><td>46</td><td>%</td><td>44</td><td>%</td><td>35</td><td>%</td><td>18</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Net sales -- TTM</td><td>$</td><td>95,048</td><td>$</td><td>106,110</td><td>$</td><td>115,843</td><td>$</td><td>125,642</td><td>$</td><td>134,545</td><td>$</td><td>141,366</td><td>33</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Operating income</td><td>$</td><td>112</td><td>$</td><td>1,692</td><td>$</td><td>1,149</td><td>$</td><td>1,835</td><td>$</td><td>2,032</td><td>$</td><td>2,251</td><td>33</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>F/X impact -- favorable (unfavorable)</td><td>$</td><td>(12</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(8</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(10</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>1</td><td>$</td><td>9</td><td>$</td><td>17</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Operating income -- Y/Y growth (decline), excluding F/X</td><td>(51</td><td>)%</td><td>108</td><td>%</td><td>95</td><td>%</td><td>321</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td><td>32</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Operating margin -- % of North America net sales</td><td>0.4</td><td>%</td><td>4.5</td><td>%</td><td>3.7</td><td>%</td><td>5.7</td><td>%</td><td>5.9</td><td>%</td><td>5.1</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Operating income -- TTM</td><td>$</td><td>1,960</td><td>$</td><td>2,837</td><td>$</td><td>3,390</td><td>$</td><td>4,788</td><td>$</td><td>6,708</td><td>$</td><td>7,267</td><td>156</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Operating margin -- TTM % of North America net sales</td><td>2.1</td><td>%</td><td>2.7</td><td>%</td><td>2.9</td><td>%</td><td>3.8</td><td>%</td><td>5.0</td><td>%</td><td>5.1</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>International Segment:</td></tr><tr><td>Net sales</td><td>$</td><td>13,714</td><td>$</td><td>18,038</td><td>$</td><td>14,875</td><td>$</td><td>14,612</td><td>$</td><td>15,549</td><td>$</td><td>20,829</td><td>15</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Net sales -- Y/Y growth, excluding F/X</td><td>28</td><td>%</td><td>22</td><td>%</td><td>21</td><td>%</td><td>21</td><td>%</td><td>15</td><td>%</td><td>19</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Net sales -- TTM</td><td>$</td><td>50,224</td><td>$</td><td>54,297</td><td>$</td><td>58,111</td><td>$</td><td>61,239</td><td>$</td><td>63,074</td><td>$</td><td>65,866</td><td>21</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Operating income (loss)</td><td>$</td><td>(936</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(919</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(622</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(494</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(385</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(642</td><td>)</td><td>(30</td><td>)%</td></tr><tr><td>F/X impact -- favorable (unfavorable)</td><td>$</td><td>(13</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>20</td><td>$</td><td>70</td><td>$</td><td>86</td><td>$</td><td>47</td><td>$</td><td>55</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Operating income/loss -- Y/Y growth (decline), excluding F/X</td><td>71</td><td>%</td><td>93</td><td>%</td><td>44</td><td>%</td><td>(20</td><td>)%</td><td>(54</td><td>)%</td><td>(24</td><td>)%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Operating margin -- % of International net sales</td><td>(6.8</td><td>)%</td><td>(5.1</td><td>)%</td><td>(4.2</td><td>)%</td><td>(3.4</td><td>)%</td><td>(2.5</td><td>)%</td><td>(3.1</td><td>)%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Operating income (loss) -- TTM</td><td>$</td><td>(2,629</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(3,062</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(3,202</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(2,971</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(2,420</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(2,142</td><td>)</td><td>(30</td><td>)%</td></tr><tr><td>Operating margin -- TTM % of International net sales</td><td>(5.2</td><td>)%</td><td>(5.6</td><td>)%</td><td>(5.5</td><td>)%</td><td>(4.9</td><td>)%</td><td>(3.8</td><td>)%</td><td>(3.3</td><td>)%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>AWS Segment:</td></tr><tr><td>Net sales</td><td>$</td><td>4,584</td><td>$</td><td>5,113</td><td>$</td><td>5,442</td><td>$</td><td>6,105</td><td>$</td><td>6,679</td><td>$</td><td>7,430</td><td>45</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Net sales -- Y/Y growth, excluding F/X</td><td>42</td><td>%</td><td>44</td><td>%</td><td>48</td><td>%</td><td>49</td><td>%</td><td>46</td><td>%</td><td>46</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Net sales -- TTM</td><td>$</td><td>15,882</td><td>$</td><td>17,459</td><td>$</td><td>19,240</td><td>$</td><td>21,244</td><td>$</td><td>23,339</td><td>$</td><td>25,655</td><td>47</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Operating income</td><td>$</td><td>1,171</td><td>$</td><td>1,354</td><td>$</td><td>1,400</td><td>$</td><td>1,642</td><td>$</td><td>2,077</td><td>$</td><td>2,177</td><td>61</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>F/X impact -- favorable (unfavorable)</td><td>$</td><td>(14</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(45</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(89</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>(45</td><td>)</td><td>$</td><td>34</td><td>$</td><td>51</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Operating income -- Y/Y growth, excluding F/X</td><td>38</td><td>%</td><td>51</td><td>%</td><td>67</td><td>%</td><td>84</td><td>%</td><td>75</td><td>%</td><td>57</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Operating margin -- % of AWS net sales</td><td>25.5</td><td>%</td><td>26.5</td><td>%</td><td>25.7</td><td>%</td><td>26.9</td><td>%</td><td>31.1</td><td>%</td><td>29.3</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Operating income -- TTM</td><td>$</td><td>3,903</td><td>$</td><td>4,331</td><td>$</td><td>4,840</td><td>$</td><td>5,567</td><td>$</td><td>6,473</td><td>$</td><td>7,296</td><td>68</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Operating margin -- TTM % of AWS net sales</td><td>24.6</td><td>%</td><td>24.8</td><td>%</td><td>25.2</td><td>%</td><td>26.2</td><td>%</td><td>27.7</td><td>%</td><td>28.4</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr></tbody></table><table><tbody><tr><td>AMAZON.COM, INC.</td></tr><tr><td>Supplemental Financial Information and Business Metrics</td></tr><tr><td>(in millions, except employee data)</td></tr><tr><td>(unaudited)</td></tr><tr><td>Q3 2017</td><td>Q4 2017</td><td>Q1 2018</td><td>Q2 2018</td><td>Q3 2018</td><td>Q4 2018</td><td><p>Y/Y %Change</p></td></tr><tr><td>Net Sales:</td></tr><tr><td>Online stores (1)</td><td>$</td><td>26,392</td><td>$</td><td>35,383</td><td>$</td><td>26,939</td><td>$</td><td>27,165</td><td>$</td><td>29,061</td><td>$</td><td>39,822</td><td>13</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Online stores - Y/Y growth, excluding F/X</td><td>22</td><td>%</td><td>17</td><td>%</td><td>13</td><td>%</td><td>12</td><td>%</td><td>11</td><td>%</td><td>14</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Physical stores (2)</td><td>$</td><td>1,276</td><td>$</td><td>4,522</td><td>$</td><td>4,263</td><td>$</td><td>4,312</td><td>$</td><td>4,248</td><td>$</td><td>4,401</td><td>(3</td><td>)%</td></tr><tr><td>Physical Stores - Y/Y growth, excluding F/X</td><td>N/A</td><td>N/A</td><td>N/A</td><td>N/A</td><td>N/A</td><td>(3</td><td>)%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Third-party seller services (3)</td><td>$</td><td>7,928</td><td>$</td><td>10,523</td><td>$</td><td>9,265</td><td>$</td><td>9,702</td><td>$</td><td>10,395</td><td>$</td><td>13,383</td><td>27</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Third-party seller services - Y/Y growth, excluding F/X</td><td>40</td><td>%</td><td>38</td><td>%</td><td>39</td><td>%</td><td>36</td><td>%</td><td>32</td><td>%</td><td>28</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Subscription services (4)</td><td>$</td><td>2,441</td><td>$</td><td>3,177</td><td>$</td><td>3,102</td><td>$</td><td>3,408</td><td>$</td><td>3,698</td><td>$</td><td>3,959</td><td>25</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Subscription services - Y/Y growth, excluding F/X</td><td>59</td><td>%</td><td>47</td><td>%</td><td>56</td><td>%</td><td>55</td><td>%</td><td>52</td><td>%</td><td>26</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>AWS</td><td>$</td><td>4,584</td><td>$</td><td>5,113</td><td>$</td><td>5,442</td><td>$</td><td>6,105</td><td>$</td><td>6,679</td><td>$</td><td>7,430</td><td>45</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>AWS - Y/Y growth, excluding F/X</td><td>42</td><td>%</td><td>44</td><td>%</td><td>48</td><td>%</td><td>49</td><td>%</td><td>46</td><td>%</td><td>46</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Other (5)</td><td>$</td><td>1,123</td><td>$</td><td>1,735</td><td>$</td><td>2,031</td><td>$</td><td>2,194</td><td>$</td><td>2,495</td><td>$</td><td>3,388</td><td>95</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Other - Y/Y growth, excluding F/X</td><td>58</td><td>%</td><td>60</td><td>%</td><td>132</td><td>%</td><td>129</td><td>%</td><td>123</td><td>%</td><td>97</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Stock-based Compensation Expense</td></tr><tr><td>Cost of sales</td><td>$</td><td>13</td><td>$</td><td>14</td><td>$</td><td>15</td><td>$</td><td>19</td><td>$</td><td>19</td><td>$</td><td>21</td><td>54</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Fulfillment</td><td>$</td><td>230</td><td>$</td><td>256</td><td>$</td><td>244</td><td>$</td><td>320</td><td>$</td><td>269</td><td>$</td><td>287</td><td>12</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Marketing</td><td>$</td><td>135</td><td>$</td><td>148</td><td>$</td><td>161</td><td>$</td><td>190</td><td>$</td><td>201</td><td>$</td><td>217</td><td>46</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Technology and content</td><td>$</td><td>595</td><td>$</td><td>637</td><td>$</td><td>631</td><td>$</td><td>788</td><td>$</td><td>719</td><td>$</td><td>750</td><td>18</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>General and administrative</td><td>$</td><td>112</td><td>$</td><td>124</td><td>$</td><td>132</td><td>$</td><td>151</td><td>$</td><td>142</td><td>$</td><td>142</td><td>14</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Total stock-based compensation expense</td><td>$</td><td>1,085</td><td>$</td><td>1,179</td><td>$</td><td>1,183</td><td>$</td><td>1,468</td><td>$</td><td>1,350</td><td>$</td><td>1,417</td><td>20</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Other</td></tr><tr><td>WW shipping costs</td><td>$</td><td>5,401</td><td>$</td><td>7,368</td><td>$</td><td>6,069</td><td>$</td><td>5,990</td><td>$</td><td>6,568</td><td>$</td><td>9,041</td><td>23</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>WW shipping costs -- Y/Y growth</td><td>39</td><td>%</td><td>31</td><td>%</td><td>38</td><td>%</td><td>31</td><td>%</td><td>22</td><td>%</td><td>23</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>WW paid units -- Y/Y growth (6)</td><td>25</td><td>%</td><td>23</td><td>%</td><td>22</td><td>%</td><td>17</td><td>%</td><td>15</td><td>%</td><td>14</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>WW seller unit mix -- % of WW paid units (6)</td><td>50</td><td>%</td><td>51</td><td>%</td><td>52</td><td>%</td><td>53</td><td>%</td><td>53</td><td>%</td><td>52</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr><tr><td>Employees (full-time and part-time; excludes contractors &amp; temporary personnel)</td><td>541,900</td><td>566,000</td><td>563,100</td><td>575,700</td><td>613,300</td><td>647,500</td><td>14</td><td>%</td></tr><tr><td>Employees (full-time and part-time; excludes contractors &amp; temporary personnel) -- Y/Y growth</td><td>77</td><td>%</td><td>66</td><td>%</td><td>60</td><td>%</td><td>51</td><td>%</td><td>13</td><td>%</td><td>14</td><td>%</td><td>N/A</td></tr></tbody></table><table><tbody><tr><td><p>________________________</p></td></tr><tr><td>(1)</td><td>Includes product sales and digital media content where we record revenue gross. We leverage our retail infrastructure to offer a wide selection of consumable and durable goods that includes media products available in both a physical and digital format, such as books, music, videos, games, and software. These product sales include digital products sold on a transactional basis. Digital product subscriptions that provide unlimited viewing or usage rights are included in Subscription services.</td></tr><tr><td>(2)</td><td>Includes product sales where our customers physically select items in a store.</td></tr><tr><td>(3)</td><td>Includes commissions and any related fulfillment and shipping fees, and other third-party seller services.</td></tr><tr><td>(4)</td><td>Includes annual and monthly fees associated with Amazon Prime memberships, as well as audiobook, digital video, e-book, digital music, and other non-AWS subscription services.</td></tr><tr><td>(5)</td><td>Primarily includes sales of advertising services, as well as sales related to our other service offerings.</td></tr><tr><td>(6)</td><td>Excludes the impact of Whole Foods Market.</td></tr></tbody></table><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Certain Definitions</p><p><em>Customer Accounts</em></p><ul><li>References to customers mean customer accounts, which are unique e-mail addresses, established either when a customer places an order or when a customer orders from other sellers on our websites. Customer accounts exclude certain customers, including customers associated with certain of our acquisitions, Amazon Payments customers, AWS customers, and the customers of select companies with whom we have a technology alliance or marketing and promotional relationship. Customers are considered active when they have placed an order during the preceding twelve-month period.</li></ul><p><em>Seller Accounts</em></p><ul><li>References to sellers means seller accounts, which are established when a seller receives an order from a customer account. Sellers are considered active when they have received an order from a customer during the preceding twelve-month period.</li></ul><p><em>AWS Customers</em></p><ul><li>References to AWS customers mean unique AWS customer accounts, which are unique customer account IDs that are eligible to use AWS services. This includes AWS accounts in the AWS free tier. Multiple users accessing AWS services via one account ID are counted as a single account. Customers are considered active when they have had AWS usage activity during the preceding one-month period.</li></ul><p><em>Units</em></p><ul><li>References to units mean physical and digital units sold (net of returns and cancellations) by us and sellers at Amazon domains worldwide as well as Amazon-owned items sold through non-Amazon domains. Units sold are paid units and do not include units associated with AWS, certain acquisitions, rental businesses, or advertising businesses, or Amazon gift cards.</li></ul><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190131005900/en/</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p><p>Amazon.com Investor RelationsDave Fildes, amazon-ir@amazon.comamazon.com/ir</p><p>Amazon.com Public RelationsDan Perlet, amazon-pr@amazon.comamazon.com/pr</p>

Amazon teams up with New York City and State colleges to launch pathway to cloud computing jobs

/news/news-details/2019/Amazon-teams-up-with-New-York-City-and-State-colleges-to-launch-pathway-to-cloud-computing-jobs/default.aspx

Amazon-teams-up-with-New-York-City-and-State-colleges-to-launch-pathway-to-cloud-computing-jobs

01/31/2019 11:30:00

Amazon teams up with New York City and State colleges to launch pathway to cloud computing jobs

01/31/2019

2019

LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, and SUNY will work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create a certificate program enabling tens of thousands of students with the opportunity to land entry-level, New York-based tech roles in the cloud computing industryAWS will provide LAGCC, CUNY, and SUNY faculty with professional development, such as curriculum development workshops and AWS trainings; students will be eligible to receive membership to AWS Educate, which provides hands-on experience with leading cloud technology and tools at no costThis is part of Amazon's broader workforce development and training initiatives for local residents across New York, ahead of the company's development of its new headquarters in the city NEW YORK—Jan. 30, 2019—Amazon today announced that it will work with LaGuardia Community College (LAGCC), the City University of New York (CUNY), and the State University of New York (SUNY) to create a cloud computing certificate program for students across New York – enabling students in the region to learn skills for entry-level tech roles, whether at Amazon or other tech companies. The cloud computing initiative is expected to be available in fall 2019 to the tens of thousands of students who attend LAGCC, CUNY, and SUNY, and is part of Amazon's broader workforce development and training initiatives for local residents across New York.Cloud computing—which delivers vast data capacity to organizations of all shapes and sizes without requiring expensive on-site servers—is an exciting place to build a successful career, with LinkedIn highlighting cloud and distributed computing as the #1 in-demand global skill for the past four years in a row. Cloud computing also opens a world of opportunity for students in one of the highest paying IT fields. The local demand for cloud computing talent is increasing in New York City – the broader occupational forecast estimates an increase of 17% for these roles by 2024*."As we continue to expand our presence in New York, we're excited to work with the community to provide more opportunities for skills development," said Ardine Williams, VP of Workforce Development at Amazon. "There is such rich talent in New York, and we want to ensure we're reaching New Yorkers from diverse backgrounds, as we hire for 25,000 jobs across the region. We see this collaboration with LAGCC, CUNY, and SUNY as ensuring that more students have the opportunity to join companies like Amazon as we seek out more tech talent. This is the beginning of our workforce development efforts in New York – we're looking forward to launching more initiatives to meet New Yorkers where they are, providing opportunities for new skill sets and even better paying jobs.""LaGuardia's students represent a singularly unique talent pipeline for Amazon—they have a diversity of life experiences that have prepared them to contribute to and develop the next-generation of consumer and enterprise technologies. We will work closely with our community, including Queensbridge public housing residents and organizations such as Urban Upbound, to secure funding for this program," said LaGuardia Community College President Gail O. Mellow. "We are interested in collaborating with AWS, and any tech company, that recognizes the inherent business, cultural and technical skills that students from our community bring to the workplace.""CUNY is deeply committed to providing students with access to programs that will equip them to thrive in an ever-evolving workplace," said CUNY's Interim Chancellor Vita C. Rabinowitz. "As industries have discovered the value of cloud computing to enable innovation, the demand for workers skilled in its deployment has ballooned. We are pleased to work with Amazon and SUNY in this effort -- the first of what we expect will be numerous career development initiatives -- and to prepare our diverse pool of students for jobs in this burgeoning field.""At SUNY, we are pleased to offer a path for more New Yorkers from diverse backgrounds to careers at Amazon and other emerging industries across the state," said SUNY Chancellor Kristina M. Johnson. "Education and training are clearly key to developing a talented workforce, and by working with Amazon Web Services, our colleagues at CUNY, and our respective campuses, we will develop specific programs online and in our classrooms. The cloud computing certificate is the first step toward this end, and we look forward to the launch of this credential in 2019."As part of this collaboration between the AWS Educate program and LAGCC, CUNY, and SUNY, students in the region will have access to a cloud computing certificate as soon as fall 2019. LAGCC will also partner with at least one high school in New York City to offer concurrent enrollment in the 15-credit certificate program and other support.AWS Educate will provide LAGCC, CUNY, and SUNY faculty with professional development opportunities, such as curriculum development workshops and AWS trainings. All students will also be eligible to receive membership in the AWS Educate program, which provides opportunities to gain hands-on experience with leading cloud technology and tools at no cost to the student. Through AWS Educate, students have access to AWS Promotional Credits for use with real-world, project-based assignments; instructional content and activities; micro-credentials; and the AWS Educate Job Board for direct hiring by AWS, members of the Amazon Partner Network, and AWS customers in NYC and around the globe.About AmazonAmazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.For over 12 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 125 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 57 Availability Zones (AZs) within 19 geographic regions around the world, spanning the US, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the UK. AWS services are trusted by millions of active customers around the world—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—to power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

<p><em>LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, and SUNY will work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create a certificate program enabling tens of thousands of students with the opportunity to land entry-level, New York-based tech roles in the cloud computing industry</em><em>AWS will provide LAGCC, CUNY, and SUNY faculty with professional development, such as curriculum development workshops and AWS trainings; students will be eligible to receive membership to AWS Educate, which provides hands-on experience with leading cloud technology and tools at no cost</em><em>This is part of Amazon's broader workforce development and training initiatives for local residents across New York, ahead of the company's development of its new headquarters in the city</em></p><p>NEW YORK—Jan. 30, 2019—Amazon today announced that it will work with LaGuardia Community College (LAGCC), the City University of New York (CUNY), and the State University of New York (SUNY) to create a cloud computing certificate program for students across New York – enabling students in the region to learn skills for entry-level tech roles, whether at Amazon or other tech companies. The cloud computing initiative is expected to be available in fall 2019 to the tens of thousands of students who attend LAGCC, CUNY, and SUNY, and is part of Amazon's broader workforce development and training initiatives for local residents across New York.Cloud computing—which delivers vast data capacity to organizations of all shapes and sizes without requiring expensive on-site servers—is an exciting place to build a successful career, with LinkedIn highlighting cloud and distributed computing as the #1 in-demand global skill for the past four years in a row. Cloud computing also opens a world of opportunity for students in one of the highest paying IT fields. The local demand for cloud computing talent is increasing in New York City – the broader occupational forecast estimates an increase of 17% for these roles by 2024*."As we continue to expand our presence in New York, we're excited to work with the community to provide more opportunities for skills development," said Ardine Williams, VP of Workforce Development at Amazon. "There is such rich talent in New York, and we want to ensure we're reaching New Yorkers from diverse backgrounds, as we hire for 25,000 jobs across the region. We see this collaboration with LAGCC, CUNY, and SUNY as ensuring that more students have the opportunity to join companies like Amazon as we seek out more tech talent. This is the beginning of our workforce development efforts in New York – we're looking forward to launching more initiatives to meet New Yorkers where they are, providing opportunities for new skill sets and even better paying jobs.""LaGuardia's students represent a singularly unique talent pipeline for Amazon—they have a diversity of life experiences that have prepared them to contribute to and develop the next-generation of consumer and enterprise technologies. We will work closely with our community, including Queensbridge public housing residents and organizations such as Urban Upbound, to secure funding for this program," said LaGuardia Community College President Gail O. Mellow. "We are interested in collaborating with AWS, and any tech company, that recognizes the inherent business, cultural and technical skills that students from our community bring to the workplace.""CUNY is deeply committed to providing students with access to programs that will equip them to thrive in an ever-evolving workplace," said CUNY's Interim Chancellor Vita C. Rabinowitz. "As industries have discovered the value of cloud computing to enable innovation, the demand for workers skilled in its deployment has ballooned. We are pleased to work with Amazon and SUNY in this effort -- the first of what we expect will be numerous career development initiatives -- and to prepare our diverse pool of students for jobs in this burgeoning field.""At SUNY, we are pleased to offer a path for more New Yorkers from diverse backgrounds to careers at Amazon and other emerging industries across the state," said SUNY Chancellor Kristina M. Johnson. "Education and training are clearly key to developing a talented workforce, and by working with Amazon Web Services, our colleagues at CUNY, and our respective campuses, we will develop specific programs online and in our classrooms. The cloud computing certificate is the first step toward this end, and we look forward to the launch of this credential in 2019."As part of this collaboration between the AWS Educate program and LAGCC, CUNY, and SUNY, students in the region will have access to a cloud computing certificate as soon as fall 2019. LAGCC will also partner with at least one high school in New York City to offer concurrent enrollment in the 15-credit certificate program and other support.AWS Educate will provide LAGCC, CUNY, and SUNY faculty with professional development opportunities, such as curriculum development workshops and AWS trainings. All students will also be eligible to receive membership in the AWS Educate program, which provides opportunities to gain hands-on experience with leading cloud technology and tools at no cost to the student. Through AWS Educate, students have access to AWS Promotional Credits for use with real-world, project-based assignments; instructional content and activities; micro-credentials; and the AWS Educate Job Board for direct hiring by AWS, members of the Amazon Partner Network, and AWS customers in NYC and around the globe.About AmazonAmazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.For over 12 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 125 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 57 Availability Zones (AZs) within 19 geographic regions around the world, spanning the US, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the UK. AWS services are trusted by millions of active customers around the world—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—to power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p>

Amazon Future Engineer Program to Fund Computer Science Courses in More Than 130 New York City High Schools

/news/news-details/2019/Amazon-Future-Engineer-Program-to-Fund-Computer-Science-Courses-in-More-Than-130-New-York-City-High-Schools/default.aspx

Amazon-Future-Engineer-Program-to-Fund-Computer-Science-Courses-in-More-Than-130-New-York-City-High-Schools

01/29/2019 12:00:00

Amazon Future Engineer Program to Fund Computer Science Courses in More Than 130 New York City High Schools

01/29/2019

2019

High schools in underrepresented communities of all five boroughs to benefit from Amazon Future Engineer, including more than 30 in Queens, the company's future headquarters location Students to have access to in-demand Introductory and AP Computer Science courses by this fall, helping them build skills for rewarding careers in technology and innovation Amazon Future Engineer is a nationwide childhood-to-career program aimed at making computer science education accessible to children in underserved communities SEATTLE--Jan. 29, 2019-- Amazon today announced that more than 130 high schools in New York City will start providing computer science courses, supported by Amazon Future Engineer, an initiative aimed at making computer science available to children in underrepresented and underserved communities. The more than 130 schools are located throughout all five New York City boroughs, including more than 30 in Queens, where the company plans to open one of its new headquarters. With Amazon Future Engineer's funding, the selected New York City high schools will offer Intro to Computer Science and Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science classes through the New York-based curriculum provider, Edhesive. Amazon's funding provides preparatory lessons, tutorials, and professional development for teachers, fully sequenced and paced digital curriculum for students, and live online support every day of the week for both teachers and students. These full-year courses are designed to inspire students and develop their understanding of technology and coding so that someday they might be interested in pursuing a professional career in the fast-growing field of computer science. All students participating in this program will receive a free membership to AWS Educate which provides them with free access to computing power in the AWS Cloud for their coding projects and content to learn about cloud computing."The Young Women's Leadership School of Queens is ecstatic to collaborate with Amazon on this great opportunity," said George Diaz, Assistant Principal at The Young Women's Leadership School of Queens. "Our young women will expand on their computer science knowledge and the skills that are so important and valuable in today's economy. Amazon is helping fill a major gap in our curriculum that will help young people acquire the skills to build rewarding careers, while boosting prospects for our local community overall."   The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by 2020 there will be 1.4 million computer-science-related jobs available and only 400,000 computer science graduates with the skills to apply for those jobs. Computer science is the fastest growing profession within the Science, Technology, Engineering or Math (STEM) field, but only 8% of STEM graduates earn a computer science degree, with a tiny minority from underprivileged backgrounds. And, students from underprivileged backgrounds are 8 to 10 times more likely to pursue college degrees in computer science if they have taken AP computer science in high school. "We want to help make sure more children across New York City gain the coding skills necessary to have successful careers in many fields," said Jeff Wilke, CEO Worldwide Consumer, Amazon. "We are excited that Amazon Future Engineer will immediately impact more than 130 schools and thousands of students who do not currently have access to computer science education. We will continue to invest in bringing these classes to more schools in New York City and across the U.S." Amazon Future Engineer is a comprehensive childhood-to-career program intended to inspire, educate, and train children and young adults from underserved and low income communities across the country to pursue careers in the fast-growing field of computer science. Amazon Future Engineer aims to inspire more than 10 million kids each year to explore computer science, help over 100,000 young people in 2,000 high schools in lower income communities take Introductory or Advanced Placement (AP) courses in computer science, and provide 100 students from underrepresented communities with four-year $10,000 scholarships as well as guaranteed internships to gain work experience. The list of New York City high schools is on the Amazon Day One blog and below:   Abraham Lincoln High School Academy for Careers In Television And Film Academy for Conservation And The Environment Academy for Software Engineering Academy for Young Writers Academy of Finance and Enterprise Academy of Urban Planning Al-Ihsan Academy Antonia Pantoja Preparatory Academy Archbishop Molloy High School Baruch College Campus High School Beacon High School Bedford Academy High School Beth Rivka High School Bronx Academy for Software Engineering (Base) Bronx Community High School Bronx High School for Writing and Communication Arts Bronx High School of Science Bronx International High School Brooklyn High School for Law And Technology Brooklyn High School of the Arts Brooklyn Lab School Brooklyn Laboratory Charter School Brooklyn Prospect Charter School Bushwick School for Social Justice Calhoun School City College Academy of the Arts Clara Barton High School College of Staten Island High School for International Studies Collegiate Institute for Math and Science Columbia Secondary School Curtis High School Cypress Hills Collegiate Preparatory School Dominican Academy Dr. Richard Izquierdo Health and Science Charter School Eagle Academy for Young Men of Harlem East Harlem Scholars Academy Charter School East Williamsburg Scholars Academy East-West School of International Studies Edward R. Murrow High School El Puente Academy for Peace And Justice Energy Tech High School Epic High School North Evangel Christian School Excelsior Preparatory High School Francis Lewis High School Frank Sinatra School of the Arts High School George Westinghouse High School Gotham Collaborative High School Grover Cleveland High School High School for Law & Public Service High School for Leadership & Public Service High School for Public Service: Heroes of Tomorrow High School of Arts and Technology High School of Enterprise Business & Technology Independence High School Information Technology High School International High School at Prospect Heights International School for Liberal Arts Inwood Early College for Health and Information Technologies Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis High School James Madison High School John Bowne High School Kappa International High School Kingsbridge International High School Manhattan Center for Science & Mathematics Manhattan High School for Girls Martin Van Buren High School Math Engineering and Science Academy Charter High School Monsignor McClancy Memorial High School Monsignor Scanlan High School Morris Academy for Collaborative Studies Mount St. Michael Academy New Dorp High School New Heights Academy Charter School New Utrecht High School New Visions Charter High School For Humanities II New Visions Charter High School-Advanced Math/Science II New Visions Charter High School-Advanced Math/Science III New Visions Charter High School-Advanced Math/Science IV Newtown High School Northside Charter High School NYC Charter High School - Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industries NYC Museum School Pan American International High School at Monroe Preston High School Queens High School for Information Research and Technology Queens High School for the Sciences at York College Queens Metropolitan High School Queens School of Inquiry Ralph R. McKee Career and Technical Education High School Richard R. Green High School of Teaching Richmond Hill High School Robert F. Kennedy Community High School Robert F. Wagner Secondary School for Arts and Technology Saint Catharine Academy Science Skills Center High School St. Agnes Academic School St. Barnabas High School St. Demetrios School St. Johns Preparatory School St. Joseph High School St. Joseph Hill Academy High School St. Raymond High School for Boys Summit Academy Charter School Sunset Park High School Susan E. Wagner High School Teachers Preparatory High School The Brooklyn Academy of Global Finance The Cathedral School The Clinton School The Laboratory School of Finance and Technology The Mary Louis Academy The Renaissance Charter School The Scholars' Academy The School for Human Rights The Urban Assembly Bronx Academy of Letters The Young Women's Leadership School of Astoria The Young Women's Leadership School of Queens Theatre Arts Production Company School Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical Education High School Townsend Harris High School University Neighborhood High School Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science Veritas Academy William Cullen Bryant High School World Journalism Preparatory: A College Board School Xaverian High School Xavier YABC at Stevenson Yeshivah of Flatbush Joel Braverman High School Amazon Future Engineer is still accepting applications from schools for the high school piece of the program, in addition to the K-8, scholarship, and internship stages. Those interested in applying can do so at www.amazonfutureengineer.com.

<p><em>High schools in underrepresented communities of all five boroughs to benefit from Amazon Future Engineer, including more than 30 in Queens, the company's future headquarters location</em></p><p><em>Students to have access to in-demand Introductory and AP Computer Science courses by this fall, helping them build skills for rewarding careers in technology and innovation</em></p><p><em>Amazon Future Engineer is a nationwide childhood-to-career program aimed at making computer science education accessible to children in underserved communities</em></p><p>SEATTLE--Jan. 29, 2019-- Amazon today announced that more than 130 high schools in New York City will start providing computer science courses, supported by Amazon Future Engineer, an initiative aimed at making computer science available to children in underrepresented and underserved communities. The more than 130 schools are located throughout all five New York City boroughs, including more than 30 in Queens, where the company plans to open one of its new headquarters.</p><p>With Amazon Future Engineer's funding, the selected New York City high schools will offer Intro to Computer Science and Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science classes through the New York-based curriculum provider, Edhesive. Amazon's funding provides preparatory lessons, tutorials, and professional development for teachers, fully sequenced and paced digital curriculum for students, and live online support every day of the week for both teachers and students. These full-year courses are designed to inspire students and develop their understanding of technology and coding so that someday they might be interested in pursuing a professional career in the fast-growing field of computer science. All students participating in this program will receive a free membership to AWS Educate which provides them with free access to computing power in the AWS Cloud for their coding projects and content to learn about cloud computing."The Young Women's Leadership School of Queens is ecstatic to collaborate with Amazon on this great opportunity," said George Diaz, Assistant Principal at The Young Women's Leadership School of Queens. "Our young women will expand on their computer science knowledge and the skills that are so important and valuable in today's economy. Amazon is helping fill a major gap in our curriculum that will help young people acquire the skills to build rewarding careers, while boosting prospects for our local community overall."  </p><p>The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by 2020 there will be 1.4 million computer-science-related jobs available and only 400,000 computer science graduates with the skills to apply for those jobs. Computer science is the fastest growing profession within the Science, Technology, Engineering or Math (STEM) field, but only 8% of STEM graduates earn a computer science degree, with a tiny minority from underprivileged backgrounds. And, students from underprivileged backgrounds are 8 to 10 times more likely to pursue college degrees in computer science if they have taken AP computer science in high school.</p><p>"We want to help make sure more children across New York City gain the coding skills necessary to have successful careers in many fields," said Jeff Wilke, CEO Worldwide Consumer, Amazon. "We are excited that Amazon Future Engineer will immediately impact more than 130 schools and thousands of students who do not currently have access to computer science education. We will continue to invest in bringing these classes to more schools in New York City and across the U.S."</p><p>Amazon Future Engineer is a comprehensive childhood-to-career program intended to inspire, educate, and train children and young adults from underserved and low income communities across the country to pursue careers in the fast-growing field of computer science. Amazon Future Engineer aims to inspire more than 10 million kids each year to explore computer science, help over 100,000 young people in 2,000 high schools in lower income communities take Introductory or Advanced Placement (AP) courses in computer science, and provide 100 students from underrepresented communities with four-year $10,000 scholarships as well as guaranteed internships to gain work experience.</p><p>The list of New York City high schools is on the Amazon Day One blog and below:  </p><table><tbody><tr><td>Abraham Lincoln High School</td></tr><tr><td>Academy for Careers In Television And Film</td></tr><tr><td>Academy for Conservation And The Environment</td></tr><tr><td>Academy for Software Engineering</td></tr><tr><td>Academy for Young Writers</td></tr><tr><td>Academy of Finance and Enterprise</td></tr><tr><td>Academy of Urban Planning</td></tr><tr><td>Al-Ihsan Academy</td></tr><tr><td>Antonia Pantoja Preparatory Academy</td></tr><tr><td>Archbishop Molloy High School</td></tr><tr><td>Baruch College Campus High School</td></tr><tr><td>Beacon High School</td></tr><tr><td>Bedford Academy High School</td></tr><tr><td>Beth Rivka High School</td></tr><tr><td>Bronx Academy for Software Engineering (Base)</td></tr><tr><td>Bronx Community High School</td></tr><tr><td>Bronx High School for Writing and Communication Arts</td></tr><tr><td>Bronx High School of Science</td></tr><tr><td>Bronx International High School</td></tr><tr><td>Brooklyn High School for Law And Technology</td></tr><tr><td>Brooklyn High School of the Arts</td></tr><tr><td>Brooklyn Lab School</td></tr><tr><td>Brooklyn Laboratory Charter School</td></tr><tr><td>Brooklyn Prospect Charter School</td></tr><tr><td>Bushwick School for Social Justice</td></tr><tr><td>Calhoun School</td></tr><tr><td>City College Academy of the Arts</td></tr><tr><td>Clara Barton High School</td></tr><tr><td>College of Staten Island High School for International Studies</td></tr><tr><td>Collegiate Institute for Math and Science</td></tr><tr><td>Columbia Secondary School</td></tr><tr><td>Curtis High School</td></tr><tr><td>Cypress Hills Collegiate Preparatory School</td></tr><tr><td>Dominican Academy</td></tr><tr><td>Dr. Richard Izquierdo Health and Science Charter School</td></tr><tr><td>Eagle Academy for Young Men of Harlem</td></tr><tr><td>East Harlem Scholars Academy Charter School</td></tr><tr><td>East Williamsburg Scholars Academy</td></tr><tr><td>East-West School of International Studies</td></tr><tr><td>Edward R. Murrow High School</td></tr><tr><td>El Puente Academy for Peace And Justice</td></tr><tr><td>Energy Tech High School</td></tr><tr><td>Epic High School North</td></tr><tr><td>Evangel Christian School</td></tr><tr><td>Excelsior Preparatory High School</td></tr><tr><td>Francis Lewis High School</td></tr><tr><td>Frank Sinatra School of the Arts High School</td></tr><tr><td>George Westinghouse High School</td></tr><tr><td>Gotham Collaborative High School</td></tr><tr><td>Grover Cleveland High School</td></tr><tr><td>High School for Law &amp; Public Service</td></tr><tr><td>High School for Leadership &amp; Public Service</td></tr><tr><td>High School for Public Service: Heroes of Tomorrow</td></tr><tr><td>High School of Arts and Technology</td></tr><tr><td>High School of Enterprise Business &amp; Technology</td></tr><tr><td>Independence High School</td></tr><tr><td>Information Technology High School</td></tr><tr><td>International High School at Prospect Heights</td></tr><tr><td>International School for Liberal Arts</td></tr><tr><td>Inwood Early College for Health and Information Technologies</td></tr><tr><td>Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis High School</td></tr><tr><td>James Madison High School</td></tr><tr><td>John Bowne High School</td></tr><tr><td>Kappa International High School</td></tr><tr><td>Kingsbridge International High School</td></tr><tr><td>Manhattan Center for Science &amp; Mathematics</td></tr><tr><td>Manhattan High School for Girls</td></tr><tr><td>Martin Van Buren High School</td></tr><tr><td>Math Engineering and Science Academy Charter High School</td></tr><tr><td>Monsignor McClancy Memorial High School</td></tr><tr><td>Monsignor Scanlan High School</td></tr><tr><td>Morris Academy for Collaborative Studies</td></tr><tr><td>Mount St. Michael Academy</td></tr><tr><td>New Dorp High School</td></tr><tr><td>New Heights Academy Charter School</td></tr><tr><td>New Utrecht High School</td></tr><tr><td>New Visions Charter High School For Humanities II</td></tr><tr><td>New Visions Charter High School-Advanced Math/Science II</td></tr><tr><td>New Visions Charter High School-Advanced Math/Science III</td></tr><tr><td>New Visions Charter High School-Advanced Math/Science IV</td></tr><tr><td>Newtown High School</td></tr><tr><td>Northside Charter High School</td></tr><tr><td>NYC Charter High School - Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industries</td></tr><tr><td>NYC Museum School</td></tr><tr><td>Pan American International High School at Monroe</td></tr><tr><td>Preston High School</td></tr><tr><td>Queens High School for Information Research and Technology</td></tr><tr><td>Queens High School for the Sciences at York College</td></tr><tr><td>Queens Metropolitan High School</td></tr><tr><td>Queens School of Inquiry</td></tr><tr><td>Ralph R. McKee Career and Technical Education High School</td></tr><tr><td>Richard R. Green High School of Teaching</td></tr><tr><td>Richmond Hill High School</td></tr><tr><td>Robert F. Kennedy Community High School</td></tr><tr><td>Robert F. Wagner Secondary School for Arts and Technology</td></tr><tr><td>Saint Catharine Academy</td></tr><tr><td>Science Skills Center High School</td></tr><tr><td>St. Agnes Academic School</td></tr><tr><td>St. Barnabas High School</td></tr><tr><td>St. Demetrios School</td></tr><tr><td>St. Johns Preparatory School</td></tr><tr><td>St. Joseph High School</td></tr><tr><td>St. Joseph Hill Academy High School</td></tr><tr><td>St. Raymond High School for Boys</td></tr><tr><td>Summit Academy Charter School</td></tr><tr><td>Sunset Park High School</td></tr><tr><td>Susan E. Wagner High School</td></tr><tr><td>Teachers Preparatory High School</td></tr><tr><td>The Brooklyn Academy of Global Finance</td></tr><tr><td>The Cathedral School</td></tr><tr><td>The Clinton School</td></tr><tr><td>The Laboratory School of Finance and Technology</td></tr><tr><td>The Mary Louis Academy</td></tr><tr><td>The Renaissance Charter School</td></tr><tr><td>The Scholars' Academy</td></tr><tr><td>The School for Human Rights</td></tr><tr><td>The Urban Assembly Bronx Academy of Letters</td></tr><tr><td>The Young Women's Leadership School of Astoria</td></tr><tr><td>The Young Women's Leadership School of Queens</td></tr><tr><td>Theatre Arts Production Company School</td></tr><tr><td>Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical Education High School</td></tr><tr><td>Townsend Harris High School</td></tr><tr><td>University Neighborhood High School</td></tr><tr><td>Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women</td></tr><tr><td>Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science</td></tr><tr><td>Veritas Academy</td></tr><tr><td>William Cullen Bryant High School</td></tr><tr><td>World Journalism Preparatory: A College Board School</td></tr><tr><td>Xaverian High School</td></tr><tr><td>Xavier</td></tr><tr><td>YABC at Stevenson</td></tr><tr><td>Yeshivah of Flatbush Joel Braverman High School</td></tr></tbody></table><p>Amazon Future Engineer is still accepting applications from schools for the high school piece of the program, in addition to the K-8, scholarship, and internship stages. Those interested in applying can do so at www.amazonfutureengineer.com.</p>

Amazon Publishing Announces Amazon Crossing Kids, an Imprint for Children's Books in Translation

/news/news-details/2019/Amazon-Publishing-Announces-Amazon-Crossing-Kids-an-Imprint-for-Childrens-Books-in-Translation/default.aspx

Amazon-Publishing-Announces-Amazon-Crossing-Kids-an-Imprint-for-Childrens-Books-in-Translation

01/25/2019 09:00:00

Amazon Publishing Announces Amazon Crossing Kids, an Imprint for Children's Books in Translation

01/25/2019

2019

Amazon Crossing Kids will publish English-language translations of popular and award-winning picture books from across the globe SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 25, 2019-- (NASDAQ:AMZN)—Amazon Publishing today announced the launch of Amazon Crossing Kids, a new imprint for children's picture books in translation. Building on the work of Amazon Crossing, the largest publisher of translated fiction in the United States, and Amazon Publishing's Two Lions imprint, a leading children's book publisher, Amazon Crossing Kids aims to increase the diversity of children's picture books in translation and encourage young reading from a range of cultural perspectives. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190125005007/en/ A Tiger Like Me written by Michael Engler, illustrated by Joëlle Tourlonias and translated by Laura Watkinson (Photo: Business Wire) Amazon Crossing Kids launches with three picture books and is seeking picture book submissions from all regions of the world. The first titles on the list are: Spiky,written and illustrated by Ilaria Guarducci and translated by Laura Watkinson (7/1/2019): First published in Italy in 2016, this is the story of a forest creature named Spiky, who spends his days bullying the other forest creatures and sharpening the spikes on his body. But suddenly, when he begins to lose his spikes, he must learn how to befriend the other creatures of the forest and share his softer side, making meaningful relationships along the way. A Tiger Like Me,written by Michael Engler, illustrated by Joëlle Tourlonias and translated by Laura Watkinson (9/1/2019): First published in Germany in 2016, this sweet story follows a little boy who likes to reimagine his world as that of a tiger's. This "tiger cub" shares with the reader a day in the life of him and his "tiger" family—waking up in the den, eating in his favorite spot, and how a little tiger feels when he's awake, hungry, or in the mood for an adventure. With splendor and delight, this little boy encourages the reader to get creative with his or her own imagination. Along the Tapajós,written and illustrated by Fernando Vilela and translated by Daniel Hahn (10/1/19): First published in Brazil in 2015, this is the story of two children—and their pet tortoise Titi—who live in the region of Jarí, a small community that links the Amazon and Tapajós rivers. Every year, the families living there must relocate when the rainy season starts. When the boy and his sister move with their family, they realize that they have left Titi behind! Eager to rescue him, the pair sneaks back at night on a journey along the river. This story offers a unique look at this way of life. Two Lions Editorial Director Kelsey Skea will also serve as Editorial Director of Amazon Crossing Kids, working in collaboration with Two Lions Editor Marilyn Brigham and Amazon Crossing Editorial Director Gabriella Page-Fort, to acquire a diverse list of storytellers, illustrators, and translators from across the globe. "We're delighted to blend the missions of Amazon Crossing and Two Lions by introducing terrific books from around the globe to readers who are beginning to develop their worldview," says Mikyla Bruder, Publisher of Amazon Publishing. "Whether a title has a universal theme with regionally-influenced artistry or focuses on an aspect of local culture, our list will encompass a broad range of perspectives, styles, and characters that celebrate what makes us unique as well as what we have in common." Award-winning translators, Laura Watkinson and Daniel Hahn, will translate the first titles from Amazon Crossing Kids. Laura Watkinson has translated from Dutch, Italian, and German and is the winner of the Vondel Prize for her Dutch-to-English translation of The Letter for the King as well as a 3-time winner of the Mildred L. Batchelder Award. Daniel Hahn has translated works from Portuguese, Spanish, and French and is the recipient of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his translation of The Book of Chameleons and was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize for his translation of A General Theory of Oblivion, which won the International Dublin Literary Award. "Publishing and translating children's books from around the world is an important way to provide young readers with writing, illustration, and storytelling of the most extraordinary range and quality," says Daniel Hahn, translator of the forthcoming Amazon Crossing Kids picture book Along the Tapajós. "Any new attempt to broaden our literary horizons, by making it easier for a greater variety of books to find a greater pool of readers, is to be welcomed enthusiastically!" Both Amazon Crossing and Amazon Crossing Kids accept book proposals from any language for translation into English at translation.amazon.com/submissions. About Amazon Publishing Amazon Publishing is a leading publisher of trade fiction, nonfiction, and children's books with a mission to empower outstanding storytellers and connect them with readers worldwide. The Amazon Publishing teams based in Seattle, New York, Grand Haven, Luxembourg, London, Paris, Madrid, Milan and Munich contribute to discovering and publishing emerging, bestselling and critically-acclaimed authors in digital, print and audio formats. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190125005007/en/ Source: Amazon.com, Inc. Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr

<p><em>Amazon Crossing Kids will publish English-language translations of popular and award-winning picture books from across the globe</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 25, 2019-- (NASDAQ:AMZN)—Amazon Publishing today announced the launch of Amazon Crossing Kids, a new imprint for children's picture books in translation. Building on the work of Amazon Crossing, the largest publisher of translated fiction in the United States, and Amazon Publishing's Two Lions imprint, a leading children's book publisher, Amazon Crossing Kids aims to increase the diversity of children's picture books in translation and encourage young reading from a range of cultural perspectives.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190125005007/en/</p><div><p>A Tiger Like Me written by Michael Engler, illustrated by Joëlle Tourlonias and translated by Laura Watkinson (Photo: Business Wire)</p></div><p>Amazon Crossing Kids launches with three picture books and is seeking picture book submissions from all regions of the world. The first titles on the list are:</p><ul><li><em>Spiky</em>,written and illustrated by Ilaria Guarducci and translated by Laura Watkinson (7/1/2019): First published in Italy in 2016, this is the story of a forest creature named Spiky, who spends his days bullying the other forest creatures and sharpening the spikes on his body. But suddenly, when he begins to lose his spikes, he must learn how to befriend the other creatures of the forest and share his softer side, making meaningful relationships along the way.</li><li><em>A Tiger Like Me</em>,written by Michael Engler, illustrated by Joëlle Tourlonias and translated by Laura Watkinson (9/1/2019): First published in Germany in 2016, this sweet story follows a little boy who likes to reimagine his world as that of a tiger's. This "tiger cub" shares with the reader a day in the life of him and his "tiger" family—waking up in the den, eating in his favorite spot, and how a little tiger feels when he's awake, hungry, or in the mood for an adventure. With splendor and delight, this little boy encourages the reader to get creative with his or her own imagination.</li><li><em>Along the Tapajós</em>,written and illustrated by Fernando Vilela and translated by Daniel Hahn (10/1/19): First published in Brazil in 2015, this is the story of two children—and their pet tortoise Titi—who live in the region of Jarí, a small community that links the Amazon and Tapajós rivers. Every year, the families living there must relocate when the rainy season starts. When the boy and his sister move with their family, they realize that they have left Titi behind! Eager to rescue him, the pair sneaks back at night on a journey along the river. This story offers a unique look at this way of life.</li></ul><p>Two Lions Editorial Director Kelsey Skea will also serve as Editorial Director of Amazon Crossing Kids, working in collaboration with Two Lions Editor Marilyn Brigham and Amazon Crossing Editorial Director Gabriella Page-Fort, to acquire a diverse list of storytellers, illustrators, and translators from across the globe.</p><p>"We're delighted to blend the missions of Amazon Crossing and Two Lions by introducing terrific books from around the globe to readers who are beginning to develop their worldview," says Mikyla Bruder, Publisher of Amazon Publishing. "Whether a title has a universal theme with regionally-influenced artistry or focuses on an aspect of local culture, our list will encompass a broad range of perspectives, styles, and characters that celebrate what makes us unique as well as what we have in common."</p><p>Award-winning translators, Laura Watkinson and Daniel Hahn, will translate the first titles from Amazon Crossing Kids. Laura Watkinson has translated from Dutch, Italian, and German and is the winner of the Vondel Prize for her Dutch-to-English translation of <em>The Letter for the King</em> as well as a 3-time winner of the Mildred L. Batchelder Award. Daniel Hahn has translated works from Portuguese, Spanish, and French and is the recipient of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his translation of <em>The Book of Chameleons</em> and was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize for his translation of <em>A General Theory of Oblivion</em>, which won the International Dublin Literary Award.</p><p>"Publishing and translating children's books from around the world is an important way to provide young readers with writing, illustration, and storytelling of the most extraordinary range and quality," says Daniel Hahn, translator of the forthcoming Amazon Crossing Kids picture book <em>Along the Tapajós</em>. "Any new attempt to broaden our literary horizons, by making it easier for a greater variety of books to find a greater pool of readers, is to be welcomed enthusiastically!"</p><p>Both Amazon Crossing and Amazon Crossing Kids accept book proposals from any language for translation into English at translation.amazon.com/submissions.</p><p>About Amazon Publishing</p><p>Amazon Publishing is a leading publisher of trade fiction, nonfiction, and children's books with a mission to empower outstanding storytellers and connect them with readers worldwide. The Amazon Publishing teams based in Seattle, New York, Grand Haven, Luxembourg, London, Paris, Madrid, Milan and Munich contribute to discovering and publishing emerging, bestselling and critically-acclaimed authors in digital, print and audio formats.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190125005007/en/</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p>

AWS Announces Amazon WorkLink

/news/news-details/2019/AWS-Announces-Amazon-WorkLink/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-Amazon-WorkLink

01/23/2019 19:14:00

AWS Announces Amazon WorkLink

01/23/2019

2019

Fully managed service enables customers to easily and securely provide employees one-click access to internal websites and web applications on mobile devices Intuit Inc., Unisys, and Oak Hill Advisors among initial customers using Amazon WorkLink SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 23, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the availability of Amazon WorkLink, a fully managed service that enables companies to provide their workforce with secure one-click access to internal websites and web applications from their mobile devices without connecting to VPNs or using custom browsers. End users simply download the Amazon WorkLink app to enable access to internal content through existing browsers on their mobile devices. IT administrators determine which internal content to make available, and Amazon WorkLink securely renders it behind the scenes using the compute and networking infrastructure of AWS, delivering a non-cached, fully functional, graphical representation of the web content to the user requesting it. Amazon WorkLink removes the need to build and maintain complicated infrastructure and software deployments to secure access to internal content on authorized mobile devices outside of the firewall. Amazon WorkLink also reduces the risk of information loss or theft because content is never stored or cached on devices. There are no up-front payments, per seat licensing costs, or long-term commitments, and customers pay only $5 per active user per month. To get started with Amazon WorkLink, visit: aws.amazon.com/worklink. Today's workforce of employees, contractors, partners, and suppliers needs access to internal websites and web applications to do their jobs, but often lacks convenient means to connect when working outside the corporate firewall. With existing solutions, enabling access means IT administrators must invest in and deploy both Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to ensure secure connectivity, and mobile device management (MDM) software to configure devices and control user access. For end users, these VPN and device management applications often require access fobs and tokens, one-time passwords, and custom web browsers – all of which can be cumbersome and significantly slow the process of connecting to vital corporate resources. As a result, simple tasks like looking up a colleague on the Intranet or checking the status of an open customer ticket are often delayed until an employee can return to the office, hindering the productivity of today's global workforce. IT administrators face the even more daunting challenge of setting up, operating, and maintaining VPNs and device management software deployments, which often requires the purchase of licenses for workers regardless of whether they are used or not. Even when these solutions work as advertised, information is still stored or cached on devices, leaving companies at risk of loss or theft of corporate data. And, because devices connect to the corporate network directly, enterprise resources may be exposed to device-based malware. Amazon WorkLink was built to provide convenient access to critical content for workers and to make it easier for IT administrators to deliver secure access to mobile devices, all while providing greater security by ensuring that the corporate web content is never stored or cached on the device. At the core of Amazon WorkLink is a secure web browser hosted in the cloud that transforms web content into a fully interactive simple vector graphics (SVG) graphical representation. Once rendered, Amazon WorkLink sends that graphical representation to the web browser on an end user's device. Unlike virtual desktop applications, this means Amazon WorkLink does not stream content, but instead embeds a fully interactive image in an end user's existing browser, enabling common gestures and features like scrolling, typing, and pinching locally on the device despite the web page running in the cloud. Amazon WorkLink prevents web content from being stored and cached on the device itself, and saves bandwidth by eliminating the need to download large HTML, style sheets, and JavaScript files used to display web pages. When an end user closes their web browser tab at the end of a session, none of the content remains on the device, meaning lost or stolen devices don't need to be remotely wiped. At the end of the session, the ephemeral cloud-based web browser disappears, ensuring corporate content only resides within the customer's network. Because Amazon WorkLink is fully managed, it removes the heavy lifting of software and infrastructure deployment, capacity planning, and scaling, as well as the need for custom browser updates. With Amazon WorkLink, mobile devices never connect directly to the corporate network, narrowing the path for device-based malware to reach enterprise resources behind the corporate firewall. "When talking with customers, all of them expressed frustration that their workers don't have an easy and secure way to access internal content, which means that their employees either waste time or don't bother trying to access content that would make them more productive," said Peter Hill, Vice President of Productivity Applications at AWS. "With Amazon WorkLink, we're enabling greater workplace productivity for those outside the corporate firewall in a way that IT administrators and security teams are happy with and employees are willing to use." Amazon WorkLink can be configured directly from the AWS Management Console. Once configured, end users can download the Amazon WorkLink application from either the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store (available soon), log in with their corporate credentials, and start accessing internal websites, while Amazon WorkLink works behind the scenes to ensure data is delivered quickly and securely. Amazon WorkLink works with SAML 2.0 compliant identity providers including Okta and Ping Identity, and honors existing security policies. Amazon WorkLink supports devices running iOS 12+ (with Android 6+ coming in weeks) and works with Safari, with Chrome support to follow in the coming weeks. Amazon WorkLink is available immediately in North America and Europe, and will expand to additional regions in the coming year. Intuit Inc. is a business and financial software company that develops and sells financial, accounting, and tax preparation software and related services for small businesses, accountants, and individuals. "Our DevSecOps team at Intuit expects instant access to key internal resources anywhere, anytime," said Shannon Lietz, Director, Information Security at Intuit. "We are excited about making these mission-critical employees more productive than ever, regardless of where they are. Being able to promptly act on security tickets without any worry or friction, even when away from our desks, allows us to ensure Intuit products remain secure and our employees more efficient." Unisys is a global information technology company that builds high-performance, security-centric solutions for the most demanding businesses and governments on Earth. "Our clients frequently say they struggle with securing mobile access to internal web resources without restricting employee productivity," said Mickey Davis, global vice president of Managed Workplace Services, Unisys. "With Amazon WorkLink, end users can securely perform important tasks – such as resolving customer support requests, reviewing important business reports and approving budget requests or expense reports – in seconds using just their phones. We are testing Amazon WorkLink at Unisys to access our training wiki and trouble ticketing system, and we're excited at the prospect of using it to empower our clients and their workers as well." Oak Hill Advisors is a leading alternative investment firm with approximately $32B under management across performing and distressed credit related investments in North America, Europe, and other geographies. "Our business and technology teams rely on a set of services providing dashboards and project management tools, running in our data centers to complete their day to day activities," said Sajawal Haider, Chief Information Security Officer at Oak Hill Advisors, L.P. "Currently, to provide anytime access on mobile devices, we use a combination of mobile device management and VPN solutions, which are complicated and expensive to maintain. Amazon WorkLink being a managed service solves this problem for us by providing mobile access to critical web content, while securing sensitive data. And the best part is our users love the experience." Brillio is a global technology consulting and business solutions company dedicated towards modernizing IT infrastructures to facilitate agility for enterprises in the consumer goods, financial, manufacturing, and healthcare industries. "Our customers consistently tell us one of their biggest challenges is enabling secure mobile access as they move their legacy content to a mobile-first world. Amazon WorkLink will allow us to help our customers keep pace with the speed of markets by delivering both productivity and security on the go," said Siva Perubotla, Associate Vice President & Head – Digital Infrastructure at Brillio. "We have leveraged Amazon WorkLink for our own internal use cases which involved productivity enablement for our global workforce by building capabilities through secure, cross platform, on-demand and seamless access of internal knowledge base, learning modules, and intranet resources. We are excited with the results and convinced that we will be able to replicate the benefits for our customers at scale." Privo is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with practices across a wide range of services including DevOps, End User Computing, and Cost Optimization. "When AWS introduced us to Amazon WorkLink, we saw the opportunity to deliver both security and productivity on mobile devices, while also enabling our customers to both complement their MDM solutions with more secure and seamless Web access, and open up secure access to end users who do not have any access at all today," said Doug Heestand, Partner at Privo. "We use Amazon WorkLink ourselves today to help our own employees access our internal training intranet and now we're excited to help new customers take advantage of Amazon WorkLink's unique capabilities." 8K Miles is one of the leaders in providing a wide range of expertise ranging from Enterprise Cloud Transformation, Big Data Analytics, Identity Access Management, and other Managed Services to maintain continuous compliance regulations and security of the enterprise. "Health Care and Pharma companies work with some of the world's most sensitive data on a daily basis, and we have been helping them securely navigate the move to the cloud for over a decade," said Sudish Mogli, CTO for 8K Miles. "Our AWS customers are all at different points in their digital transformation, with some already all-in on the AWS cloud, others in a hybrid state, and others just starting from their on-prem infrastructure. Amazon WorkLink will allow us to help all of these customers enable their end users with secure one click intranet access no matter where their origin servers are located. Our customers tell us that their workers are spending more on more time away from their desks, and Amazon WorkLink will be an exciting part of making that time more productive and secure." Eplexity is a cloud services provider focused on cloud acceleration, devops as a service, managed cloud services, and cloud security, all designed to accelerate customers' AWS journey. "We are thrilled to work with AWS to enable our customers with cost-effective, secure connectivity to their mobile workforce for critical line of business services," said John Clendennen, Eplexity CEO. "Amazon WorkLink provides organizations who are not in a position to redevelop legacy applications the ability to deliver full mobile access to end users."

<p><em>Fully managed service </em><em>enables customers to easily and securely provide employees one-click access to internal websites and web applications on mobile devices</em></p><p><em>Intuit Inc., Unisys, and Oak Hill Advisors among initial customers using Amazon WorkLink</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 23, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the availability of Amazon WorkLink, a fully managed service that enables companies to provide their workforce with secure one-click access to internal websites and web applications from their mobile devices without connecting to VPNs or using custom browsers. End users simply download the Amazon WorkLink app to enable access to internal content through existing browsers on their mobile devices. IT administrators determine which internal content to make available, and Amazon WorkLink securely renders it behind the scenes using the compute and networking infrastructure of AWS, delivering a non-cached, fully functional, graphical representation of the web content to the user requesting it. Amazon WorkLink removes the need to build and maintain complicated infrastructure and software deployments to secure access to internal content on authorized mobile devices outside of the firewall. Amazon WorkLink also reduces the risk of information loss or theft because content is never stored or cached on devices. There are no up-front payments, per seat licensing costs, or long-term commitments, and customers pay only $5 per active user per month. To get started with Amazon WorkLink, visit: aws.amazon.com/worklink.</p><p>Today's workforce of employees, contractors, partners, and suppliers needs access to internal websites and web applications to do their jobs, but often lacks convenient means to connect when working outside the corporate firewall. With existing solutions, enabling access means IT administrators must invest in and deploy both Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to ensure secure connectivity, and mobile device management (MDM) software to configure devices and control user access. For end users, these VPN and device management applications often require access fobs and tokens, one-time passwords, and custom web browsers – all of which can be cumbersome and significantly slow the process of connecting to vital corporate resources. As a result, simple tasks like looking up a colleague on the Intranet or checking the status of an open customer ticket are often delayed until an employee can return to the office, hindering the productivity of today's global workforce. IT administrators face the even more daunting challenge of setting up, operating, and maintaining VPNs and device management software deployments, which often requires the purchase of licenses for workers regardless of whether they are used or not. Even when these solutions work as advertised, information is still stored or cached on devices, leaving companies at risk of loss or theft of corporate data. And, because devices connect to the corporate network directly, enterprise resources may be exposed to device-based malware.</p><p>Amazon WorkLink was built to provide convenient access to critical content for workers and to make it easier for IT administrators to deliver secure access to mobile devices, all while providing greater security by ensuring that the corporate web content is never stored or cached on the device. At the core of Amazon WorkLink is a secure web browser hosted in the cloud that transforms web content into a fully interactive simple vector graphics (SVG) graphical representation. Once rendered, Amazon WorkLink sends that graphical representation to the web browser on an end user's device. Unlike virtual desktop applications, this means Amazon WorkLink does not stream content, but instead embeds a fully interactive image in an end user's existing browser, enabling common gestures and features like scrolling, typing, and pinching locally on the device despite the web page running in the cloud. Amazon WorkLink prevents web content from being stored and cached on the device itself, and saves bandwidth by eliminating the need to download large HTML, style sheets, and JavaScript files used to display web pages. When an end user closes their web browser tab at the end of a session, none of the content remains on the device, meaning lost or stolen devices don't need to be remotely wiped. At the end of the session, the ephemeral cloud-based web browser disappears, ensuring corporate content only resides within the customer's network. Because Amazon WorkLink is fully managed, it removes the heavy lifting of software and infrastructure deployment, capacity planning, and scaling, as well as the need for custom browser updates. With Amazon WorkLink, mobile devices never connect directly to the corporate network, narrowing the path for device-based malware to reach enterprise resources behind the corporate firewall.</p><p>"When talking with customers, all of them expressed frustration that their workers don't have an easy and secure way to access internal content, which means that their employees either waste time or don't bother trying to access content that would make them more productive," said Peter Hill, Vice President of Productivity Applications at AWS. "With Amazon WorkLink, we're enabling greater workplace productivity for those outside the corporate firewall in a way that IT administrators and security teams are happy with and employees are willing to use."</p><p>Amazon WorkLink can be configured directly from the AWS Management Console. Once configured, end users can download the Amazon WorkLink application from either the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store (available soon), log in with their corporate credentials, and start accessing internal websites, while Amazon WorkLink works behind the scenes to ensure data is delivered quickly and securely. Amazon WorkLink works with SAML 2.0 compliant identity providers including Okta and Ping Identity, and honors existing security policies. Amazon WorkLink supports devices running iOS 12+ (with Android 6+ coming in weeks) and works with Safari, with Chrome support to follow in the coming weeks. Amazon WorkLink is available immediately in North America and Europe, and will expand to additional regions in the coming year.</p><p>Intuit Inc. is a business and financial software company that develops and sells financial, accounting, and tax preparation software and related services for small businesses, accountants, and individuals. "Our DevSecOps team at Intuit expects instant access to key internal resources anywhere, anytime," said Shannon Lietz, Director, Information Security at Intuit. "We are excited about making these mission-critical employees more productive than ever, regardless of where they are. Being able to promptly act on security tickets without any worry or friction, even when away from our desks, allows us to ensure Intuit products remain secure and our employees more efficient."</p><p>Unisys is a global information technology company that builds high-performance, security-centric solutions for the most demanding businesses and governments on Earth. "Our clients frequently say they struggle with securing mobile access to internal web resources without restricting employee productivity," said Mickey Davis, global vice president of Managed Workplace Services, Unisys. "With Amazon WorkLink, end users can securely perform important tasks – such as resolving customer support requests, reviewing important business reports and approving budget requests or expense reports – in seconds using just their phones. We are testing Amazon WorkLink at Unisys to access our training wiki and trouble ticketing system, and we're excited at the prospect of using it to empower our clients and their workers as well."</p><p>Oak Hill Advisors is a leading alternative investment firm with approximately $32B under management across performing and distressed credit related investments in North America, Europe, and other geographies. "Our business and technology teams rely on a set of services providing dashboards and project management tools, running in our data centers to complete their day to day activities," said Sajawal Haider, Chief Information Security Officer at Oak Hill Advisors, L.P. "Currently, to provide anytime access on mobile devices, we use a combination of mobile device management and VPN solutions, which are complicated and expensive to maintain. Amazon WorkLink being a managed service solves this problem for us by providing mobile access to critical web content, while securing sensitive data. And the best part is our users love the experience."</p><p>Brillio is a global technology consulting and business solutions company dedicated towards modernizing IT infrastructures to facilitate agility for enterprises in the consumer goods, financial, manufacturing, and healthcare industries. "Our customers consistently tell us one of their biggest challenges is enabling secure mobile access as they move their legacy content to a mobile-first world. Amazon WorkLink will allow us to help our customers keep pace with the speed of markets by delivering both productivity and security on the go," said Siva Perubotla, Associate Vice President &amp; Head – Digital Infrastructure at Brillio. "We have leveraged Amazon WorkLink for our own internal use cases which involved productivity enablement for our global workforce by building capabilities through secure, cross platform, on-demand and seamless access of internal knowledge base, learning modules, and intranet resources. We are excited with the results and convinced that we will be able to replicate the benefits for our customers at scale."</p><p>Privo is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with practices across a wide range of services including DevOps, End User Computing, and Cost Optimization. "When AWS introduced us to Amazon WorkLink, we saw the opportunity to deliver both security and productivity on mobile devices, while also enabling our customers to both complement their MDM solutions with more secure and seamless Web access, and open up secure access to end users who do not have any access at all today," said Doug Heestand, Partner at Privo. "We use Amazon WorkLink ourselves today to help our own employees access our internal training intranet and now we're excited to help new customers take advantage of Amazon WorkLink's unique capabilities."</p><p>8K Miles is one of the leaders in providing a wide range of expertise ranging from Enterprise Cloud Transformation, Big Data Analytics, Identity Access Management, and other Managed Services to maintain continuous compliance regulations and security of the enterprise. "Health Care and Pharma companies work with some of the world's most sensitive data on a daily basis, and we have been helping them securely navigate the move to the cloud for over a decade," said Sudish Mogli, CTO for 8K Miles. "Our AWS customers are all at different points in their digital transformation, with some already all-in on the AWS cloud, others in a hybrid state, and others just starting from their on-prem infrastructure. Amazon WorkLink will allow us to help all of these customers enable their end users with secure one click intranet access no matter where their origin servers are located. Our customers tell us that their workers are spending more on more time away from their desks, and Amazon WorkLink will be an exciting part of making that time more productive and secure."</p><p>Eplexity is a cloud services provider focused on cloud acceleration, devops as a service, managed cloud services, and cloud security, all designed to accelerate customers' AWS journey. "We are thrilled to work with AWS to enable our customers with cost-effective, secure connectivity to their mobile workforce for critical line of business services," said John Clendennen, Eplexity CEO. "Amazon WorkLink provides organizations who are not in a position to redevelop legacy applications the ability to deliver full mobile access to end users."</p>

Amazon Stores Helping Build the Future of Business: More than 50,000 Small and Medium-sized Businesses Exceeded $500,000 in Sales in Amazon's Stores in 2018

/news/news-details/2019/Amazon-Stores-Helping-Build-the-Future-of-Business-More-than-50000-Small-and-Medium-sized-Businesses-Exceeded-500000-in-Sales-in-Amazons-Stores-in-2018/default.aspx

Amazon-Stores-Helping-Build-the-Future-of-Business-More-than-50000-Small-and-Medium-sized-Businesses-Exceeded-500000-in-Sales-in-Amazons-Stores-in-2018

01/18/2019 09:00:00

Amazon Stores Helping Build the Future of Business: More than 50,000 Small and Medium-sized Businesses Exceeded $500,000 in Sales in Amazon's Stores in 2018

01/18/2019

2019

Third-party sales are growing at a faster rate than first-party sales in Amazon's stores More than half of units sold in Amazon's stores are from small and medium-sized businesses Small and medium-sized businesses selling in Amazon's stores are estimated to have created more than 900,000 jobs worldwide SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 18, 2019-- (NASDAQ: AMZN) – Amazon today announced that more than 50,000 small and medium-sized businesses exceeded $500,000 in sales in Amazon's stores worldwide, and nearly 200,000 surpassed $100,000 in sales in our stores. The number of small and medium-sized businesses eclipsing $1 million in sales in Amazon's stores worldwide grew by 20 percent in 2018. Millions of small and medium-sized businesses from around the world are selling in Amazon's stores and more than a million of them are based in the U.S. Small and medium-sized businesses selling in Amazon's stores come from every state in the U.S., and from more than 130 different countries around the world. "This year growth of small and medium-sized businesses in our stores enabled business owners to create new products, provide greater selection to customers, and reinvest in their local communities through job creation," said Nick Denissen, Vice President for Amazon. "Since we opened our shelves to third-party sellers in 2001, small and medium-sized businesses have been an integral part of Amazon's DNA. Our guiding star is an obsession with customers, and the service we've built is more powerful because we have small and medium-sized businesses complementing and competing with our retail business." Third-party sales are growing at a faster rate than first-party sales on Amazon and across retailers in the U.S. During the 2018 holiday season, Amazon reported that sales by small and medium-sized businesses outpaced its retail business sales in Amazon's stores worldwide. "Selling on Amazon has been huge for Yedi Houseware," said Bobby Djavaheri, Director of Sales & Development, Yedi Houseware. "Since we began listing products on Amazon 12 years ago, our business has skyrocketed and we now have 12 fulltime employees and plan to hire more this year. Amazon allows us to reach new customers across the U.S. and even worldwide, which enabled our business to grow 126% just last year!" 2018 Amazon Stores Highlights: Nearly 200,000 small and medium-sized businesses sold more than $100,000 in Amazon's stores in 2018. More than 50,000 small and medium-sized businesses exceeded $500,000 in sales in our stores in 2018. The number of small and medium-sized businesses eclipsing $1 million in sales in Amazon's stores worldwide grew by 20 percent in 2018. Small and medium-sized businesses in the U.S. using Fulfillment by Amazon more than doubled their export sales. More than half of units sold in Amazon's stores are from small and medium-sized businesses. Small and medium-sized businesses selling in Amazon's stores exceeded $1.5 billion in sales during the Prime Day event. Amazon Storefronts launched, featuring more than 1 million products from 20,000 U.S. small and medium-sized businesses. In 2018, Amazon introduced the Small Business Impact Report. According to the report, small and medium-sized businesses selling in Amazon's stores are estimated to have created more than 900,000 jobs worldwide. To view the report, visit: www.amazon.com/SMBreport. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190118005064/en/ Source: Amazon Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr

<p><em>Third-party sales are growing at a faster rate than first-party sales in Amazon's stores</em></p><p><em>More than half of units sold in Amazon's stores are from small and medium-sized businesses</em></p><p><em>Small and medium-sized businesses selling in Amazon's stores are estimated to have created more than 900,000 jobs worldwide</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 18, 2019-- (NASDAQ: AMZN) – Amazon today announced that more than 50,000 small and medium-sized businesses exceeded $500,000 in sales in Amazon's stores worldwide, and nearly 200,000 surpassed $100,000 in sales in our stores. The number of small and medium-sized businesses eclipsing $1 million in sales in Amazon's stores worldwide grew by 20 percent in 2018. Millions of small and medium-sized businesses from around the world are selling in Amazon's stores and more than a million of them are based in the U.S. Small and medium-sized businesses selling in Amazon's stores come from every state in the U.S., and from more than 130 different countries around the world.</p><p>"This year growth of small and medium-sized businesses in our stores enabled business owners to create new products, provide greater selection to customers, and reinvest in their local communities through job creation," said Nick Denissen, Vice President for Amazon. "Since we opened our shelves to third-party sellers in 2001, small and medium-sized businesses have been an integral part of Amazon's DNA. Our guiding star is an obsession with customers, and the service we've built is more powerful because we have small and medium-sized businesses complementing and competing with our retail business."</p><p>Third-party sales are growing at a faster rate than first-party sales on Amazon and across retailers in the U.S. During the 2018 holiday season, Amazon reported that sales by small and medium-sized businesses outpaced its retail business sales in Amazon's stores worldwide.</p><p>"Selling on Amazon has been huge for Yedi Houseware," said Bobby Djavaheri, Director of Sales &amp; Development, Yedi Houseware. "Since we began listing products on Amazon 12 years ago, our business has skyrocketed and we now have 12 fulltime employees and plan to hire more this year. Amazon allows us to reach new customers across the U.S. and even worldwide, which enabled our business to grow 126% just last year!"</p><p>2018 Amazon Stores Highlights:</p><ul><li>Nearly 200,000 small and medium-sized businesses sold more than $100,000 in Amazon's stores in 2018.</li><li>More than 50,000 small and medium-sized businesses exceeded $500,000 in sales in our stores in 2018.</li><li>The number of small and medium-sized businesses eclipsing $1 million in sales in Amazon's stores worldwide grew by 20 percent in 2018.</li><li>Small and medium-sized businesses in the U.S. using Fulfillment by Amazon more than doubled their export sales.</li><li>More than half of units sold in Amazon's stores are from small and medium-sized businesses.</li><li>Small and medium-sized businesses selling in Amazon's stores exceeded $1.5 billion in sales during the Prime Day event.</li><li>Amazon Storefronts launched, featuring more than 1 million products from 20,000 U.S. small and medium-sized businesses.</li></ul><p>In 2018, Amazon introduced the Small Business Impact Report. According to the report, small and medium-sized businesses selling in Amazon's stores are estimated to have created more than 900,000 jobs worldwide. To view the report, visit: www.amazon.com/SMBreport.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190118005064/en/</p><p>Source: Amazon</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p>

Amazon.com to Webcast Fourth Quarter 2018 Financial Results Conference Call

/news/news-details/2019/Amazon.com-to-Webcast-Fourth-Quarter-2018-Financial-Results-Conference-Call/default.aspx

Amazon.com-to-Webcast-Fourth-Quarter-2018-Financial-Results-Conference-Call

01/17/2019 16:01:00

Amazon.com to Webcast Fourth Quarter 2018 Financial Results Conference Call

01/17/2019

2019

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 17, 2019-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced today that it will hold a conference call to discuss its fourth quarter 2018 financial results on January 31, 2019 at 2:30 p.m. PT/5:30 p.m. ET. The event will be webcast live, and the audio and associated slides will be available for at least three months thereafter at www.amazon.com/ir. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190117005783/en/ Source: Amazon.com Amazon.com Public Relationsamazon-pr@amazon.comamazon.com/pr

<p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 17, 2019-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced today that it will hold a conference call to discuss its fourth quarter 2018 financial results on January 31, 2019 at 2:30 p.m. PT/5:30 p.m. ET.</p><p>The event will be webcast live, and the audio and associated slides will be available for at least three months thereafter at www.amazon.com/ir.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190117005783/en/</p><p>Source: Amazon.com</p><p>Amazon.com Public Relationsamazon-pr@amazon.comamazon.com/pr</p>

Amazon Web Services Announces AWS Backup

/news/news-details/2019/Amazon-Web-Services-Announces-AWS-Backup/default.aspx

Amazon-Web-Services-Announces-AWS-Backup

01/16/2019 19:21:00

Amazon Web Services Announces AWS Backup

01/16/2019

2019

Centralized backup service makes it easier and more cost-effective for customers to automate backups of their data and meet business and regulatory requirements State Street Corporation, Smile Brands, and Rackspace among companies using AWS Backup SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 16, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced AWS Backup, a fully-managed, centralized backup service that makes it faster and simpler for customers to back up their data across AWS services and on-premises, helping customers more easily meet their business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. AWS Backup makes protecting storage volumes, databases, and file systems easier by giving customers a single service to configure and audit the AWS resources they backup, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor recent backups and restores in one place. To get started with AWS Backup visit: aws.amazon.com/backup. As enterprises move more and more applications to the cloud, their data can become distributed across multiple services, including databases, block storage, object storage, and file systems. While these services in AWS provide backup capabilities, customers often create custom scripts to automate scheduling, enforce retention policies, and consolidate backup activity across several services in order to better meet their business and regulatory compliance requirements. AWS Backup removes the need for custom solutions or manual processes by providing a centralized place to manage backups across AWS. With just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can create a policy that defines how frequently backups are created and how long they are stored. Customers can then assign these policies to their AWS resources, and AWS Backup automatically handles the rest by automatically scheduling backup actions for the assigned AWS resources, orchestrating across AWS services, and managing their retention period. "As the cloud has become the default choice for customers of all sizes, it has attracted two distinct types of builders. Some are tinkerers who want to tweak and fine tune the full range of AWS services into a desired architecture, and other builders are drawn to the same breadth and depth of functionality in AWS, but are willing to trade some of the service granularity to start at a higher abstraction layer, so they can build even faster," said Bill Vass, VP of Storage, Automation, and Management Services, AWS. "We designed AWS Backup for this second type of builder who has told us that they want one place to go for backups versus having to do it across multiple, individual services. Today, we are proud to make AWS Backup available with support for block storage volumes, databases, and file systems, and over time, we plan to support additional AWS services." Initially, AWS Backup is integrated with Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and AWS Storage Gateway, with support for additional services planned for the future. Customers can also back up on-premises application data through the AWS Backup integration with AWS Storage Gateway, providing a common way to protect their on-premises data in the AWS cloud. State Street Corporation is the world's leading provider of financial services to institutional investors including investment servicing, investment management and investment research, and trading. "We operate in the financial services industry and must provide data storage solutions that ensure the integrity and availability of backup data as stipulated by the FFIEC IT examination handbook," says Nauman Noor, Managing Director, State Street Corporation. "Meeting these regulations requires us to develop and maintain an internal serverless application to enable timely and auditable backups across the AWS services we use. With AWS Backup's centralized backup console, we will have a single pane of glass to audit our backup processes across our AWS environment, mitigating the need for custom applications and thus, easing our effort to aid data integrity and availability. The ability to set backup policies for automated backup scheduling and backup retention provides us flexibility to address the needs for varying levels of criticality in a cost effective and consistent manner." Smile Brands is a leading dental support organization that provides business support services to over 400 locations across 17 states. "We manage thousands of AWS resources, such as storage volumes and databases, and all of them must meet compliance according to HIPAA backup requirements," says George Suda, Senior VP and Chief Information Officer, Smile Brands. "Ensuring that all our AWS workloads are properly backed up can require manual processes and custom scripts. With AWS Backup's centralized backup console, we will be able to define a backup policy that meets our compliance requirements and apply the same policy to all our AWS resources across the various AWS services that we use. AWS Backup will automatically handle the backup processes on our behalf, providing a full-managed and cost-effective solution that removes the need for manual processes or custom scripts." Rackspace delivers modern IT as a service, helping customers in more than 150 countries drive business results with technology. "Rackspace is focused on delivering next generation cloud services to help our customers meet their data protection and regulatory compliance needs," said Prashanth Chandrasekar, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Managed Public Clouds at Rackspace. "With AWS Backup, we now have access to a cloud-scale, centralized backup solution to help automate, manage, and monitor data protection for customers. We believe AWS Backup will also provide customers greater operational efficiency, allowing us to simplify the process for supporting our customers' auditing and compliance requirements."

<p><em>Centralized backup service makes it easier and more cost-effective for customers to automate backups of their data and meet business and regulatory requirements</em></p><p><em>State Street Corporation, Smile Brands, and Rackspace among companies using AWS Backup</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 16, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced AWS Backup, a fully-managed, centralized backup service that makes it faster and simpler for customers to back up their data across AWS services and on-premises, helping customers more easily meet their business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. AWS Backup makes protecting storage volumes, databases, and file systems easier by giving customers a single service to configure and audit the AWS resources they backup, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor recent backups and restores in one place. To get started with AWS Backup visit: aws.amazon.com/backup.</p><p>As enterprises move more and more applications to the cloud, their data can become distributed across multiple services, including databases, block storage, object storage, and file systems. While these services in AWS provide backup capabilities, customers often create custom scripts to automate scheduling, enforce retention policies, and consolidate backup activity across several services in order to better meet their business and regulatory compliance requirements. AWS Backup removes the need for custom solutions or manual processes by providing a centralized place to manage backups across AWS. With just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can create a policy that defines how frequently backups are created and how long they are stored. Customers can then assign these policies to their AWS resources, and AWS Backup automatically handles the rest by automatically scheduling backup actions for the assigned AWS resources, orchestrating across AWS services, and managing their retention period.</p><p>"As the cloud has become the default choice for customers of all sizes, it has attracted two distinct types of builders. Some are tinkerers who want to tweak and fine tune the full range of AWS services into a desired architecture, and other builders are drawn to the same breadth and depth of functionality in AWS, but are willing to trade some of the service granularity to start at a higher abstraction layer, so they can build even faster," said Bill Vass, VP of Storage, Automation, and Management Services, AWS. "We designed AWS Backup for this second type of builder who has told us that they want one place to go for backups versus having to do it across multiple, individual services. Today, we are proud to make AWS Backup available with support for block storage volumes, databases, and file systems, and over time, we plan to support additional AWS services."</p><p>Initially, AWS Backup is integrated with Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and AWS Storage Gateway, with support for additional services planned for the future. Customers can also back up on-premises application data through the AWS Backup integration with AWS Storage Gateway, providing a common way to protect their on-premises data in the AWS cloud.</p><p>State Street Corporation is the world's leading provider of financial services to institutional investors including investment servicing, investment management and investment research, and trading. "We operate in the financial services industry and must provide data storage solutions that ensure the integrity and availability of backup data as stipulated by the FFIEC IT examination handbook," says Nauman Noor, Managing Director, State Street Corporation. "Meeting these regulations requires us to develop and maintain an internal serverless application to enable timely and auditable backups across the AWS services we use. With AWS Backup's centralized backup console, we will have a single pane of glass to audit our backup processes across our AWS environment, mitigating the need for custom applications and thus, easing our effort to aid data integrity and availability. The ability to set backup policies for automated backup scheduling and backup retention provides us flexibility to address the needs for varying levels of criticality in a cost effective and consistent manner."</p><p>Smile Brands is a leading dental support organization that provides business support services to over 400 locations across 17 states. "We manage thousands of AWS resources, such as storage volumes and databases, and all of them must meet compliance according to HIPAA backup requirements," says George Suda, Senior VP and Chief Information Officer, Smile Brands. "Ensuring that all our AWS workloads are properly backed up can require manual processes and custom scripts. With AWS Backup's centralized backup console, we will be able to define a backup policy that meets our compliance requirements and apply the same policy to all our AWS resources across the various AWS services that we use. AWS Backup will automatically handle the backup processes on our behalf, providing a full-managed and cost-effective solution that removes the need for manual processes or custom scripts."</p><p>Rackspace delivers modern IT as a service, helping customers in more than 150 countries drive business results with technology. "Rackspace is focused on delivering next generation cloud services to help our customers meet their data protection and regulatory compliance needs," said Prashanth Chandrasekar, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Managed Public Clouds at Rackspace. "With AWS Backup, we now have access to a cloud-scale, centralized backup solution to help automate, manage, and monitor data protection for customers. We believe AWS Backup will also provide customers greater operational efficiency, allowing us to simplify the process for supporting our customers' auditing and compliance requirements."</p>

Choice Hotels Goes All-In on AWS

/news/news-details/2019/Choice-Hotels-Goes-All-In-on-AWS/default.aspx

Choice-Hotels-Goes-All-In-on-AWS

01/14/2019 09:00:00

Choice Hotels Goes All-In on AWS

01/14/2019

2019

Leading hospitality company migrates to AWS to enhance company's leadership in innovation using the broadest and deepest portfolio of cloud services SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 14, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Choice Hotels International, Inc. (NYSE: CHH) is moving its infrastructure to AWS—going all-in on the world's leading cloud—to boost its technology leadership position in the hotel industry. Choice Hotels, which develops some of its own technology, will migrate over 1,000 applications to AWS, moving off legacy systems to help improve performance, scalability, and reliability. As Choice Hotels continues to expand its international footprint, the hospitality leader will be able to deploy new cloud-based systems globally in minutes for stronger regional performance, availability, and fault tolerance to help create more value for its franchisees and guests. AWS is already home to some of Choice Hotels' primary business applications, including its global reservation system (GRS) and distribution platform, property-management system, and data analytics platform. Choice Hotels has teamed with the Amazon ML Solutions Lab to identify uses for machine learning across its businesses, and guide its teams in the development of new machine learning-enabled features, products, and processes. By leveraging AWS machine learning and analytics services, Choice Hotels will be able to provide more personalized experiences for its customers, use trend analysis paired with data analytics to identify systems issues, and interpret and resolve those issues without human intervention. "Choice Hotels is an established leader in innovation, and the migration of the company's infrastructure to AWS will help build upon Choice's legacy of technology innovations and industry firsts. Choice began working with AWS in 2014. Shortly after, we embarked on the largest IT project in the company's history to replace our central reservation system and distribution platform with a new cloud-based global solution – choiceEDGE, the industry's first new GRS from a hotel company in over 30 years. We have continued to expand our strategic relationship with AWS ever since," said Brian Kirkland, Chief Technology Officer at Choice Hotels. "We closely evaluated several public cloud providers and found that AWS was the best fit for our cloud-first approach, delivering the broadest and deepest portfolio of cloud services, and innovating at a faster pace than the rest of the industry. With AWS, we will also be able to leverage the industry's leading machine learning and analytics services to fuel real-time decision-making across our business and transform the way that we deliver our services to franchisees and customers." "As consumer behavior evolves, the hospitality industry is changing rapidly, and customers are pushing an unprecedented volume of room and service requests through digital channels, which is driving leaders to turn to the cloud to transform their customer engagement, service, and business models," said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. "Choice Hotels was the first hotel company to create their own cloud-based reservation system on AWS for more than 6,900 hotels worldwide, exceeding performance requirements and lowering costs. This gave the Choice Hotels leadership team the confidence to move forward with new initiatives, and go all-in on AWS. We are excited to expand our strategic relationship as we work with Choice to embed machine learning and analytics across their business."

<p><em>Leading hospitality company migrates to AWS to enhance company's leadership in innovation using the broadest and deepest portfolio of cloud services</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 14, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Choice Hotels International, Inc. (NYSE: CHH) is moving its infrastructure to AWS—going all-in on the world's leading cloud—to boost its technology leadership position in the hotel industry. Choice Hotels, which develops some of its own technology, will migrate over 1,000 applications to AWS, moving off legacy systems to help improve performance, scalability, and reliability. As Choice Hotels continues to expand its international footprint, the hospitality leader will be able to deploy new cloud-based systems globally in minutes for stronger regional performance, availability, and fault tolerance to help create more value for its franchisees and guests.</p><p>AWS is already home to some of Choice Hotels' primary business applications, including its global reservation system (GRS) and distribution platform, property-management system, and data analytics platform. Choice Hotels has teamed with the Amazon ML Solutions Lab to identify uses for machine learning across its businesses, and guide its teams in the development of new machine learning-enabled features, products, and processes. By leveraging AWS machine learning and analytics services, Choice Hotels will be able to provide more personalized experiences for its customers, use trend analysis paired with data analytics to identify systems issues, and interpret and resolve those issues without human intervention.</p><p>"Choice Hotels is an established leader in innovation, and the migration of the company's infrastructure to AWS will help build upon Choice's legacy of technology innovations and industry firsts. Choice began working with AWS in 2014. Shortly after, we embarked on the largest IT project in the company's history to replace our central reservation system and distribution platform with a new cloud-based global solution – choiceEDGE, the industry's first new GRS from a hotel company in over 30 years. We have continued to expand our strategic relationship with AWS ever since," said Brian Kirkland, Chief Technology Officer at Choice Hotels. "We closely evaluated several public cloud providers and found that AWS was the best fit for our cloud-first approach, delivering the broadest and deepest portfolio of cloud services, and innovating at a faster pace than the rest of the industry. With AWS, we will also be able to leverage the industry's leading machine learning and analytics services to fuel real-time decision-making across our business and transform the way that we deliver our services to franchisees and customers."</p><p>"As consumer behavior evolves, the hospitality industry is changing rapidly, and customers are pushing an unprecedented volume of room and service requests through digital channels, which is driving leaders to turn to the cloud to transform their customer engagement, service, and business models," said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. "Choice Hotels was the first hotel company to create their own cloud-based reservation system on AWS for more than 6,900 hotels worldwide, exceeding performance requirements and lowering costs. This gave the Choice Hotels leadership team the confidence to move forward with new initiatives, and go all-in on AWS. We are excited to expand our strategic relationship as we work with Choice to embed machine learning and analytics across their business."</p>

AWS Announces Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB Compatibility)

/news/news-details/2019/AWS-Announces-Amazon-DocumentDB-with-MongoDB-Compatibility/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-Amazon-DocumentDB-with-MongoDB-Compatibility

01/09/2019 17:38:00

AWS Announces Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB Compatibility)

01/09/2019

2019

Fully managed MongoDB compatible database service designed from the ground up to be fast, scalable, and highly available Capital One, Dow Jones, and The Washington Post among initial customers using Amazon DocumentDB SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 9, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility), a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. Developers can use the same MongoDB application code, drivers, and tools as they do today to run, manage, and scale workloads on Amazon DocumentDB and enjoy improved performance, scalability, and availability without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure. Customers can easily migrate their on-premises or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) MongoDB databases to Amazon DocumentDB with virtually no downtime using the AWS Database Migration Service (DMS). There are no up-front investments required to use Amazon DocumentDB, and customers only pay for the capacity they use. To get started with Amazon DocumentDB, visit https://aws.amazon.com/documentdb. AWS customers use MongoDB as a document database to store, retrieve, and manage semi-structured data. Customers like using the MongoDB Application Programming Interface (API) and expressive language query to help them quickly build and evolve applications, but they often only take advantage of a fraction of the functionality the API offers. Customers also find it challenging to build performant, highly available applications on MongoDB that can quickly scale to multiple Terabytes (TBs) and hundreds of thousands of reads and writes-per-second because of the complexity that comes with setting up and managing MongoDB clusters. As a result, customers spend a lot of time and expense managing MongoDB clusters at scale, including dealing with the undifferentiated heavy lifting of securing, patching, and operating MongoDB. Just like on-premises deployments, managed MongoDB systems face data replication challenges and they suffer from long recovery times in the event of failure. As a result, customers are struggling to get the performance, scalability, and availability their growing applications need over time. Amazon DocumentDB is designed from the ground up to give customers the performance, scalability, and availability they need when operating mission-critical MongoDB workloads at scale. Amazon DocumentDB implements the Apache 2.0 open source MongoDB 3.6 API by emulating the responses that a MongoDB client expects from a MongoDB server, allowing customers to use their existing MongoDB drivers and tools with Amazon DocumentDB. Amazon DocumentDB uses a unique, distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that automatically scales up to 64 TB of data per cluster, so customers can save time and money by not having to worry about capacity planning or over provisioning storage infrastructure. Amazon DocumentDB reduces database I/O by writing only database changes to the storage layer, avoiding slow, inefficient, and expensive data replication across network links. Together with optimizations like advanced query processing, connection pooling, and optimized recovery and rebuild, Amazon DocumentDB achieves twice the throughput of currently available MongoDB solutions. Additionally, with Amazon DocumentDB's architecture, the storage and compute are decoupled, allowing each to scale independently, and developers can increase the read capacity to millions of requests per second by adding up to 15 low latency read replicas in minutes, regardless of data size. Amazon DocumentDB is designed for 99.99% availability by using the AWS multi-Availability Zone (AZ) technology and replicating six copies of a customer's data across three AWS Availability Zones (AZs). Amazon DocumentDB's architecture also allows customers to save money when running MongoDB databases as customers can get started with one instance for durability and only requires a second instance for high availability. "While other companies have taken the same emulation approach we have to providing a MongoDB compatible service, nobody has built the unique, distributed, fault-tolerant, highly scalable, self-healing storage system that AWS has to work seamlessly with MongoDB," said Shawn Bice, Vice President, Non-Relational Databases at AWS. "To meet developers' needs, we looked at multiple different approaches to supporting MongoDB workloads and concluded that the best way to improve the customer experience was to build a new purpose-built document database from the ground up, while supporting the same MongoDB APIs that our customers currently use and like. This effort took more than two years of development, and we're excited to make this available to our customers today." Amazon DocumentDB automatically and continuously backs up data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and provides up to 35 days of point-in-time recovery with no downtime or performance degradation. Amazon DocumentDB supports network isolation using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), encryption-at-rest using keys customers create and control through AWS Key Management Service (KMS), and encryption-in-transit using Transport Layer Security (TLS). To get started, customers can provision their Amazon DocumentDB clusters with a few simple clicks in the AWS Management Console or with the AWS Command Line Interface and launch their MongoDB-compatible database in minutes. Amazon DocumentDB is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland), and will expand to additional AWS Regions in the coming year. Capital One, a leading information-based technology company and digital banking leader, has taken a cloud-first approach to software development. "Our developers love the document model as it enables them to move fast and iterate quickly when building applications," said Sunjay Pandey, Vice President, Capital One. "Amazon DocumentDB integrates deeply with AWS services and provides us with a robust, highly scalable, and cost effective database service that meets our operational requirements. With Amazon DocumentDB, our developers will be able to move faster and focus more on innovating on behalf of our customers versus managing a database." Dow Jones publishes some of the world's most trusted, breaking, and exclusive business news and financial information in a variety of media, including the Dow Jones Industrial Average and related statistics and the Dow Jones Newswire. "Dow Jones uses a number of specialized databases including MongoDB to provide a variety of services for our customers," said Ramin Beheshti, Chief Product & Technology Officer. "We are excited about collaborating with AWS around Amazon DocumentDB, which meets key needs we expressed to AWS in order to simplify our operations and free up our developers to invest in innovative experiences for our customers rather than undifferentiated operations." The Washington Post is one of the leading national and global news organizations reaching more than 90 million readers a month. "To provide our readers with the best possible experience, The Washington Post engineering team leverages AWS database services because they offer self-service provisioning without compromising operational excellence," said Patrick Cullen, Director of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at The Washington Post. "From automated backup to multi-AZ failover, Amazon DocumentDB provides all the key APIs and features we need to build the world class systems that power both our Arc Publishing business and our machine learning platform. Document databases support the unstructured data that is prevalent in media, and with Amazon DocumentDB, we can now leverage AWS for all our critical database needs." Hudl provides coaches, athletes, and analysts the tools to study and improve performance through video and stats. "At Hudl, we utilize a significant amount of AWS services, as we're always looking for opportunities to get out of the business of managing our own infrastructure," said Brian Kaiser, CTO at Hudl. "Our developers love the MongoDB API and document model. We're very excited about the launch of Amazon DocumentDB, as it fits perfectly into our short-term and long-term architectural plans. Amazon DocumentDB has the capabilities we're looking for, and it's great to see Amazon DMS support from day one."

<p><em>Fully managed MongoDB compatible database service designed from the ground up to be fast, scalable, and highly available</em></p><p><em>Capital One, Dow Jones, and The Washington Post among initial customers using Amazon DocumentDB</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 9, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility), a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. Developers can use the same MongoDB application code, drivers, and tools as they do today to run, manage, and scale workloads on Amazon DocumentDB and enjoy improved performance, scalability, and availability without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure. Customers can easily migrate their on-premises or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) MongoDB databases to Amazon DocumentDB with virtually no downtime using the AWS Database Migration Service (DMS). There are no up-front investments required to use Amazon DocumentDB, and customers only pay for the capacity they use. To get started with Amazon DocumentDB, visit https://aws.amazon.com/documentdb.</p><p>AWS customers use MongoDB as a document database to store, retrieve, and manage semi-structured data. Customers like using the MongoDB Application Programming Interface (API) and expressive language query to help them quickly build and evolve applications, but they often only take advantage of a fraction of the functionality the API offers. Customers also find it challenging to build performant, highly available applications on MongoDB that can quickly scale to multiple Terabytes (TBs) and hundreds of thousands of reads and writes-per-second because of the complexity that comes with setting up and managing MongoDB clusters. As a result, customers spend a lot of time and expense managing MongoDB clusters at scale, including dealing with the undifferentiated heavy lifting of securing, patching, and operating MongoDB. Just like on-premises deployments, managed MongoDB systems face data replication challenges and they suffer from long recovery times in the event of failure. As a result, customers are struggling to get the performance, scalability, and availability their growing applications need over time.</p><p>Amazon DocumentDB is designed from the ground up to give customers the performance, scalability, and availability they need when operating mission-critical MongoDB workloads at scale. Amazon DocumentDB implements the Apache 2.0 open source MongoDB 3.6 API by emulating the responses that a MongoDB client expects from a MongoDB server, allowing customers to use their existing MongoDB drivers and tools with Amazon DocumentDB. Amazon DocumentDB uses a unique, distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that automatically scales up to 64 TB of data per cluster, so customers can save time and money by not having to worry about capacity planning or over provisioning storage infrastructure. Amazon DocumentDB reduces database I/O by writing only database changes to the storage layer, avoiding slow, inefficient, and expensive data replication across network links. Together with optimizations like advanced query processing, connection pooling, and optimized recovery and rebuild, Amazon DocumentDB achieves twice the throughput of currently available MongoDB solutions. Additionally, with Amazon DocumentDB's architecture, the storage and compute are decoupled, allowing each to scale independently, and developers can increase the read capacity to millions of requests per second by adding up to 15 low latency read replicas in minutes, regardless of data size. Amazon DocumentDB is designed for 99.99% availability by using the AWS multi-Availability Zone (AZ) technology and replicating six copies of a customer's data across three AWS Availability Zones (AZs). Amazon DocumentDB's architecture also allows customers to save money when running MongoDB databases as customers can get started with one instance for durability and only requires a second instance for high availability.</p><p>"While other companies have taken the same emulation approach we have to providing a MongoDB compatible service, nobody has built the unique, distributed, fault-tolerant, highly scalable, self-healing storage system that AWS has to work seamlessly with MongoDB," said Shawn Bice, Vice President, Non-Relational Databases at AWS. "To meet developers' needs, we looked at multiple different approaches to supporting MongoDB workloads and concluded that the best way to improve the customer experience was to build a new purpose-built document database from the ground up, while supporting the same MongoDB APIs that our customers currently use and like. This effort took more than two years of development, and we're excited to make this available to our customers today."</p><p>Amazon DocumentDB automatically and continuously backs up data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and provides up to 35 days of point-in-time recovery with no downtime or performance degradation. Amazon DocumentDB supports network isolation using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), encryption-at-rest using keys customers create and control through AWS Key Management Service (KMS), and encryption-in-transit using Transport Layer Security (TLS). To get started, customers can provision their Amazon DocumentDB clusters with a few simple clicks in the AWS Management Console or with the AWS Command Line Interface and launch their MongoDB-compatible database in minutes. Amazon DocumentDB is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland), and will expand to additional AWS Regions in the coming year.</p><p>Capital One, a leading information-based technology company and digital banking leader, has taken a cloud-first approach to software development. "Our developers love the document model as it enables them to move fast and iterate quickly when building applications," said Sunjay Pandey, Vice President, Capital One. "Amazon DocumentDB integrates deeply with AWS services and provides us with a robust, highly scalable, and cost effective database service that meets our operational requirements. With Amazon DocumentDB, our developers will be able to move faster and focus more on innovating on behalf of our customers versus managing a database."</p><p>Dow Jones publishes some of the world's most trusted, breaking, and exclusive business news and financial information in a variety of media, including the Dow Jones Industrial Average and related statistics and the Dow Jones Newswire. "Dow Jones uses a number of specialized databases including MongoDB to provide a variety of services for our customers," said Ramin Beheshti, Chief Product &amp; Technology Officer. "We are excited about collaborating with AWS around Amazon DocumentDB, which meets key needs we expressed to AWS in order to simplify our operations and free up our developers to invest in innovative experiences for our customers rather than undifferentiated operations."</p><p>The Washington Post is one of the leading national and global news organizations reaching more than 90 million readers a month. "To provide our readers with the best possible experience, The Washington Post engineering team leverages AWS database services because they offer self-service provisioning without compromising operational excellence," said Patrick Cullen, Director of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at The Washington Post. "From automated backup to multi-AZ failover, Amazon DocumentDB provides all the key APIs and features we need to build the world class systems that power both our Arc Publishing business and our machine learning platform. Document databases support the unstructured data that is prevalent in media, and with Amazon DocumentDB, we can now leverage AWS for all our critical database needs."</p><p>Hudl provides coaches, athletes, and analysts the tools to study and improve performance through video and stats. "At Hudl, we utilize a significant amount of AWS services, as we're always looking for opportunities to get out of the business of managing our own infrastructure," said Brian Kaiser, CTO at Hudl. "Our developers love the MongoDB API and document model. We're very excited about the launch of Amazon DocumentDB, as it fits perfectly into our short-term and long-term architectural plans. Amazon DocumentDB has the capabilities we're looking for, and it's great to see Amazon DMS support from day one."</p>

Key by Amazon Introduces New Products and Services to Expand Its Secure, Convenient Keyless Entry Offerings for Customers

/news/news-details/2019/Key-by-Amazon-Introduces-New-Products-and-Services-to-Expand-Its-Secure-Convenient-Keyless-Entry-Offerings-for-Customers/default.aspx

Key-by-Amazon-Introduces-New-Products-and-Services-to-Expand-Its-Secure-Convenient-Keyless-Entry-Offerings-for-Customers

01/07/2019 13:42:00

Key by Amazon Introduces New Products and Services to Expand Its Secure, Convenient Keyless Entry Offerings for Customers

01/07/2019

2019

Introducing the all-new Schlage Encode Smart Wi-Fi Deadbolt, the first WiFi-enabled smart lock for Key making keyless entry simple and easy Key for Garage opens a new delivery option for Prime members and keyless entry for all U.S. customers with a myQ-connected garage door opener Ring app compatibility with Key service; customers can soon lock and unlock their Key-compatible locks directly from the Ring app Introducing Key for Business, a smart fob for drivers delivering Amazon packages to commercial and residential properties SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 7, 2019-- (NASDAQ: AMZN)—Amazon today announced new products, features and services supporting Key by Amazon, which puts security, convenience, and control in the hands of customers to offer one common benefit that everyone can enjoy—the magic of being key-free. New offerings include the all-new Schlage Encode Smart Wi-Fi Deadbolt, the first WiFi-enabled smart lock for Key; Key for Garage with Chamberlin Group (CGI); compatibility with the Ring app for access control; and Key for Business, a smart fob for drivers delivering Amazon packages to commercial and residential properties. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190107005925/en/ Key for Garage is the newest part of Key by Amazon (Photo: Business Wire) "For the past year, we've been thrilled to see how customers have benefited from Key by Amazon. We started with the idea of in-home package delivery and quickly learned that our customers found peace of mind and delight from the control Key gives them over their most important place—their homes—even when they aren't there themselves," said Rohit Shrivastava, GM of Key by Amazon. "Key puts security, convenience, and control in the hands of our customers and we are excited to expand Key and open up more possibilities for them." Open for Convenience The Schlage Encode Smart WiFi Deadbolt is the first WiFi-enabled smart lock for Key, offering an innovative, easy-to-use option for any customer who wants to experience the magic of a keyless life without any additional hub or hardware. It will make managing access for renters, letting the dog walker in while you're at work, sending a delivery to your elderly parent's house, and so much more incredibly simple; all you need is WiFi and the Key app to install and start managing comings and goings, no matter where you are. Read more about the Schlage Encode Smart WiFi Deadbolt here. "Even with all the advancements in the category, we recognized there was still a gap in simple, secure, high performance and cost-effective, all-in-one access solutions," said Lee Odess, Vice President, Solutions Providers Business at Allegion, maker of Schlage locks. "Schlage Encode was designed to provide homeowners with one trusted device—no gateway or hub needed—that could make keyless entry simpler and more convenient than ever before." Open for Ease Key for Garage will allow any customer to monitor and control their garage door via the Key app. Also, in addition to receiving deliveries at home and in your car, eligible Amazon Prime members will soon be able to get deliveries in their garage. Key for Garage is made possible by integrating Key with CGI's proprietary myQ-connected technology. Read more about Key for Garage here. "A self-contained extension of the home, the garage offers a convenient destination for delivery hurdles such as potential theft and missed deliveries. We are proud to collaborate with Amazon on this game-changing in-garage delivery initiative," said Jeff Meredith, CGI President and Chief Operating Officer. "Our leadership in garage access control and superior network of retailers and installing dealers, combined with Amazon's innovation, means Prime members now have a new secure delivery option for all of their purchases, and all customers can enjoy complete control over their garage, one of the home's primary access points." Open for Ring Ring customers will be able to lock and unlock their Key-compatible smart locks directly from the live feed of their camera in the Ring app. For example, when your dog sitter arrives, you can pull up the live feed using your Ring Video Doorbell, verify it's your sitter, and unlock your Yale, Kwikset, or Schlage lock with the push of a button right in the Ring app. "Giving customers the ability to lock and unlock their Key-compatible locks directly from the Ring app is a no-brainer," said Jamie Siminoff, Chief Inventor and Founder of Ring. "Ring's customers already regularly use two-way talk on Ring devices to scare off would-be thieves or other bad actors. With the integration of Key, they'll also be able to use the Ring app to open the door to neighbors, family, and service providers they do want coming and going, no matter where they are." Open for Business Key for Business is a smart fob for drivers delivering Amazon packages to commercial and residential properties. The technology allows building owners and managers to give controlled access to delivery drivers to drop off Amazon packages to their residents, and eliminate the need for building staff to manually give access each time deliveries are made. Through Key for Business, building staff can monitor driver entries, and manage delivery hours, freeing them up to focus on their real priority: the building residents. Key for Business works with most building access systems and is currently available to hundreds of buildings across the country, including apartment properties owned by WinnCompanies, Avalon, Kettler, and more. "Our residents order a high volume of packages from Amazon, requiring frequent access by delivery drivers to our communities," said Karen Hollinger, Vice President at AvalonBay Communities, Inc. "To help ensure that packages aren't ever delayed in reaching our residents, we've enabled the Key for Business technology at key doors and gates. This reduces work for our associates and provides a more secure digital verification of driver activity." Pricing and Availability The Schlage Encode Smart Wi-Fi Deadbolt is available for pre-order now for $249.99 or $299.99 when bundled with an Amazon Cloud Cam. It will begin shipping to U.S. customers on March 5. Click here to learn more. Key for Garage will be available in the US in Q2 2019. Visit amazon.com/keyforgarage to learn more and sign up for email updates. Ring customers will be able to lock and unlock Key-compatible smart locks via the Ring app in Q1 2019. Key for Business is available now to residential and commercial buildings. Visit amazon.com/keyforbusiness to learn more. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190107005925/en/ Source: Amazon.com, Inc. Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr

<p><em>Introducing the all-new Schlage Encode Smart Wi-Fi Deadbolt, the first WiFi-enabled smart lock for Key making keyless entry simple and easy</em></p><p><em>Key for Garage opens a new delivery option for Prime members and keyless entry for all U.S. customers with a myQ-connected garage door opener</em></p><p><em>Ring app compatibility with Key service; customers can soon lock and unlock their Key-compatible locks directly from the Ring app</em></p><p><em>Introducing Key for Business, a smart fob for drivers delivering Amazon packages to commercial and residential properties</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 7, 2019-- (NASDAQ: AMZN)—Amazon today announced new products, features and services supporting Key by Amazon, which puts security, convenience, and control in the hands of customers to offer one common benefit that everyone can enjoy—the magic of being key-free. New offerings include the all-new Schlage Encode Smart Wi-Fi Deadbolt, the first WiFi-enabled smart lock for Key; Key for Garage with Chamberlin Group (CGI); compatibility with the Ring app for access control; and Key for Business, a smart fob for drivers delivering Amazon packages to commercial and residential properties.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190107005925/en/</p><div><p>Key for Garage is the newest part of Key by Amazon (Photo: Business Wire)</p></div><p>"For the past year, we've been thrilled to see how customers have benefited from Key by Amazon. We started with the idea of in-home package delivery and quickly learned that our customers found peace of mind and delight from the control Key gives them over their most important place—their homes—even when they aren't there themselves," said Rohit Shrivastava, GM of Key by Amazon. "Key puts security, convenience, and control in the hands of our customers and we are excited to expand Key and open up more possibilities for them."</p><p>Open for Convenience</p><p>The Schlage Encode Smart WiFi Deadbolt is the first WiFi-enabled smart lock for Key, offering an innovative, easy-to-use option for any customer who wants to experience the magic of a keyless life without any additional hub or hardware. It will make managing access for renters, letting the dog walker in while you're at work, sending a delivery to your elderly parent's house, and so much more incredibly simple; all you need is WiFi and the Key app to install and start managing comings and goings, no matter where you are. Read more about the Schlage Encode Smart WiFi Deadbolt here.</p><p>"Even with all the advancements in the category, we recognized there was still a gap in simple, secure, high performance and cost-effective, all-in-one access solutions," said Lee Odess, Vice President, Solutions Providers Business at Allegion, maker of Schlage locks. "Schlage Encode was designed to provide homeowners with one trusted device—no gateway or hub needed—that could make keyless entry simpler and more convenient than ever before."</p><p>Open for Ease</p><p>Key for Garage will allow any customer to monitor and control their garage door via the Key app. Also, in addition to receiving deliveries at home and in your car, eligible Amazon Prime members will soon be able to get deliveries in their garage. Key for Garage is made possible by integrating Key with CGI's proprietary myQ-connected technology. Read more about Key for Garage here.</p><p>"A self-contained extension of the home, the garage offers a convenient destination for delivery hurdles such as potential theft and missed deliveries. We are proud to collaborate with Amazon on this game-changing in-garage delivery initiative," said Jeff Meredith, CGI President and Chief Operating Officer. "Our leadership in garage access control and superior network of retailers and installing dealers, combined with Amazon's innovation, means Prime members now have a new secure delivery option for all of their purchases, and all customers can enjoy complete control over their garage, one of the home's primary access points."</p><p>Open for Ring</p><p>Ring customers will be able to lock and unlock their Key-compatible smart locks directly from the live feed of their camera in the Ring app. For example, when your dog sitter arrives, you can pull up the live feed using your Ring Video Doorbell, verify it's your sitter, and unlock your Yale, Kwikset, or Schlage lock with the push of a button right in the Ring app.</p><p>"Giving customers the ability to lock and unlock their Key-compatible locks directly from the Ring app is a no-brainer," said Jamie Siminoff, Chief Inventor and Founder of Ring. "Ring's customers already regularly use two-way talk on Ring devices to scare off would-be thieves or other bad actors. With the integration of Key, they'll also be able to use the Ring app to open the door to neighbors, family, and service providers they do want coming and going, no matter where they are."</p><p>Open for Business</p><p>Key for Business is a smart fob for drivers delivering Amazon packages to commercial and residential properties. The technology allows building owners and managers to give controlled access to delivery drivers to drop off Amazon packages to their residents, and eliminate the need for building staff to manually give access each time deliveries are made. Through Key for Business, building staff can monitor driver entries, and manage delivery hours, freeing them up to focus on their real priority: the building residents. Key for Business works with most building access systems and is currently available to hundreds of buildings across the country, including apartment properties owned by WinnCompanies, Avalon, Kettler, and more.</p><p>"Our residents order a high volume of packages from Amazon, requiring frequent access by delivery drivers to our communities," said Karen Hollinger, Vice President at AvalonBay Communities, Inc. "To help ensure that packages aren't ever delayed in reaching our residents, we've enabled the Key for Business technology at key doors and gates. This reduces work for our associates and provides a more secure digital verification of driver activity."</p><p>Pricing and Availability</p><p>The Schlage Encode Smart Wi-Fi Deadbolt is available for pre-order now for $249.99 or $299.99 when bundled with an Amazon Cloud Cam. It will begin shipping to U.S. customers on March 5. Click here to learn more. Key for Garage will be available in the US in Q2 2019. Visit amazon.com/keyforgarage to learn more and sign up for email updates. Ring customers will be able to lock and unlock Key-compatible smart locks via the Ring app in Q1 2019. Key for Business is available now to residential and commercial buildings. Visit amazon.com/keyforbusiness to learn more.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190107005925/en/</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p>

Amazon Announces First Fulfillment Center in Louisiana

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Announces-First-Fulfillment-Center-in-Louisiana/default.aspx

Amazon-Announces-First-Fulfillment-Center-in-Louisiana

12/22/2020 12:45:00

Amazon Announces First Fulfillment Center in Louisiana

12/22/2020

2020

New one million square-foot site to create over 500 new, full-time jobs SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 22, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced plans to open its first fulfillment center in the state of Louisiana in Carencro. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201222005551/en/ Amazon's new one million square-foot site in Carencro, Louisiana (Photo: Business Wire) The new fulfillment center, which is anticipated to launch in 2021, will create over 500 new, full-time jobs with industry-leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on the first day on the job for employees. In the new one million square-foot fulfillment center, Amazon associates will pick, pack, and ship bulky or larger-sized customer items such as patio furniture, outdoor equipment, or rugs. Amazon is a great place to work with highly competitive pay, benefits from day one, and training programs for in-demand jobs. On top of Amazon's industry-leading minimum starting wage of $15 per hour, full-time employees receive comprehensive benefits, including full medical, vision and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) with 50 percent company match, starting on day one. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families. Amazon is committed to the long-term development of its employees. The company's employees have access to innovative programs like Career Choice, where Amazon will pay up to 95 percent of tuition for courses related to in-demand fields, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at Amazon. Since the program's launch, more than 25,000 employees across the globe have pursued degrees in a range of fields, including game design and visual communications, nursing, IT programming and radiology. Key Quotes Alicia Boler Davis, Vice President of Global Customer Fulfillment at Amazon"We are thrilled to be opening our first fulfillment center in the great state of Louisiana. We are grateful for the strong support we've received from local and state leaders as we expand our footprint in Louisiana. Every day at Amazon, incredible employees come together to deliver magical experiences for customers and we look forward to creating over 500 new, full-time jobs for the local community, with industry-leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one." Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards"You don't become the world's largest online retailer without making a series of well-reasoned strategic investments, and Amazon's selection of Carencro for its new fulfillment center is a testament to this. This one million-square-foot fulfillment center will not only prove to be a tremendous asset for all of Louisiana, but the project also will result in more than 500 new, full-time jobs in Acadiana and surrounding regions. I am proud to welcome this new Amazon fulfillment center to Louisiana, and I look forward to their continued investment in our great state." Mayor Glenn Brasseaux of Carencro"Carencro is extremely honored and equally blessed to have been chosen for Amazon's first Louisiana-based fulfillment center. The economic impact of this facility cannot be overstated in terms of capital investment, job creation with respectable wages and benefits, and the increased interest in residential housing development." Mayor-President Josh Guillory of Lafayette"I'm so thankful to Mayor Brasseaux, LEDA, Amazon and all of the others who were involved in making this extraordinary project possible. Anytime we can bring business and jobs to Lafayette Parish, everyone wins. We have all worked hard and will continue to put every resource forward to attract more businesses like this one to Lafayette." President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux of the Lafayette Economic Development Authority"Today's announcement is a big win for Carencro, Lafayette Parish and our Acadiana people. Amazon's decision to locate Louisiana's first fulfillment center here validates that our community is attractive to companies across sectors because of our work ethic, creativity and pro-business attitude. As our economy continues to recover from impacts of the pandemic and the energy downturn, this project highlights the importance of our diversification efforts to help stabilize the region's economy." Amazon in Louisiana: From 2010-2019, Amazon has invested more than $250 million in Louisiana, including infrastructure and compensation to employees in the state. Amazon's investments in the state contributed an additional more than $220 million into the state's economy over that same time period. Using methodology developed by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Amazon estimates its investments have created an additional 750+ indirect jobs on top of the company's current 1,500+ full- and part-time direct hires. Amazon currently operates three delivery stations and seven Whole Foods Market locations in Louisiana. Amazon's worldwide fulfillment network supports businesses of all sizes through its Fulfillment by Amazon offering, and many of those local businesses are based in Louisiana. There are more than 14,500 independent authors and small and medium-sized businesses in the state growing their businesses and reaching new customers with Amazon. Additional Resources: See an Amazon Fulfillment Center In Action Amazon Job Creation and Investment U.S. Louisiana Investment Map About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/ and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201222005551/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>New one million square-foot site to create over 500 new, full-time jobs</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 22, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced plans to open its first fulfillment center in the state of Louisiana in Carencro.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201222005551/en/</p><div><p>Amazon's new one million square-foot site in Carencro, Louisiana (Photo: Business Wire)</p></div><p>The new fulfillment center, which is anticipated to launch in 2021, will create over 500 new, full-time jobs with industry-leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on the first day on the job for employees. In the new one million square-foot fulfillment center, Amazon associates will pick, pack, and ship bulky or larger-sized customer items such as patio furniture, outdoor equipment, or rugs.</p><p>Amazon is a great place to work with highly competitive pay, benefits from day one, and training programs for in-demand jobs. On top of Amazon's industry-leading minimum starting wage of $15 per hour, full-time employees receive comprehensive benefits, including full medical, vision and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) with 50 percent company match, starting on day one. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families.</p><p>Amazon is committed to the long-term development of its employees. The company's employees have access to innovative programs like Career Choice, where Amazon will pay up to 95 percent of tuition for courses related to in-demand fields, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at Amazon. Since the program's launch, more than 25,000 employees across the globe have pursued degrees in a range of fields, including game design and visual communications, nursing, IT programming and radiology.</p><p>Key Quotes</p><p>Alicia Boler Davis, Vice President of Global Customer Fulfillment at Amazon"We are thrilled to be opening our first fulfillment center in the great state of Louisiana. We are grateful for the strong support we've received from local and state leaders as we expand our footprint in Louisiana. Every day at Amazon, incredible employees come together to deliver magical experiences for customers and we look forward to creating over 500 new, full-time jobs for the local community, with industry-leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one."</p><p>Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards"You don't become the world's largest online retailer without making a series of well-reasoned strategic investments, and Amazon's selection of Carencro for its new fulfillment center is a testament to this. This one million-square-foot fulfillment center will not only prove to be a tremendous asset for all of Louisiana, but the project also will result in more than 500 new, full-time jobs in Acadiana and surrounding regions. I am proud to welcome this new Amazon fulfillment center to Louisiana, and I look forward to their continued investment in our great state."</p><p>Mayor Glenn Brasseaux of Carencro"Carencro is extremely honored and equally blessed to have been chosen for Amazon's first Louisiana-based fulfillment center. The economic impact of this facility cannot be overstated in terms of capital investment, job creation with respectable wages and benefits, and the increased interest in residential housing development."</p><p>Mayor-President Josh Guillory of Lafayette"I'm so thankful to Mayor Brasseaux, LEDA, Amazon and all of the others who were involved in making this extraordinary project possible. Anytime we can bring business and jobs to Lafayette Parish, everyone wins. We have all worked hard and will continue to put every resource forward to attract more businesses like this one to Lafayette."</p><p>President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux of the Lafayette Economic Development Authority"Today's announcement is a big win for Carencro, Lafayette Parish and our Acadiana people. Amazon's decision to locate Louisiana's first fulfillment center here validates that our community is attractive to companies across sectors because of our work ethic, creativity and pro-business attitude. As our economy continues to recover from impacts of the pandemic and the energy downturn, this project highlights the importance of our diversification efforts to help stabilize the region's economy."</p><p>Amazon in Louisiana:</p><ul><li>From 2010-2019, Amazon has invested more than $250 million in Louisiana, including infrastructure and compensation to employees in the state.</li><li>Amazon's investments in the state contributed an additional more than $220 million into the state's economy over that same time period.</li><li>Using methodology developed by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Amazon estimates its investments have created an additional 750+ indirect jobs on top of the company's current 1,500+ full- and part-time direct hires.</li><li>Amazon currently operates three delivery stations and seven Whole Foods Market locations in Louisiana.</li><li>Amazon's worldwide fulfillment network supports businesses of all sizes through its Fulfillment by Amazon offering, and many of those local businesses are based in Louisiana. There are more than 14,500 independent authors and small and medium-sized businesses in the state growing their businesses and reaching new customers with Amazon.</li></ul><p>Additional Resources:</p><ul><li>See an Amazon Fulfillment Center In Action</li><li>Amazon Job Creation and Investment U.S.</li><li>Louisiana Investment Map</li></ul><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/ and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201222005551/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

Amazon Announces Two New Fulfillment Centers and New Delivery Station in San Antonio, TX

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Announces-Two-New-Fulfillment-Centers-and-New-Delivery-Station-in-San-Antonio-TX/default.aspx

Amazon-Announces-Two-New-Fulfillment-Centers-and-New-Delivery-Station-in-San-Antonio-TX

12/22/2020 10:02:00

Amazon Announces Two New Fulfillment Centers and New Delivery Station in San Antonio, TX

12/22/2020

2020

New operations facilities to create over 1,500 new, full-time jobs SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 22, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) plans to open two new fulfillment centers and a new delivery station in San Antonio, Texas. The new operations facilities will together create over 1,500 new full-time jobs with industry-leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one. See Our Fulfillment Centers in Action "We're thrilled to be able to continue our growth throughout the San Antonio area," said Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon's vice president of global customer fulfillment. "Amazon is a great place to work with highly competitive pay, benefits from day one, and training programs for in-demand careers. We're grateful for the support we've received from local and state leaders and look forward to creating over 1,500 new, full-time jobs for the San Antonio community." Every day at Amazon, incredible employees come together to deliver magical experiences for customers. In the new one million square-foot fulfillment center, which is expected to launch in 2021, Amazon associates will work to pick, pack, and ship bulky or larger-sized customer items such as patio furniture, outdoor equipment, or rugs. Additionally, in the new 750,000 square-foot robotics fulfillment center, which is expected to launch in 2022, Amazon associates will work to pick, pack and ship smaller customer items such as electronics, books and toys. "The Lone Star State is proud to welcome Amazon's expansion in the San Antonio region," said Texas Governor Greg Abbott. "In what continues to be a strong partnership between Amazon and Texas, these facilities will integrate state-of-the-art robotics working alongside Amazon associates to serve customers throughout the region. We are proud that Texas' business-friendly model continues to attract innovative companies like Amazon." Amazon is also planning a new 350,000 square-foot delivery station located at 8210 Aviation Landing. Delivery stations power the last mile of Amazon's order fulfillment process. Packages are transported to delivery stations from Amazon fulfillment and sortation centers, and then loaded into vehicles for delivery to customers. The delivery station, which is expected to launch in 2021, will create hundreds of full- and part-time jobs, in addition to offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to build their own small business delivering Amazon packages, and independent contractors the flexibility to be their own boss and create their own schedule delivering for Amazon Flex. To learn more, visit www.logistics.amazon.com and https://flex.amazon.com/. "San Antonio's diverse industries, skilled workforce, and sustainable infrastructure make us resilient and we are ready to support significant growth from tech-focused companies like Amazon," said Mayor Ron Nirenberg, City of San Antonio. "We look forward to supporting Amazon as they grow and hire more than 1,500 San Antonians." On top of Amazon's industry-leading minimum $15 per hour wage, the company offers full-time employees comprehensive benefits including full medical, vision, and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) with 50 percent match starting on day one. Amazon prioritizes the safety and health of its employees and has invested millions of dollars to provide a safe workplace. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families. Amazon leverages its scale to help support local communities. Amazon has also pledged to invest over $700 million to provide upskilling training for 100,000 U.S. employees for in-demand jobs. The programs will help Amazon team members from all backgrounds access training to move into highly skilled roles across the company's corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and transportation network, or pursue career paths outside of Amazon. "We are thrilled to work closely with Amazon to support their growing presence in our region," said Jenna Saucedo-Herrera, president & CEO of the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation. "Together, these three new facilities in San Antonio will occupy more than two million sq. ft. and employ thousands of San Antonians who will work to deliver the great prime service many have come to rely on." Amazon in Texas: Since 2010, Amazon has created more than 43,000 jobs in Texas and invested more than $16.9 billion across the state, including infrastructure and compensation to its employees. Amazon's investments have contributed more than $18.8 billion in GDP to the Texas economy and have helped create over 49,000 indirect jobs on top of Amazon's direct hires – from jobs in construction and logistics to professional services. More than 116,000 independent authors and small and medium businesses in Texas are selling to customers in Amazon's store, creating thousands of additional jobs across the state. Additional Resources: See an Amazon Fulfillment Center In Action Amazon Job Creation and Investment U.S. U.S. Investment Map About Amazon: Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/ and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201222005431/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>New operations facilities to create over 1,500 new, full-time jobs</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 22, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) plans to open two new fulfillment centers and a new delivery station in San Antonio, Texas. The new operations facilities will together create over 1,500 new full-time jobs with industry-leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one.</p><p>See Our Fulfillment Centers in Action</p><p>"We're thrilled to be able to continue our growth throughout the San Antonio area," said Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon's vice president of global customer fulfillment. "Amazon is a great place to work with highly competitive pay, benefits from day one, and training programs for in-demand careers. We're grateful for the support we've received from local and state leaders and look forward to creating over 1,500 new, full-time jobs for the San Antonio community."</p><p>Every day at Amazon, incredible employees come together to deliver magical experiences for customers. In the new one million square-foot fulfillment center, which is expected to launch in 2021, Amazon associates will work to pick, pack, and ship bulky or larger-sized customer items such as patio furniture, outdoor equipment, or rugs. Additionally, in the new 750,000 square-foot robotics fulfillment center, which is expected to launch in 2022, Amazon associates will work to pick, pack and ship smaller customer items such as electronics, books and toys.</p><p>"The Lone Star State is proud to welcome Amazon's expansion in the San Antonio region," said Texas Governor Greg Abbott. "In what continues to be a strong partnership between Amazon and Texas, these facilities will integrate state-of-the-art robotics working alongside Amazon associates to serve customers throughout the region. We are proud that Texas' business-friendly model continues to attract innovative companies like Amazon."</p><p>Amazon is also planning a new 350,000 square-foot delivery station located at 8210 Aviation Landing. Delivery stations power the last mile of Amazon's order fulfillment process. Packages are transported to delivery stations from Amazon fulfillment and sortation centers, and then loaded into vehicles for delivery to customers. The delivery station, which is expected to launch in 2021, will create hundreds of full- and part-time jobs, in addition to offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to build their own small business delivering Amazon packages, and independent contractors the flexibility to be their own boss and create their own schedule delivering for Amazon Flex. To learn more, visit www.logistics.amazon.com and https://flex.amazon.com/.</p><p>"San Antonio's diverse industries, skilled workforce, and sustainable infrastructure make us resilient and we are ready to support significant growth from tech-focused companies like Amazon," said Mayor Ron Nirenberg, City of San Antonio. "We look forward to supporting Amazon as they grow and hire more than 1,500 San Antonians."</p><p>On top of Amazon's industry-leading minimum $15 per hour wage, the company offers full-time employees comprehensive benefits including full medical, vision, and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) with 50 percent match starting on day one. Amazon prioritizes the safety and health of its employees and has invested millions of dollars to provide a safe workplace. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families.</p><p>Amazon leverages its scale to help support local communities. Amazon has also pledged to invest over $700 million to provide upskilling training for 100,000 U.S. employees for in-demand jobs. The programs will help Amazon team members from all backgrounds access training to move into highly skilled roles across the company's corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and transportation network, or pursue career paths outside of Amazon.</p><p>"We are thrilled to work closely with Amazon to support their growing presence in our region," said Jenna Saucedo-Herrera, president &amp; CEO of the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation. "Together, these three new facilities in San Antonio will occupy more than two million sq. ft. and employ thousands of San Antonians who will work to deliver the great prime service many have come to rely on."</p><p>Amazon in Texas:</p><ul><li>Since 2010, Amazon has created more than 43,000 jobs in Texas and invested more than $16.9 billion across the state, including infrastructure and compensation to its employees.</li><li>Amazon's investments have contributed more than $18.8 billion in GDP to the Texas economy and have helped create over 49,000 indirect jobs on top of Amazon's direct hires – from jobs in construction and logistics to professional services.</li><li>More than 116,000 independent authors and small and medium businesses in Texas are selling to customers in Amazon's store, creating thousands of additional jobs across the state.</li></ul><p>Additional Resources:</p><ul><li>See an Amazon Fulfillment Center In Action</li><li>Amazon Job Creation and Investment U.S.</li><li>U.S. Investment Map</li></ul><p>About Amazon: Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/ and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201222005431/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

Amazon Delivers the Gift of Football to Prime Members—NFL Holiday Blitz on Prime Video Features Vikings-Saints on Christmas Day Followed by Exclusive Coverage of 49ers-Cardinals on Dec. 26

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Delivers-the-Gift-of-Football-to-Prime-MembersNFL-Holiday-Blitz-on-Prime-Video-Features-Vikings-Saints-on-Christmas-Day-Followed-by-Exclusive-Coverage-of-49ers-Cardinals-on-Dec.-26/default.aspx

Amazon-Delivers-the-Gift-of-Football-to-Prime-MembersNFL-Holiday-Blitz-on-Prime-Video-Features-Vikings-Saints-on-Christmas-Day-Followed-by-Exclusive-Coverage-of-49ers-Cardinals-on-Dec.-26

12/21/2020 11:00:00

Amazon Delivers the Gift of Football to Prime Members—NFL Holiday Blitz on Prime Video Features Vikings-Saints on Christmas Day Followed by Exclusive Coverage of 49ers-Cardinals on Dec. 26

12/21/2020

2020

Vikings-Saints kicks off on Dec. 25 at 4:30 p.m. ET on FOX, Prime Video, and NFL Network; 49ers-Cardinals airs exclusively on Prime Video on Dec. 26 at 4:30 p.m. ET (with additional limited over the air coverage in local team markets and on mobile nationally) Hannah Storm, Andrea Kremer, Bucky Brooks, Daniel Jeremiah, and Joy Taylor will call both matchups on Prime Video, and a combination of Andrew Hawkins, Cari Champion, Von Miller, Chad "Ochocinco" Johnson, and Chris Long will livestream the games on Twitch; Andrew Catalon, James Lofton, and Sherree Burruss to serve as default broadcast crew for 49ers-Cardinals on Prime Video NFL Holiday Blitz on Prime Video gives fans a week-long celebration of football culture across food, fashion, fitness, and entertainment with a star-studded lineup of original content featuring Action Bronson, Brandon Aiyuk, Cari Champion, Chad ‘Ochocinco' Johnson, Dan Gamache, Kenyan Drake, Kickasso, Quavo, Ron Everline (@JustTrain), and Victor Cruz SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 21, 2020-- (NASDAQ: AMZN)—Today Amazon announced its broadcast crews and shoulder programming for a week-long NFL Holiday Blitz, which kicked off today and culminates with the Minnesota Vikings at New Orleans Saints Christmas Day game airing at 4:30p.m. ET on FOX, NFL Network, and Prime Video, and the Prime Video exclusive broadcast of San Francisco 49ers at Arizona Cardinals airing globally on Dec. 26 at 4:30p.m. ET. Both games are available at no additional cost to a Prime membership, and fans can sign up or start a 30-day free trial by visiting amazon.com/prime. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201221005489/en/ NFL Holiday Blitz on Prime Video (Graphic: Business Wire) The Christmas Day game will also air through NFL, FOX and FOX Deportes digital properties and the Vikings, Saints and Yahoo Sports mobile properties. The 49ers-Cardinals game is the first NFL game to air on an exclusive national basis on Prime Video and Twitch, and will be available to more than 150 million paid Prime members worldwide, and in more than 240 countries and territories excluding China, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and Spain. The game will also be televised in both teams' home markets on NBC affiliate KNTV in San Francisco and FOX affiliate KSAZ in Arizona, and it will be available to stream nationally on mobile through the NFL, 49ers, Cardinals, and Yahoo Sports mobile properties. "We hope Prime members around the world are gearing up for a safe and happy holiday season, and we are looking forward to delivering the gift of football on Prime Video this weekend," said Marie Donoghue, VP of Global Sports Video at Amazon. "With multiple announcers to choose from, Next Gen Stats, and on-demand replays from X-Ray, the NFL on Prime Video has a little something for everyone, giving fans more optionality and deeper insights into the action on the field. We can't wait for kickoff." Broadcast Crews Alternate audio feeds featuring either Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer or Bucky Brooks, Daniel Jeremiah, and Joy Taylor will be available for both games on Prime Video. Cari Champion, Chad "Ochocinco" Johnson, and Von Miller will livestream the Christmas Special on Twitch, and Andrew Hawkins, Cari Champion, and Chris Long will stream the Dec. 26 game on Twitch—both streams will be available at twitch.tv/twitchsports. Joe Buck and Troy Aikman will once again serve as the default FOX broadcast for the Vikings and Saints with Erin Andrews and Kristina Pink on the sidelines, and Andrew Catalon and James Lofton will be the default commentary crew with Sherree Burruss on the sidelines for the 49ers and Cardinals game. To switch between audio feeds, Prime members can simply open the settings on their device, select the broadcast of their choice, and enjoy the game. NFL Holiday Blitz on Prime Video Fans can unwrap the gift of football with a week-long slate of original content airing across Prime Video, Twitch, and on social media. Join analysts, NFL Legends, and tastemakers like Action Bronson, Andrew Hawkins, Brandon Aiyuk, Cari Champion, Chad ‘Ochocinco' Johnson, Chris Long, Dan Gamache, James Koh, Kay Adams, Kenyan Drake, Kickasso, Kyle Long, Quavo, Ron Everline (JustTrain), and Victor Cruz for a week-long celebration of football culture as fans gear up for a full slate of NFL action on Prime Video this weekend. Fans can follow @SportsOnPrime on Twitter and Instagram for updates throughout the week and watch the hype video here. See below for a full rundown of the NFL Holiday Blitz on Prime Video: Monday, Dec. 21 at 2p.m. ET—‘The NFL Comment Box' on Twitch Join NFL Legends Kyle Long and Andrew Hawkins on ‘The NFL Comment Box,' an Ask Me Anything-style show that gives fans the chance to engage with Long and Hawkins in an authentic and informative way. Fans can get all their questions answered ahead of the big weekend on Prime Video. Watch at twitch.tv/twitchsports. Tuesday, Dec. 22 at 8p.m. ET—‘NFL Next' on Prime Video Join two-time Super Bowl Champion Chris Long, NFL Network's Kay Adams, Next Gen Stats Analyst James Koh, and NFL Legend and Academy Award winner Andrew Hawkins for ‘NFL Next' on Prime Video. Presented through the lens of Next Gen Stats, NFL Next amplifies the social media pulse of the league, provides a fantasy football-themed look ahead to the upcoming week's action, and will give fans an in-depth preview of the weekend's matchups utilizing the NFL Films "mic'd up" vault. Available on-demand throughout the week on Prime Video. Tuesday, Dec. 22—‘Hurry Up Kitchen' with Action Bronson Foodies and football fans alike can join rapper and classically trained chef Action Bronson for a football-themed lesson on how to cook dishes inspired by his love of football and the holidays. Sharpen your culinary skills and follow along at @SportsOnPrime on Twitter and Instagram. Wednesday, Dec. 23—‘Rise and Prime' with Ron Everline (@justtrain) Start your day with Ron Everline, Kevin Hart's trainer, for an intense workout to burn some calories before the holiday and football feast. Grab a water bottle and follow along @SportsOnPrime on Twitter and Instagram. Wednesday, Dec. 23 at 6p.m. ET—‘The NFL Machine' on Twitch Join NFL Legends Kyle Long and Chad Johnson on ‘The NFL Machine,' a show that gives fans inside access to the NFL Films archive and allows hosts to walk through footage in the most live and interactive manner possible. Watch at twitch.tv/twitchsports. Thursday, Dec. 24—‘Spiked Up' with Brandon Aiyuk and Kenyan Drake Sneakerheads Kickasso and Dan Gamache will design custom cleats for Brandon Aiyuk and Kenyan Drake, which they'll each wear during pre-game on Saturday. As an extension of the NFL's My Cause My Cleats initiative, the designs will be inspired by charitable organizations both athletes are passionate about. Watch the design process and cleat unveiling via @SportsOnPrime on Twitter and Instagram. Friday, Dec. 25 at 1:45p.m. ET—‘2020 Touchback' with Cari Champion, Chad ‘Ochocinco' Johnson, Quavo, and Victor Cruz Join this star-studded lineup of media personalities, musicians, and NFL Legends for a unique season-in-review award show that highlights the best plays of the year, best Tik Tok videos, best touchdown dances, and more. Get a glimpse of what's in store this weekend and tune-in to the show at twitch.tv/primevideo, twitch.tv/twitchsports or via @SportsOnPrime on Twitter and Instagram. Friday, Dec. 25 at 4:30p.m. ET—Minnesota Vikings at New Orleans Saints  Kirk Cousins, Dalvin Cook, and the resurgent Vikings head south to New Orleans to take on Drew Brees, Alvin Kamara and the NFC South-leading Saints as the Vikings fight for one of the final NFC Wild Card playoff spots. Watch on FOX, NFL Network or stream on Prime Video, twitch.tv/primevideo, or twitch.tv/movethesticks. The game is also available on NFL, FOX and FOX Deportes digital properties and the Vikings, Saints and Yahoo Sports mobile properties. Saturday, Dec. 26 at 4:30p.m. ET—San Francisco 49ers at Arizona Cardinals  Kyle Shanahan and the San Francisco 49ers head to the desert to face former Rookie of the Year Kyler Murray and the Arizona Cardinals in an NFC West showdown with significant playoff implications. Stream on Prime Video Stream on Prime Video, twitch.tv/primevideo, or twitch.tv/movethesticks. The game will also be televised in both teams' home markets on NBC affiliate KNTV in San Francisco and FOX affiliate KSAZ in Arizona, and it will be available to stream on mobile through the NFL, 49ers, Cardinals, and Yahoo Sports mobile properties. About Prime Video Prime Video offers customers a vast collection of movies, series, and sports— all available to watch on hundreds of compatible devices. Included with Prime Video: Watch movies, series and sports, including Thursday Night Football, award-winning Amazon Originals, and other exclusives. Enjoy hits like Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, The Boys, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Chemical Hearts, Upload, Troop Zero, and My Spy, plus Emmy Award winners Fleabag and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Prime members also get access to licensed content. Prime Video Channels: Prime members can add channels like CBS All Access, BET+, EPIX, Noggin, NBA League Pass, MLB.tv, STARZ and SHOWTIME—no extra apps to download, and no cable required. Only pay for the ones you want, and cancel anytime. View the full list of channels available at amazon.com/channels. Rent or Buy: Enjoy new-release movies to rent or buy, entire seasons of current TV shows available to buy, and special deals just for Prime members. Instant access: Watch at home or on the go with your choice of hundreds of compatible devices. Stream from the web or using the Prime Video app on your smartphone, tablet, set-top box, game console, or select smart TV. For a complete list of compatible devices, visit amazon.com/howtostream. Enhanced experiences: Make the most of every viewing with 4K Ultra HD- and High Dynamic Range (HDR)-compatible content. Go behind the scenes of your favorite movies and TV shows with exclusive X-Ray access, powered by IMDb. Save it for later with select mobile downloads for offline viewing. Prime Video is just one of many shopping and entertainment benefits included with a Prime membership, along with fast, free shipping on millions of Prime-eligible items at Amazon.com, unlimited photo storage, exclusive deals and discounts, and access to ad-free music and Kindle ebooks. To sign up or start a 30-day free trial of Prime, visit: amazon.com/prime. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201221005489/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon

<p><em>Vikings-Saints kicks off on Dec. 25 at 4:30 p.m. ET on FOX, Prime Video, and NFL Network; 49ers-Cardinals airs exclusively on Prime Video on Dec. 26 at 4:30 p.m. ET (with additional limited over the air coverage in local team markets and on mobile nationally)</em></p><p><em>Hannah Storm, Andrea Kremer, Bucky Brooks, Daniel Jeremiah, and Joy Taylor will call both matchups on Prime Video, and a combination of Andrew Hawkins, Cari Champion, Von Miller, Chad "Ochocinco" Johnson, and Chris Long will livestream the games on Twitch; Andrew Catalon, James Lofton, and Sherree Burruss to serve as default broadcast crew for 49ers-Cardinals on Prime Video</em></p><p><em>NFL Holiday Blitz on Prime Video gives fans a week-long celebration of football culture across food, fashion, fitness, and entertainment with a star-studded lineup of original content featuring Action Bronson, Brandon Aiyuk, Cari Champion, Chad ‘Ochocinco' Johnson, Dan Gamache, Kenyan Drake, Kickasso, Quavo, Ron Everline (@JustTrain), and Victor Cruz</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 21, 2020-- (NASDAQ: AMZN)—Today Amazon announced its broadcast crews and shoulder programming for a week-long NFL Holiday Blitz, which kicked off today and culminates with the Minnesota Vikings at New Orleans Saints Christmas Day game airing at 4:30p.m. ET on FOX, NFL Network, and Prime Video, and the Prime Video exclusive broadcast of San Francisco 49ers at Arizona Cardinals airing globally on Dec. 26 at 4:30p.m. ET. Both games are available at no additional cost to a Prime membership, and fans can sign up or start a 30-day free trial by visiting amazon.com/prime.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201221005489/en/</p><div><p>NFL Holiday Blitz on Prime Video (Graphic: Business Wire)</p></div><p>The Christmas Day game will also air through NFL, FOX and FOX Deportes digital properties and the Vikings, Saints and Yahoo Sports mobile properties.</p><p>The 49ers-Cardinals game is the first NFL game to air on an exclusive national basis on Prime Video and Twitch, and will be available to more than 150 million paid Prime members worldwide, and in more than 240 countries and territories excluding China, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and Spain. The game will also be televised in both teams' home markets on NBC affiliate KNTV in San Francisco and FOX affiliate KSAZ in Arizona, and it will be available to stream nationally on mobile through the NFL, 49ers, Cardinals, and Yahoo Sports mobile properties.</p><p>"We hope Prime members around the world are gearing up for a safe and happy holiday season, and we are looking forward to delivering the gift of football on Prime Video this weekend," said Marie Donoghue, VP of Global Sports Video at Amazon. "With multiple announcers to choose from, Next Gen Stats, and on-demand replays from X-Ray, the NFL on Prime Video has a little something for everyone, giving fans more optionality and deeper insights into the action on the field. We can't wait for kickoff."</p><p>Broadcast Crews</p><p>Alternate audio feeds featuring either Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer or Bucky Brooks, Daniel Jeremiah, and Joy Taylor will be available for both games on Prime Video. Cari Champion, Chad "Ochocinco" Johnson, and Von Miller will livestream the Christmas Special on Twitch, and Andrew Hawkins, Cari Champion, and Chris Long will stream the Dec. 26 game on Twitch—both streams will be available at twitch.tv/twitchsports. Joe Buck and Troy Aikman will once again serve as the default FOX broadcast for the Vikings and Saints with Erin Andrews and Kristina Pink on the sidelines, and Andrew Catalon and James Lofton will be the default commentary crew with Sherree Burruss on the sidelines for the 49ers and Cardinals game.</p><p>To switch between audio feeds, Prime members can simply open the settings on their device, select the broadcast of their choice, and enjoy the game.</p><p>NFL Holiday Blitz on Prime Video</p><p>Fans can unwrap the gift of football with a week-long slate of original content airing across Prime Video, Twitch, and on social media. Join analysts, NFL Legends, and tastemakers like Action Bronson, Andrew Hawkins, Brandon Aiyuk, Cari Champion, Chad ‘Ochocinco' Johnson, Chris Long, Dan Gamache, James Koh, Kay Adams, Kenyan Drake, Kickasso, Kyle Long, Quavo, Ron Everline (JustTrain), and Victor Cruz for a week-long celebration of football culture as fans gear up for a full slate of NFL action on Prime Video this weekend. Fans can follow @SportsOnPrime on Twitter and Instagram for updates throughout the week and watch the hype video here. See below for a full rundown of the NFL Holiday Blitz on Prime Video:</p><ul><li>Monday, Dec. 21 at 2p.m. ET—‘<em>The NFL Comment Box</em>' on Twitch</li></ul><p>Join NFL Legends Kyle Long and Andrew Hawkins on <em>‘The NFL Comment Box,' </em>an Ask Me Anything-style show that gives fans the chance to engage with Long and Hawkins in an authentic and informative way. Fans can get all their questions answered ahead of the big weekend on Prime Video. Watch at twitch.tv/twitchsports.</p><ul><li>Tuesday, Dec. 22 at 8p.m. ET—‘<em>NFL Next' </em>on Prime Video</li></ul><p>Join two-time Super Bowl Champion Chris Long, NFL Network's Kay Adams, Next Gen Stats Analyst James Koh, and NFL Legend and Academy Award winner Andrew Hawkins for ‘<em>NFL Next'</em> on Prime Video. Presented through the lens of Next Gen Stats, NFL Next amplifies the social media pulse of the league, provides a fantasy football-themed look ahead to the upcoming week's action, and will give fans an in-depth preview of the weekend's matchups utilizing the NFL Films "mic'd up" vault. Available on-demand throughout the week on Prime Video.</p><ul><li>Tuesday, Dec. 22—<em>‘Hurry Up Kitchen' </em>with Action Bronson</li></ul><p>Foodies and football fans alike can join rapper and classically trained chef Action Bronson for a football-themed lesson on how to cook dishes inspired by his love of football and the holidays. Sharpen your culinary skills and follow along at @SportsOnPrime on Twitter and Instagram.</p><ul><li>Wednesday, Dec. 23—‘<em>Rise and Prime'</em> with Ron Everline (@justtrain)</li></ul><p>Start your day with Ron Everline, Kevin Hart's trainer, for an intense workout to burn some calories before the holiday and football feast. Grab a water bottle and follow along @SportsOnPrime on Twitter and Instagram.</p><ul><li>Wednesday, Dec. 23 at 6p.m. ET—‘<em>The NFL Machine</em>' on Twitch</li></ul><p>Join NFL Legends Kyle Long and Chad Johnson on ‘<em>The NFL Machine</em>,' a show that gives fans inside access to the NFL Films archive and allows hosts to walk through footage in the most live and interactive manner possible. Watch at twitch.tv/twitchsports.</p><ul><li>Thursday, Dec. 24—<em>‘Spiked Up</em>' with Brandon Aiyuk and Kenyan Drake</li></ul><p>Sneakerheads Kickasso and Dan Gamache will design custom cleats for Brandon Aiyuk and Kenyan Drake, which they'll each wear during pre-game on Saturday. As an extension of the NFL's My Cause My Cleats initiative, the designs will be inspired by charitable organizations both athletes are passionate about. Watch the design process and cleat unveiling via @SportsOnPrime on Twitter and Instagram.</p><ul><li>Friday, Dec. 25 at 1:45p.m. ET—<em>‘2020 Touchback' </em>with Cari Champion, Chad ‘Ochocinco' Johnson, Quavo, and Victor Cruz</li></ul><p>Join this star-studded lineup of media personalities, musicians, and NFL Legends for a unique season-in-review award show that highlights the best plays of the year, best Tik Tok videos, best touchdown dances, and more. Get a glimpse of what's in store this weekend and tune-in to the show at twitch.tv/primevideo, twitch.tv/twitchsports or via @SportsOnPrime on Twitter and Instagram.</p><ul><li>Friday, Dec. 25 at 4:30p.m. ET—Minnesota Vikings at New Orleans Saints </li></ul><p>Kirk Cousins, Dalvin Cook, and the resurgent Vikings head south to New Orleans to take on Drew Brees, Alvin Kamara and the NFC South-leading Saints as the Vikings fight for one of the final NFC Wild Card playoff spots. Watch on FOX, NFL Network or stream on Prime Video, twitch.tv/primevideo, or twitch.tv/movethesticks. The game is also available on NFL, FOX and FOX Deportes digital properties and the Vikings, Saints and Yahoo Sports mobile properties.</p><ul><li>Saturday, Dec. 26 at 4:30p.m. ET—San Francisco 49ers at Arizona Cardinals </li></ul><p>Kyle Shanahan and the San Francisco 49ers head to the desert to face former Rookie of the Year Kyler Murray and the Arizona Cardinals in an NFC West showdown with significant playoff implications. Stream on Prime Video Stream on Prime Video, twitch.tv/primevideo, or twitch.tv/movethesticks. The game will also be televised in both teams' home markets on NBC affiliate KNTV in San Francisco and FOX affiliate KSAZ in Arizona, and it will be available to stream on mobile through the NFL, 49ers, Cardinals, and Yahoo Sports mobile properties.</p><p>About Prime Video</p><p>Prime Video offers customers a vast collection of movies, series, and sports— all available to watch on hundreds of compatible devices.</p><ul><li>Included with Prime Video: Watch movies, series and sports, including <em>Thursday Night Football</em>, award-winning Amazon Originals, and other exclusives. Enjoy hits like <em>Borat Subsequent Moviefilm</em>, <em>The Boys, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Chemical Hearts, Upload</em>, <em>Troop Zero</em>, and <em>My Spy</em>, plus Emmy Award winners <em>Fleabag </em>and <em>The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. </em>Prime members also get access to licensed content.</li></ul><ul><li>Prime Video Channels: Prime members can add channels like CBS All Access, BET+, EPIX, Noggin, NBA League Pass, MLB.tv, STARZ and SHOWTIME—no extra apps to download, and no cable required. Only pay for the ones you want, and cancel anytime. View the full list of channels available at amazon.com/channels.</li></ul><ul><li>Rent or Buy: Enjoy new-release movies to rent or buy, entire seasons of current TV shows available to buy, and special deals just for Prime members.</li></ul><ul><li>Instant access: Watch at home or on the go with your choice of hundreds of compatible devices. Stream from the web or using the Prime Video app on your smartphone, tablet, set-top box, game console, or select smart TV. For a complete list of compatible devices, visit amazon.com/howtostream.</li></ul><ul><li>Enhanced experiences: Make the most of every viewing with 4K Ultra HD- and High Dynamic Range (HDR)-compatible content. Go behind the scenes of your favorite movies and TV shows with exclusive X-Ray access, powered by IMDb. Save it for later with select mobile downloads for offline viewing.</li></ul><p>Prime Video is just one of many shopping and entertainment benefits included with a Prime membership, along with fast, free shipping on millions of Prime-eligible items at Amazon.com, unlimited photo storage, exclusive deals and discounts, and access to ad-free music and Kindle ebooks. To sign up or start a 30-day free trial of Prime, visit: amazon.com/prime.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201221005489/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon</p>

Amazon Announces First Fulfillment Center in South Dakota

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Announces-First-Fulfillment-Center-in-South-Dakota/default.aspx

Amazon-Announces-First-Fulfillment-Center-in-South-Dakota

12/18/2020 09:03:00

Amazon Announces First Fulfillment Center in South Dakota

12/18/2020

2020

New 640,000 square-foot site will be in Sioux Falls and create 1,000 full-time jobs SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 18, 2020-- (NASDAQ: AMZN) – Amazon.com, Inc. plans to open its first fulfillment center in the state of South Dakota in Sioux Falls. The site, which is anticipated to launch in 2022, will create 1,000 full-time jobs with industry leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one. At the new 640,000 square-foot fulfillment center, employees will work alongside Amazon robotics to pick, pack and ship small items to customers such as books, electronics and toys. Amazon is a great place to work with highly competitive pay, benefits from day one, and training programs for in-demand jobs. On top of Amazon's industry-leading minimum starting wage of $15 per hour, full-time employees receive comprehensive benefits, including full medical, vision and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) with 50 percent company match, starting on day one. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families. Amazon also offers employees access to innovative programs like Career Choice, where it will pay up to 95 percent of tuition for courses related to in-demand fields, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at Amazon. Since the program's launch, more than 25,000 employees across the globe have pursued degrees in game design and visual communications, nursing, IT programming and radiology, to name a few. Key Quotes: Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon's Vice President of Global Customer Fulfillment "We are thrilled to be opening our first fulfillment center in the great state of South Dakota and bringing 1,000 full-time jobs with industry-leading pay and benefits to Sioux Falls. Amazon leverages its scale for good and makes investments to support communities. We appreciate the strong support from local and state leaders throughout the process, and we look forward to supporting the South Dakota community with great delivery options." U.S. Senator John Thune "Today's announcement serves as a testament to the success of South Dakota's business-friendly environment. This distribution facility will bring numerous, high-paying jobs and millions of dollars in investment to the city of Sioux Falls and the rest of the region. I am proud of the state's economic progress and infrastructure investments that have allowed businesses to thrive." Governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem "South Dakota is open for business, and this commitment has put our state in the position to welcome Amazon to Foundation Park. Amazon is investing in South Dakota with 1,000 jobs, including excellent benefits, which will help fuel our state's growth for the next generation. So on behalf of the entire state, I want to welcome Amazon to South Dakota." Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken "We are proud to have been selected by Amazon as their next fulfillment center location. Amazon's decision to invest in our community reflects the company's confidence in Sioux Falls' economic climate and excellent workforce. The team at Amazon has been incredible to work with, and we are excited to welcome them to Sioux Falls and tohelp make this partnership a win-win for many years to come." Todd Ernst, Board Chair for the Sioux Falls Development Foundation "It is both an honor and a privilege to welcome Amazon to the Sioux Falls business community. Our commitment to business growth in the region is apparent, and Amazon will be a vital player in our continued efforts to build the economy of Sioux Falls and leverage the attractive power of Foundation Park." Amazon in South Dakota: From 2010-2019, Amazon has invested more than $1 million in South Dakota, including infrastructure and compensation to employees in the state. Amazon's investments in the state contributed an additional more than $469,000 into the state's GDP over that same time period. Amazon's worldwide fulfillment network supports businesses of all sizes through its Fulfillment by Amazon offering, and many of those local businesses are based in South Dakota. There are more than 3,000 small and medium business sellers and independent authors in the state growing their businesses with Amazon. Additional Resources: See an Amazon fulfillment center in action Read the latest Amazon news on the Day One blog U.S. investment map About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201218005390/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>New 640,000 square-foot site will be in Sioux Falls and create 1,000 full-time jobs</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 18, 2020-- (NASDAQ: AMZN) – Amazon.com, Inc. plans to open its first fulfillment center in the state of South Dakota in Sioux Falls. The site, which is anticipated to launch in 2022, will create 1,000 full-time jobs with industry leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one.</p><p>At the new 640,000 square-foot fulfillment center, employees will work alongside Amazon robotics to pick, pack and ship small items to customers such as books, electronics and toys.</p><p>Amazon is a great place to work with highly competitive pay, benefits from day one, and training programs for in-demand jobs. On top of Amazon's industry-leading minimum starting wage of $15 per hour, full-time employees receive comprehensive benefits, including full medical, vision and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) with 50 percent company match, starting on day one. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families.</p><p>Amazon also offers employees access to innovative programs like Career Choice, where it will pay up to 95 percent of tuition for courses related to in-demand fields, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at Amazon. Since the program's launch, more than 25,000 employees across the globe have pursued degrees in game design and visual communications, nursing, IT programming and radiology, to name a few.</p><p>Key Quotes:</p><p>Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon's Vice President of Global Customer Fulfillment</p><p>"We are thrilled to be opening our first fulfillment center in the great state of South Dakota and bringing 1,000 full-time jobs with industry-leading pay and benefits to Sioux Falls. Amazon leverages its scale for good and makes investments to support communities. We appreciate the strong support from local and state leaders throughout the process, and we look forward to supporting the South Dakota community with great delivery options."</p><p>U.S. Senator John Thune</p><p>"Today's announcement serves as a testament to the success of South Dakota's business-friendly environment. This distribution facility will bring numerous, high-paying jobs and millions of dollars in investment to the city of Sioux Falls and the rest of the region. I am proud of the state's economic progress and infrastructure investments that have allowed businesses to thrive."</p><p>Governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem</p><p>"South Dakota is open for business, and this commitment has put our state in the position to welcome Amazon to Foundation Park. Amazon is investing in South Dakota with 1,000 jobs, including excellent benefits, which will help fuel our state's growth for the next generation. So on behalf of the entire state, I want to welcome Amazon to South Dakota."</p><p>Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken</p><p>"We are proud to have been selected by Amazon as their next fulfillment center location. Amazon's decision to invest in our community reflects the company's confidence in Sioux Falls' economic climate and excellent workforce. The team at Amazon has been incredible to work with, and we are excited to welcome them to Sioux Falls and tohelp make this partnership a win-win for many years to come."</p><p>Todd Ernst, Board Chair for the Sioux Falls Development Foundation</p><p>"It is both an honor and a privilege to welcome Amazon to the Sioux Falls business community. Our commitment to business growth in the region is apparent, and Amazon will be a vital player in our continued efforts to build the economy of Sioux Falls and leverage the attractive power of Foundation Park."</p><p>Amazon in South Dakota:</p><ul><li>From 2010-2019, Amazon has invested more than $1 million in South Dakota, including infrastructure and compensation to employees in the state.</li><li>Amazon's investments in the state contributed an additional more than $469,000 into the state's GDP over that same time period.</li><li>Amazon's worldwide fulfillment network supports businesses of all sizes through its Fulfillment by Amazon offering, and many of those local businesses are based in South Dakota. There are more than 3,000 small and medium business sellers and independent authors in the state growing their businesses with Amazon.</li></ul><p>Additional Resources:</p><ul><li>See an Amazon fulfillment center in action</li><li>Read the latest Amazon news on the Day One blog</li><li>U.S. investment map</li></ul><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201218005390/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

Amazon Announces New Fulfillment Center in North Little Rock

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Announces-New-Fulfillment-Center-in-North-Little-Rock/default.aspx

Amazon-Announces-New-Fulfillment-Center-in-North-Little-Rock

12/17/2020 10:13:00

Amazon Announces New Fulfillment Center in North Little Rock

12/17/2020

2020

New one million square-foot site to create over 500 new, full-time jobs SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 17, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced plans to open a new fulfillment center in North Little Rock, Arkansas. The new fulfillment center, which is anticipated to launch in 2021, will create over 500 new, full-time jobs with industry-leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one. See Our Fulfillment Centers in Action "We are proud to be expanding our operations in Arkansas with our newest facility in North Little Rock and we are excited to create over five hundred new, full-time jobs for the local community," said Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon's vice president of global customer fulfillment. "Amazon is grateful for the continued support we've received from local and state leaders and we look forward to leveraging our scale for good to support this great community." Every day at Amazon, incredible employees come together to deliver magical experiences for customers. In the new one million square-foot fulfillment center Amazon associates will work to pick, pack, and ship bulky or larger-sized customer items such as patio furniture, outdoor equipment, or rugs. "North Little Rock's dedicated workforce and central location make it a perfect selection for Amazon's newest distribution center," said Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson. "I'm delighted that Amazon has once again decided to invest in Central Arkansas, creating job opportunities for hundreds of Arkansans, and I'm confident that North Little Rock will be a perfect fit for the company's project." On top of Amazon's industry-leading minimum $15 per hour wage, the company offers full-time employees comprehensive benefits including full medical, vision, and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) with 50 percent match starting on day one. Amazon prioritizes the safety and health of its employees and has invested millions of dollars to provide a safe workplace. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families. "On behalf of a grateful community, I want to thank Amazon's leaders for selecting North Little Rock as its newest central Arkansas distribution center location," said North Little Rock Mayor Joe Smith. "Amazon's commitment to this region is truly remarkable. Given our great transportation network and advantageous location it is a solid business decision that we certainly appreciate and respect." Amazon is a great place to work with highly competitive pay, benefits from day one, and training programs for in-demand jobs. Amazon has pledged to invest over $700 million to provide upskilling training for 100,000 U.S. employees for in-demand jobs. The programs will help Amazon team members from all backgrounds access training to move into highly skilled roles across the company's corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and transportation network, or pursue career paths outside of Amazon. "I am proud to see Pulaski County continuing to be an attractive market for business expansion," said Pulaski County Judge Barry Hyde. "Amazon's ongoing investment directly attributes to economic growth and job opportunities for the people of Pulaski County and all of Central Arkansas." Additional Resources: See an Amazon Fulfillment Center In Action Amazon Job Creation and Investment U.S. U.S. Investment Map About Amazon: Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/ and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201217005721/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>New one million square-foot site to create over 500 new, full-time jobs</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 17, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced plans to open a new fulfillment center in North Little Rock, Arkansas. The new fulfillment center, which is anticipated to launch in 2021, will create over 500 new, full-time jobs with industry-leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one.</p><p>See Our Fulfillment Centers in Action</p><p>"We are proud to be expanding our operations in Arkansas with our newest facility in North Little Rock and we are excited to create over five hundred new, full-time jobs for the local community," said Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon's vice president of global customer fulfillment. "Amazon is grateful for the continued support we've received from local and state leaders and we look forward to leveraging our scale for good to support this great community."</p><p>Every day at Amazon, incredible employees come together to deliver magical experiences for customers. In the new one million square-foot fulfillment center Amazon associates will work to pick, pack, and ship bulky or larger-sized customer items such as patio furniture, outdoor equipment, or rugs.</p><p>"North Little Rock's dedicated workforce and central location make it a perfect selection for Amazon's newest distribution center," said Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson. "I'm delighted that Amazon has once again decided to invest in Central Arkansas, creating job opportunities for hundreds of Arkansans, and I'm confident that North Little Rock will be a perfect fit for the company's project."</p><p>On top of Amazon's industry-leading minimum $15 per hour wage, the company offers full-time employees comprehensive benefits including full medical, vision, and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) with 50 percent match starting on day one. Amazon prioritizes the safety and health of its employees and has invested millions of dollars to provide a safe workplace. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families.</p><p>"On behalf of a grateful community, I want to thank Amazon's leaders for selecting North Little Rock as its newest central Arkansas distribution center location," said North Little Rock Mayor Joe Smith. "Amazon's commitment to this region is truly remarkable. Given our great transportation network and advantageous location it is a solid business decision that we certainly appreciate and respect."</p><p>Amazon is a great place to work with highly competitive pay, benefits from day one, and training programs for in-demand jobs. Amazon has pledged to invest over $700 million to provide upskilling training for 100,000 U.S. employees for in-demand jobs. The programs will help Amazon team members from all backgrounds access training to move into highly skilled roles across the company's corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and transportation network, or pursue career paths outside of Amazon.</p><p>"I am proud to see Pulaski County continuing to be an attractive market for business expansion," said Pulaski County Judge Barry Hyde. "Amazon's ongoing investment directly attributes to economic growth and job opportunities for the people of Pulaski County and all of Central Arkansas."</p><p>Additional Resources:</p><ul><li>See an Amazon Fulfillment Center In Action</li><li>Amazon Job Creation and Investment U.S.</li><li>U.S. Investment Map</li></ul><p>About Amazon: Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/ and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201217005721/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

Amazon Offers Customers Free, Convenient and Easy Returns at More Locations This Holiday Season

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Offers-Customers-Free-Convenient-and-Easy-Returns-at-More-Locations-This-Holiday-Season/default.aspx

Amazon-Offers-Customers-Free-Convenient-and-Easy-Returns-at-More-Locations-This-Holiday-Season

12/17/2020 03:01:00

Amazon Offers Customers Free, Convenient and Easy Returns at More Locations This Holiday Season

12/17/2020

2020

New this year, customers can make returns until January 31 for items shipped between October 1 and December 31—giving customers more time to decide on whether to keep that gift or not Amazon is also making returns even easier at Whole Foods Market locations across the country with a new no-box, no-label return option SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 17, 2020-- Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced that it's here to help make buying – and returning – even more stress-free and convenient as possible this holiday season. New this year, customers have even more time to make a decision on keeping that gift or holiday purchase with an even longer returns window. Most items shipped between October 1 and December 31, 2020, can be returned until January 31, 2021. In addition, Amazon is helping make returns even easier at over 500 Whole Foods Market stores across the country by offering a box-free, label-free return option. This option is also available at other locations including Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, Amazon Fresh grocery stores, Amazon Go stores, UPS Store locations, Kohl's, and more. Returning Amazon.com orders are free and easy, and are available at tens of thousands of locations and on millions of items including electronics, household items, pet supplies, shoes, and apparel, and more, no matter the reason for the return. Amazon's extended return window and tens of thousands of free, convenient and easy return locations are made possible by incredible employees coming together to deliver magic—and make life easier—for customers, especially during the holidays. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201217005353/en/ Amazon returns at Amazon physical retail stores (Photo: Business Wire) "During a holiday season that might be more unpredictable than year's past, our employees want to help customers have one less thing to think about by giving customers more time to return, and by providing a variety of free, convenient, and easy return options this year," said Libby Johnson McKee, Director, Amazon WW Returns, ReCommerce and Sustainability. "Our hope is that by offering so many return options—from tens of thousands of drop-off locations to shipping an item back—as well as more time to think about making a return, customers can relax and shop with confidence this holiday season." Returns Made Easy Once a customer is ready to start a return, the process is simple and convenient. Customers select the item(s) to be returned and the reason for returning from the "Returns & Orders" page on Amazon.com or under "Your Orders" via the Amazon app. Customers can then choose from a list of convenient return options, including at least one FREE option, and then drop off their item at a nearby location—and in most cases without a box or a label. Dropping off a return is quick and contact free. Returning gifts is also easy: when starting a return, customers enter the gift order number and select the item to return. The type of refund or credit a customer will receive depends on how the gift was purchased and how it's returned. More Ways to Return Amazon offers free returns at tens of thousands of drop-off locations for customers, including Amazon physical retail stores like Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, Amazon Fresh grocery stores, and Amazon Go stores, most alternative delivery locations via Amazon Hub Locker and Amazon Hub Locker+, and other locations like Whole Foods Market, Kohl's, and UPS. Amazon physical retail locations: Customers can easily return items at more than 75 Amazon physical retail stores across the country including Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, Amazon Fresh grocery stores, and Amazon Go stores. Customers visit one of Amazon's convenient locations staffed with helpful associates, show the QR code received after starting a return online, and hand over the item in the original manufacturer's packaging—but without a box or label. Amazon Hub Locker and Amazon Hub Locker+ locations: To return to a Locker, customers start a return on Amazon.com or the Amazon app, and then bring their items in a box or shipping envelope and use the barcode, or six-digit code sent after starting a return to place the item in the slot. For staffed Locker+ locations, customers have the option of either pre-packaging their item, using the free packing materials available onsite, or returning without a box or label. Amazon Hub Locker and Amazon Hub Locker+ locations are in more than 900 cities and towns across the country. Whole Foods Market: New this year, Amazon has made returning even easier at more than 500 Whole Foods Market locations nationwide. No need for a box or label, customers simply bring the item and QR code generated after creating a return to the Customer Service desk. A Whole Foods Market team member will scan the code and take the item. Kohl's: Customers can return eligible items at more than 1,100 Kohl's locations across 48 U.S. states by starting a return on Amazon.com or the Amazon app, and then select Kohl's as their drop-off location. When customers arrive, they visit the Amazon Returns desk to make their return and show the QR code to a store associate. No box or label is needed. UPS: To make a return, customers can choose to drop-off items using a pre-paid mailing label at close to 20,000 UPS Access Point locations nationwide. Amazon customers can also, in many cases, return without a box or a label at almost 5,000 The UPS Store locations using a QR code generated when starting a return. Customers may also arrange a no cost pick-up from their home or office via a UPS driver. Sustainable Ways to Return—and Rebuy Amazon leverages its scale for good to make it easier for customers to be more sustainable, which is why it offers a label-free and box-free return option for eligible items at locations including Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, Amazon Fresh grocery stores, Amazon Go stores, Amazon Hub Locker+ locations, Whole Foods Market stores, UPS Store locations, and Kohl's, helping to reduce the amount of packaging used in returns and in many cases, reducing the number of pickups from drivers. Amazon in also committed to finding a second use for open-box and used items, and offers a variety of ways to purchase them via Amazon Warehouse, refurbished products through Amazon Renewed, and Certified Refurbished and Used Amazon devices via Pre-Owned Amazon Devices—these stores help customers save money while also helping the planet. Customers can also find information about what to do with packaging and how to trade in, recycle, or return Amazon products by visiting Amazon Second Chance. Easy Return and Refund Policies This year, customers have even more time to decide if they want to return an item as this year's return window is even longer: new and unused items shipped between October 1 and December 31, 2020, can be returned until January 31, 2021—for any reason. For refunds, customers making a label-free, box-free return will in most cases receive a refund within a few hours after drop-off. Customers shipping back an item will see their refund processed and issued three to five business days after the item is received back to Amazon. To see Amazon's full list of return and refund policies, click here. To find out more about Amazon Returns, click here, and for Amazon holiday shipping, delivery, pickup and returns b-roll and images, click here. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201217005353/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>New this year, customers can make returns until January 31 for items shipped between October 1 and December 31—giving customers more time to decide on whether to keep that gift or not</em></p><p><em>Amazon is also making returns even easier at Whole Foods Market locations across the country with a new no-box, no-label return option</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 17, 2020-- Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced that it's here to help make buying – and returning – even more stress-free and convenient as possible this holiday season. New this year, customers have even more time to make a decision on keeping that gift or holiday purchase with an even longer returns window. Most items shipped between October 1 and December 31, 2020, can be returned until January 31, 2021. In addition, Amazon is helping make returns even easier at over 500 Whole Foods Market stores across the country by offering a box-free, label-free return option. This option is also available at other locations including Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, Amazon Fresh grocery stores, Amazon Go stores, UPS Store locations, Kohl's, and more. Returning Amazon.com orders are free and easy, and are available at tens of thousands of locations and on millions of items including electronics, household items, pet supplies, shoes, and apparel, and more, no matter the reason for the return. Amazon's extended return window and tens of thousands of free, convenient and easy return locations are made possible by incredible employees coming together to deliver magic—and make life easier—for customers, especially during the holidays.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201217005353/en/</p><div><p>Amazon returns at Amazon physical retail stores (Photo: Business Wire)</p></div><p>"During a holiday season that might be more unpredictable than year's past, our employees want to help customers have one less thing to think about by giving customers more time to return, and by providing a variety of free, convenient, and easy return options this year," said Libby Johnson McKee, Director, Amazon WW Returns, ReCommerce and Sustainability. "Our hope is that by offering so many return options—from tens of thousands of drop-off locations to shipping an item back—as well as more time to think about making a return, customers can relax and shop with confidence this holiday season."</p><p>Returns Made Easy</p><p>Once a customer is ready to start a return, the process is simple and convenient. Customers select the item(s) to be returned and the reason for returning from the "Returns &amp; Orders" page on Amazon.com or under "Your Orders" via the Amazon app. Customers can then choose from a list of convenient return options, including at least one FREE option, and then drop off their item at a nearby location—and in most cases without a box or a label. Dropping off a return is quick and contact free. Returning gifts is also easy: when starting a return, customers enter the gift order number and select the item to return. The type of refund or credit a customer will receive depends on how the gift was purchased and how it's returned.</p><p>More Ways to Return</p><p>Amazon offers free returns at tens of thousands of drop-off locations for customers, including Amazon physical retail stores like Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, Amazon Fresh grocery stores, and Amazon Go stores, most alternative delivery locations via Amazon Hub Locker and Amazon Hub Locker+, and other locations like Whole Foods Market, Kohl's, and UPS.</p><ul><li>Amazon physical retail locations: Customers can easily return items at more than 75 Amazon physical retail stores across the country including Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, Amazon Fresh grocery stores, and Amazon Go stores. Customers visit one of Amazon's convenient locations staffed with helpful associates, show the QR code received after starting a return online, and hand over the item in the original manufacturer's packaging—but without a box or label.</li><li>Amazon Hub Locker and Amazon Hub Locker+ locations: To return to a Locker, customers start a return on Amazon.com or the Amazon app, and then bring their items in a box or shipping envelope and use the barcode, or six-digit code sent after starting a return to place the item in the slot. For staffed Locker+ locations, customers have the option of either pre-packaging their item, using the free packing materials available onsite, or returning without a box or label. Amazon Hub Locker and Amazon Hub Locker+ locations are in more than 900 cities and towns across the country.</li><li>Whole Foods Market: New this year, Amazon has made returning even easier at more than 500 Whole Foods Market locations nationwide. No need for a box or label, customers simply bring the item and QR code generated after creating a return to the Customer Service desk. A Whole Foods Market team member will scan the code and take the item.</li><li>Kohl's: Customers can return eligible items at more than 1,100 Kohl's locations across 48 U.S. states by starting a return on Amazon.com or the Amazon app, and then select Kohl's as their drop-off location. When customers arrive, they visit the Amazon Returns desk to make their return and show the QR code to a store associate. No box or label is needed.</li><li>UPS: To make a return, customers can choose to drop-off items using a pre-paid mailing label at close to 20,000 UPS Access Point locations nationwide. Amazon customers can also, in many cases, return without a box or a label at almost 5,000 The UPS Store locations using a QR code generated when starting a return. Customers may also arrange a no cost pick-up from their home or office via a UPS driver.</li></ul><p>Sustainable Ways to Return—and Rebuy</p><p>Amazon leverages its scale for good to make it easier for customers to be more sustainable, which is why it offers a label-free and box-free return option for eligible items at locations including Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, Amazon Fresh grocery stores, Amazon Go stores, Amazon Hub Locker+ locations, Whole Foods Market stores, UPS Store locations, and Kohl's, helping to reduce the amount of packaging used in returns and in many cases, reducing the number of pickups from drivers. Amazon in also committed to finding a second use for open-box and used items, and offers a variety of ways to purchase them via Amazon Warehouse, refurbished products through Amazon Renewed, and Certified Refurbished and Used Amazon devices via Pre-Owned Amazon Devices—these stores help customers save money while also helping the planet. Customers can also find information about what to do with packaging and how to trade in, recycle, or return Amazon products by visiting Amazon Second Chance.</p><p>Easy Return and Refund Policies</p><p>This year, customers have even more time to decide if they want to return an item as this year's return window is even longer: new and unused items shipped between October 1 and December 31, 2020, can be returned until January 31, 2021—for any reason. For refunds, customers making a label-free, box-free return will in most cases receive a refund within a few hours after drop-off. Customers shipping back an item will see their refund processed and issued three to five business days after the item is received back to Amazon. To see Amazon's full list of return and refund policies, click here.</p><p>To find out more about Amazon Returns, click here, and for Amazon holiday shipping, delivery, pickup and returns b-roll and images, click here.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201217005353/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

Twitter Selects AWS as Strategic Provider to Serve Timelines

/news/news-details/2020/Twitter-Selects-AWS-as-Strategic-Provider-to-Serve-Timelines/default.aspx

Twitter-Selects-AWS-as-Strategic-Provider-to-Serve-Timelines

12/15/2020 09:00:00

Twitter Selects AWS as Strategic Provider to Serve Timelines

12/15/2020

2020

Twitter will use AWS's industry-leading services and global infrastructure to power the real-time, global traffic and improve the experience for people who use Twitter SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 15, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) has selected AWS to provide global cloud infrastructure to deliver Twitter timelines. Under the multi-year deal, Twitter will leverage AWS's proven infrastructure and portfolio of services to support delivery of millions of daily Tweets. This expansion onto AWS marks the first time that Twitter is leveraging the public cloud to scale their real-time service. Twitter will rely on the breadth and depth of AWS, including capabilities in compute, containers, storage, and security, to reliably deliver the real-time service with the lowest latency, while continuing to develop and deploy new features to improve how people use Twitter. The new agreement builds on the companies' more than decade-long collaboration, where AWS continues to provide Twitter with storage, compute, database, and content delivery services to support its distribution of images, videos and ad content. Millions of people and organizations use Twitter to share and react to what's happening and what people are talking about right now, and Twitter will leverage AWS infrastructure and services to continue improving performance and security for them. Twitter and AWS will create an architecture that extends Twitter's on-premises infrastructure to enable them to seamlessly run and scale the real-time service globally, increase its reliability using AWS's fault-tolerant infrastructure, and rapidly move new features into production around the world. Twitter will take advantage of AWS Graviton2-based instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to power its cloud-based workloads, and use AWS container services to develop and deploy new features and applications consistently across its hybrid infrastructure. In addition, Twitter will continue to use AWS services such as Amazon CloudFront (AWS's fast content delivery network service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs with low latency and high transfer speeds to customers globally) and Amazon DynamoDB (AWS's key-value database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale). "We are excited to work with AWS to expand the infrastructure Twitter uses to serve the public conversation as we grow globally," said Parag Agrawal, Chief Technology Officer, Twitter. "The collaboration with AWS will improve performance for people who use Twitter by enabling us to serve Tweets from data centers closer to our customers at the same time as we leverage the Arm-based architecture of AWS Graviton2 instances. In addition to helping us scale our infrastructure, this work with AWS enables us to ship features faster as we apply AWS's diverse and growing portfolio of services." "Twitter's decision to rely on AWS infrastructure and services for its real-time workloads will help them instantly scale their global footprint up and down without ever compromising the experience for people who use Twitter," said Matt Garman, Vice President, Sales and Marketing at Amazon Web Services, Inc. "By using AWS container services to create a seamless hybrid on-premises and cloud environment, Twitter can innovate and deliver new experiences quickly and cost-effectively." About Amazon Web Services  For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. About Twitter, Inc.  Twitter is what's happening and what people are talking about right now. To learn more, visit about.twitter.com and follow @Twitter. Let's talk. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201215005162/en/ TwitterCatherine Hillpress@twitter.com Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>Twitter will use AWS's industry-leading services and global infrastructure to power the real-time, global traffic and improve the experience for people who use Twitter</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 15, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) has selected AWS to provide global cloud infrastructure to deliver Twitter timelines. Under the multi-year deal, Twitter will leverage AWS's proven infrastructure and portfolio of services to support delivery of millions of daily Tweets. This expansion onto AWS marks the first time that Twitter is leveraging the public cloud to scale their real-time service. Twitter will rely on the breadth and depth of AWS, including capabilities in compute, containers, storage, and security, to reliably deliver the real-time service with the lowest latency, while continuing to develop and deploy new features to improve how people use Twitter. The new agreement builds on the companies' more than decade-long collaboration, where AWS continues to provide Twitter with storage, compute, database, and content delivery services to support its distribution of images, videos and ad content.</p><p>Millions of people and organizations use Twitter to share and react to what's happening and what people are talking about right now, and Twitter will leverage AWS infrastructure and services to continue improving performance and security for them. Twitter and AWS will create an architecture that extends Twitter's on-premises infrastructure to enable them to seamlessly run and scale the real-time service globally, increase its reliability using AWS's fault-tolerant infrastructure, and rapidly move new features into production around the world. Twitter will take advantage of AWS Graviton2-based instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to power its cloud-based workloads, and use AWS container services to develop and deploy new features and applications consistently across its hybrid infrastructure.</p><p>In addition, Twitter will continue to use AWS services such as Amazon CloudFront (AWS's fast content delivery network service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs with low latency and high transfer speeds to customers globally) and Amazon DynamoDB (AWS's key-value database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale).</p><p>"We are excited to work with AWS to expand the infrastructure Twitter uses to serve the public conversation as we grow globally," said Parag Agrawal, Chief Technology Officer, Twitter. "The collaboration with AWS will improve performance for people who use Twitter by enabling us to serve Tweets from data centers closer to our customers at the same time as we leverage the Arm-based architecture of AWS Graviton2 instances. In addition to helping us scale our infrastructure, this work with AWS enables us to ship features faster as we apply AWS's diverse and growing portfolio of services."</p><p>"Twitter's decision to rely on AWS infrastructure and services for its real-time workloads will help them instantly scale their global footprint up and down without ever compromising the experience for people who use Twitter," said Matt Garman, Vice President, Sales and Marketing at Amazon Web Services, Inc. "By using AWS container services to create a seamless hybrid on-premises and cloud environment, Twitter can innovate and deliver new experiences quickly and cost-effectively."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services </p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>About Twitter, Inc. </p><p>Twitter is what's happening and what people are talking about right now. To learn more, visit about.twitter.com and follow @Twitter. Let's talk.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201215005162/en/</p><p>TwitterCatherine Hillpress@twitter.com</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

Star Alliance Goes All-In on AWS to Invent the Next Era of Air Travel

/news/news-details/2020/Star-Alliance-Goes-All-In-on-AWS-to-Invent-the-Next-Era-of-Air-Travel/default.aspx

Star-Alliance-Goes-All-In-on-AWS-to-Invent-the-Next-Era-of-Air-Travel

12/14/2020 03:01:00

Star Alliance Goes All-In on AWS to Invent the Next Era of Air Travel

12/14/2020

2020

World's largest airline alliance selects AWS to build resiliency, improve operational efficiencies, and enhance traveler experiences SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 14, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Star Alliance, the world's largest airline alliance, is going all-in on AWS, moving all of its IT infrastructure to the world's leading cloud to reduce costs, enhance performance, and become a more agile company in the cloud. Star Alliance is working with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) – an AWS Partner Network Premier Consulting Partner – to migrate all of its data, platforms, and business-critical applications to AWS and close its data centers, which will reduce its infrastructure total cost of ownership by 25%. The airline alliance is using AWS's unmatched capabilities, including analytics, security, managed databases, storage, and machine learning, to provide its 26 member airlines with real-time insights that will help improve the global travel experience for their passengers, even with the uncertainty brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201214005174/en/ By migrating to AWS, Star Alliance has gained the agility to immediately optimize its existing infrastructure use and costs to meet the changing demands around worldwide air travel, especially in response to COVID-19. When quarantine orders and travel restrictions went into effect, the company instantly reduced its infrastructure footprint and spend by 30%, scaling down its use of AWS rather than paying for excess on-premises capacity. By running on AWS, Star Alliance is setting itself up for the future when global travel restrictions begin to ease and customers resume flying regularly. The organization is now able to introduce applications in half the time, leveraging Amazon Elastic Container Service with AWS Fargate (a serverless compute engine for containers that makes it easy to build applications) to power services that make travel easier and safer for passengers. For instance, Star Alliance created a baggage tracking application that uses Amazon Aurora (AWS's relational database built for the cloud) to process data from multiple airline baggage systems, delivering operational dashboards and centralized reporting so that airline customer service agents can track bags at airports around the world. In addition, the "Star Alliance Inter Airline Through Check-in Hub" application – an application that processes and analyzes more than 12 million transactions per month during peak periods and runs on AWS – makes the check-in process seamless for travelers by enabling passengers to check-in and receive boarding passes for multi-stop journeys across Star Alliance member airlines. By becoming a data-driven organization in the cloud, Star Alliance is using AWS analytics and databases, including Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Athena (AWS's serverless, interactive query service that uses standard SQL), and Amazon QuickSight (AWS's business intelligence service), to identify future travel demand and trends, as well as improve customer experiences. The Alliance's Transfer Decision Tool helps its member airlines manage at-risk flight connections in real time so that they can take proactive action – such as fast-tracking a passenger through customs and immigration – to quickly transfer customers and their baggage to a connecting flight. This tool complements the Alliance's new Connections Service (a mobile app that guides travelers with the fastest path to their departure gate and unlocks airport Fast Track lanes when connections are tight), providing a faster, contactless airport experience. In addition, by migrating its legacy databases to Amazon Aurora, Star Alliance is enabling its members' customer service teams to make quick, informed decisions that help them process frequent flyer reward requests faster and take passenger preferences into account to provide personalized travel experiences. Moving forward, Star Alliance plans to create a data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) that will centralize data access for member airlines to accelerate the development of enterprise applications and customer features. Star Alliance will then be able to apply AWS machine learning services, such as Amazon SageMaker (AWS's service that enables data scientists and developers to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly), to the consolidated data to add value like preventing loyalty-related fraud across the members' frequent flyer networks. "We decided to go all-in on AWS to gain the reliability and scalability we needed to support the increasing number of global travelers joining the alliance each year, but the pandemic also proved how valuable it is to have a flexible and agile infrastructure in the cloud. No one could have predicted what has happened so far in 2020, but because of our collaboration with AWS, we were able to quickly adjust our goals and scale back our expenses," said Jeremy Drury, Head of Digital & Technology at Star Alliance. "In addition to cost savings and elasticity, AWS gives us the most comprehensive set of cloud services to innovate rapidly, introduce new services to keep travelers safe, and continuously reinvent the global travel experience." "By going all-in on AWS, Star Alliance is leveraging the elasticity of the cloud to take advantage of industry trends and pivot their operations in order to respond to drastically changing market dynamics," said David Peller, Managing Director, Travel and Hospitality at Amazon Web Services. "Star Alliance is a prime example of a global organization that has successfully embraced the cloud to steer through times of uncertainty. As the world anticipates opening up again, we are excited to work with Star Alliance as they leverage AWS's comprehensive suite of services to innovate new offerings at scale while raising the bar for what is possible for the next era of global air travel." "The global pandemic has reinforced the need for the travel industry to embrace new technologies that improve their operational resilience, business agility, and responsiveness to evolving customer needs and local regulations," said Arun Pradeep, Head, Travel, Transportation and Hospitality, Europe, TCS. "Having accelerated Star Alliance's IT transformation on AWS, we are now helping them maximize value by harnessing capabilities around advanced analytics and machine learning to deliver higher levels of personalization and superior customer experiences." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. About Star Alliance The Star Alliance network was established in 1997 as the first truly global airline alliance, based on a customer value proposition of global reach, worldwide recognition and seamless service. Since inception, it has offered the largest and most comprehensive airline network, with a focus on improving customer experience across the Alliance journey. The member airlines are: Aegean Airlines, Air Canada, Air China, Air India, Air New Zealand, ANA, Asiana Airlines, Austrian, Avianca, Brussels Airlines, Copa Airlines, Croatia Airlines, EGYPTAIR, Ethiopian Airlines, EVA Air, LOT Polish Airlines, Lufthansa, Scandinavian Airlines, Shenzhen Airlines, Singapore Airlines, South African Airways, SWISS, TAP Air Portugal, THAI, Turkish Airlines, and United. Overall, the Star Alliance network currently offers more than 12,000 daily flights to almost 1,300 airports in 197 countries. Further connecting flights are offered by Star Alliance Connecting Partners Juneyao Airlines and THAI Smile Airways. www.staralliance.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201214005174/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services

<p><em>World's largest airline alliance selects AWS to build resiliency, improve operational efficiencies, and enhance traveler experiences</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 14, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Star Alliance, the world's largest airline alliance, is going all-in on AWS, moving all of its IT infrastructure to the world's leading cloud to reduce costs, enhance performance, and become a more agile company in the cloud. Star Alliance is working with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) – an AWS Partner Network Premier Consulting Partner – to migrate all of its data, platforms, and business-critical applications to AWS and close its data centers, which will reduce its infrastructure total cost of ownership by 25%. The airline alliance is using AWS's unmatched capabilities, including analytics, security, managed databases, storage, and machine learning, to provide its 26 member airlines with real-time insights that will help improve the global travel experience for their passengers, even with the uncertainty brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201214005174/en/</p><p>By migrating to AWS, Star Alliance has gained the agility to immediately optimize its existing infrastructure use and costs to meet the changing demands around worldwide air travel, especially in response to COVID-19. When quarantine orders and travel restrictions went into effect, the company instantly reduced its infrastructure footprint and spend by 30%, scaling down its use of AWS rather than paying for excess on-premises capacity. By running on AWS, Star Alliance is setting itself up for the future when global travel restrictions begin to ease and customers resume flying regularly. The organization is now able to introduce applications in half the time, leveraging Amazon Elastic Container Service with AWS Fargate (a serverless compute engine for containers that makes it easy to build applications) to power services that make travel easier and safer for passengers. For instance, Star Alliance created a baggage tracking application that uses Amazon Aurora (AWS's relational database built for the cloud) to process data from multiple airline baggage systems, delivering operational dashboards and centralized reporting so that airline customer service agents can track bags at airports around the world. In addition, the "Star Alliance Inter Airline Through Check-in Hub" application – an application that processes and analyzes more than 12 million transactions per month during peak periods and runs on AWS – makes the check-in process seamless for travelers by enabling passengers to check-in and receive boarding passes for multi-stop journeys across Star Alliance member airlines.</p><p>By becoming a data-driven organization in the cloud, Star Alliance is using AWS analytics and databases, including Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Athena (AWS's serverless, interactive query service that uses standard SQL), and Amazon QuickSight (AWS's business intelligence service), to identify future travel demand and trends, as well as improve customer experiences. The Alliance's Transfer Decision Tool helps its member airlines manage at-risk flight connections in real time so that they can take proactive action – such as fast-tracking a passenger through customs and immigration – to quickly transfer customers and their baggage to a connecting flight. This tool complements the Alliance's new Connections Service (a mobile app that guides travelers with the fastest path to their departure gate and unlocks airport Fast Track lanes when connections are tight), providing a faster, contactless airport experience. In addition, by migrating its legacy databases to Amazon Aurora, Star Alliance is enabling its members' customer service teams to make quick, informed decisions that help them process frequent flyer reward requests faster and take passenger preferences into account to provide personalized travel experiences. Moving forward, Star Alliance plans to create a data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) that will centralize data access for member airlines to accelerate the development of enterprise applications and customer features. Star Alliance will then be able to apply AWS machine learning services, such as Amazon SageMaker (AWS's service that enables data scientists and developers to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly), to the consolidated data to add value like preventing loyalty-related fraud across the members' frequent flyer networks.</p><p>"We decided to go all-in on AWS to gain the reliability and scalability we needed to support the increasing number of global travelers joining the alliance each year, but the pandemic also proved how valuable it is to have a flexible and agile infrastructure in the cloud. No one could have predicted what has happened so far in 2020, but because of our collaboration with AWS, we were able to quickly adjust our goals and scale back our expenses," said Jeremy Drury, Head of Digital &amp; Technology at Star Alliance. "In addition to cost savings and elasticity, AWS gives us the most comprehensive set of cloud services to innovate rapidly, introduce new services to keep travelers safe, and continuously reinvent the global travel experience."</p><p>"By going all-in on AWS, Star Alliance is leveraging the elasticity of the cloud to take advantage of industry trends and pivot their operations in order to respond to drastically changing market dynamics," said David Peller, Managing Director, Travel and Hospitality at Amazon Web Services. "Star Alliance is a prime example of a global organization that has successfully embraced the cloud to steer through times of uncertainty. As the world anticipates opening up again, we are excited to work with Star Alliance as they leverage AWS's comprehensive suite of services to innovate new offerings at scale while raising the bar for what is possible for the next era of global air travel."</p><p>"The global pandemic has reinforced the need for the travel industry to embrace new technologies that improve their operational resilience, business agility, and responsiveness to evolving customer needs and local regulations," said Arun Pradeep, Head, Travel, Transportation and Hospitality, Europe, TCS. "Having accelerated Star Alliance's IT transformation on AWS, we are now helping them maximize value by harnessing capabilities around advanced analytics and machine learning to deliver higher levels of personalization and superior customer experiences."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>About Star Alliance</p><p>The Star Alliance network was established in 1997 as the first truly global airline alliance, based on a customer value proposition of global reach, worldwide recognition and seamless service. Since inception, it has offered the largest and most comprehensive airline network, with a focus on improving customer experience across the Alliance journey. The member airlines are: Aegean Airlines, Air Canada, Air China, Air India, Air New Zealand, ANA, Asiana Airlines, Austrian, Avianca, Brussels Airlines, Copa Airlines, Croatia Airlines, EGYPTAIR, Ethiopian Airlines, EVA Air, LOT Polish Airlines, Lufthansa, Scandinavian Airlines, Shenzhen Airlines, Singapore Airlines, South African Airways, SWISS, TAP Air Portugal, THAI, Turkish Airlines, and United. Overall, the Star Alliance network currently offers more than 12,000 daily flights to almost 1,300 airports in 197 countries. Further connecting flights are offered by Star Alliance Connecting Partners Juneyao Airlines and THAI Smile Airways. www.staralliance.com</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201214005174/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services</p>

Nationwide Selects AWS as Its Preferred Cloud Provider to Deliver Digital Experiences to Customers

/news/news-details/2020/Nationwide-Selects-AWS-as-Its-Preferred-Cloud-Provider-to-Deliver-Digital-Experiences-to-Customers/default.aspx

Nationwide-Selects-AWS-as-Its-Preferred-Cloud-Provider-to-Deliver-Digital-Experiences-to-Customers

12/10/2020 09:00:00

Nationwide Selects AWS as Its Preferred Cloud Provider to Deliver Digital Experiences to Customers

12/10/2020

2020

Insurance and financial services leader rapidly migrates to AWS to unlock data-driven insights, automate processes in the cloud, and deliver new digital services to millions of customers SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 10, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Nationwide, a Fortune 100 insurance and financial services provider, is expanding its relationship with AWS and has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider. As part of its company-wide digital transformation, Nationwide is moving key, business critical workloads to AWS, including more than 850 business and customer-facing applications, such as Claims, Personal and Commercial Insurance Policy Systems, and their flagship website Nationwide.com. Leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS's advanced services, including analytics, database, machine learning, security, and serverless technologies, Nationwide is delivering deeper insights to its independent agents, financial professionals, and customer service associates to provide more personalized recommendations and customer service to their millions of customers. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201210005134/en/ Nationwide's rapid move to the cloud is accelerated by AWS Enterprise Next, a program that pairs AWS experts with customer teams to create a long-term plan and key milestones to drive a company's ongoing digital transformation. Through this 15-month engagement program, AWS experts and partners are working with Nationwide to create an on-site, cross-functional team to modernize Nationwide's applications, IT environment, and operating practices. AWS Enterprise Next has already helped Nationwide build more than 60 applications in the cloud, including its Nationwide Small Business Advisory platform, an online experience that uses machine learning services like Amazon Textract (a machine learning service that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents) to pull data from scanned forms and documents to automate the underwriting process for small business owners. In addition, the platform uses AWS's machine learning-driven personalization service, Amazon Personalize, to tailor personalized insurance policy recommendations to small business customers in minutes. This is rapidly speeding up the time to get new policies into the hands of customers, providing greater assurance to small businesses, where insurance coverage is vital. Leveraging AWS gives Nationwide the ability to introduce new resources like enhanced mobile applications and self-service financial planning, to customers much faster, getting these new ideas into the hands of customers in days, as opposed to the months it took previously. AWS analytics is also helping to reveal new insights related to application usage patterns, business trends, and customer preferences, allowing Nationwide to empower independent agents and financial professionals to make better, more personalized recommendations to customers based on the financial and insurance resources available. Going forward, Nationwide will also use Amazon SageMaker, AWS's service for easily building, training, and deploying machine learning models quickly at scale, to help its data scientists enhance their performance in areas such as marketing analytics and risk assessment to accelerate the company's life insurance policy processing. "Our customers' needs and expectations of how their insurance partner supports them are evolving rapidly and AWS has given us the agility that we need to quickly innovate and provide new services, while delivering the security, reliability, and performance that customers have come to expect from us for more than 90 years," said Jim Fowler, CTO at Nationwide. "AWS has helped us move to the cloud quicker than we ever imagined possible, and their unmatched portfolio of services is transforming our business. AWS gives us the ability to reach new digital audiences who can access and consume our services through a variety of channels, and empowers our associates with next-generation tools and insights to enhance our customer service." "Combining Nationwide's financial expertise with AWS's proven performance and unmatched portfolio of services is enabling them to deliver powerful new financial tools to help them stay ahead competitively and remain a leader in serving customers," said Greg Pearson, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. "Leveraging AWS, Nationwide can innovate and deploy new solutions while they are streamlining their business operations and processes on the backend. By building and running their most strategic platforms on AWS, Nationwide is positioning itself as a leading choice for life insurance and financial services for years to come." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. About Nationwide Nationwide, a Fortune 100 company based in Columbus, Ohio, is one of the largest and strongest diversified insurance and financial services organizations in the United States. Nationwide is rated A+ by both A.M. Best and Standard & Poor's. An industry leader in driving customer-focused innovation, Nationwide provides a full range of insurance and financial services products including auto, business, homeowners, farm and life insurance; public and private sector retirement plans, annuities and mutual funds; excess & surplus, specialty and surety; pet, motorcycle and boat insurance. For more information, visit www.nationwide.com. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Nationwide, Nationwide is on your side and the Nationwide N and Eagle are service marks of Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201210005134/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>Insurance and financial services leader rapidly migrates to AWS to unlock data-driven insights, automate processes in the cloud, and deliver new digital services to millions of customers</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 10, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Nationwide, a Fortune 100 insurance and financial services provider, is expanding its relationship with AWS and has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider. As part of its company-wide digital transformation, Nationwide is moving key, business critical workloads to AWS, including more than 850 business and customer-facing applications, such as Claims, Personal and Commercial Insurance Policy Systems, and their flagship website Nationwide.com. Leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS's advanced services, including analytics, database, machine learning, security, and serverless technologies, Nationwide is delivering deeper insights to its independent agents, financial professionals, and customer service associates to provide more personalized recommendations and customer service to their millions of customers.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201210005134/en/</p><p>Nationwide's rapid move to the cloud is accelerated by AWS Enterprise Next, a program that pairs AWS experts with customer teams to create a long-term plan and key milestones to drive a company's ongoing digital transformation. Through this 15-month engagement program, AWS experts and partners are working with Nationwide to create an on-site, cross-functional team to modernize Nationwide's applications, IT environment, and operating practices. AWS Enterprise Next has already helped Nationwide build more than 60 applications in the cloud, including its Nationwide Small Business Advisory platform, an online experience that uses machine learning services like Amazon Textract (a machine learning service that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents) to pull data from scanned forms and documents to automate the underwriting process for small business owners. In addition, the platform uses AWS's machine learning-driven personalization service, Amazon Personalize, to tailor personalized insurance policy recommendations to small business customers in minutes. This is rapidly speeding up the time to get new policies into the hands of customers, providing greater assurance to small businesses, where insurance coverage is vital.</p><p>Leveraging AWS gives Nationwide the ability to introduce new resources like enhanced mobile applications and self-service financial planning, to customers much faster, getting these new ideas into the hands of customers in days, as opposed to the months it took previously. AWS analytics is also helping to reveal new insights related to application usage patterns, business trends, and customer preferences, allowing Nationwide to empower independent agents and financial professionals to make better, more personalized recommendations to customers based on the financial and insurance resources available. Going forward, Nationwide will also use Amazon SageMaker, AWS's service for easily building, training, and deploying machine learning models quickly at scale, to help its data scientists enhance their performance in areas such as marketing analytics and risk assessment to accelerate the company's life insurance policy processing.</p><p>"Our customers' needs and expectations of how their insurance partner supports them are evolving rapidly and AWS has given us the agility that we need to quickly innovate and provide new services, while delivering the security, reliability, and performance that customers have come to expect from us for more than 90 years," said Jim Fowler, CTO at Nationwide. "AWS has helped us move to the cloud quicker than we ever imagined possible, and their unmatched portfolio of services is transforming our business. AWS gives us the ability to reach new digital audiences who can access and consume our services through a variety of channels, and empowers our associates with next-generation tools and insights to enhance our customer service."</p><p>"Combining Nationwide's financial expertise with AWS's proven performance and unmatched portfolio of services is enabling them to deliver powerful new financial tools to help them stay ahead competitively and remain a leader in serving customers," said Greg Pearson, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. "Leveraging AWS, Nationwide can innovate and deploy new solutions while they are streamlining their business operations and processes on the backend. By building and running their most strategic platforms on AWS, Nationwide is positioning itself as a leading choice for life insurance and financial services for years to come."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>About Nationwide</p><p>Nationwide, a Fortune 100 company based in Columbus, Ohio, is one of the largest and strongest diversified insurance and financial services organizations in the United States. Nationwide is rated A+ by both A.M. Best and Standard &amp; Poor's. An industry leader in driving customer-focused innovation, Nationwide provides a full range of insurance and financial services products including auto, business, homeowners, farm and life insurance; public and private sector retirement plans, annuities and mutual funds; excess &amp; surplus, specialty and surety; pet, motorcycle and boat insurance. For more information, visit www.nationwide.com. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.</p><p>Nationwide, Nationwide is on your side and the Nationwide N and Eagle are service marks of Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201210005134/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

Amazon Becomes World's Largest Corporate Purchaser of Renewable Energy, Advancing its Climate Pledge Commitment to be Net-zero Carbon by 2040

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Becomes-Worlds-Largest-Corporate-Purchaser-of-Renewable-Energy-Advancing-its-Climate-Pledge-Commitment-to-be-Net-zero-Carbon-by-2040/default.aspx

Amazon-Becomes-Worlds-Largest-Corporate-Purchaser-of-Renewable-Energy-Advancing-its-Climate-Pledge-Commitment-to-be-Net-zero-Carbon-by-2040

12/10/2020 06:00:00

Amazon Becomes World's Largest Corporate Purchaser of Renewable Energy, Advancing its Climate Pledge Commitment to be Net-zero Carbon by 2040

12/10/2020

2020

The addition of 26 new utility-scale wind and solar projects in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, South Africa, Sweden, the UK, and the U.S. bring Amazon's total number of renewable energy projects to 127 Company's total renewable energy investments to date will supply 6.5 GW of electricity production capacity — enough to power 1.7 million U.S. homes for one year SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 10, 2020-- Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced 26 new utility-scale wind and solar energy projects totaling 3.4 gigawatts (GW) of electricity production capacity, bringing its total investment in renewable energy in 2020 to 35 projects and more than 4 GW of capacity — the largest corporate investment in renewable energy in a single year. These new projects will make Amazon the largest-ever corporate purchaser of renewable energy. Amazon has now invested in 6.5 GW of wind and solar projects that will enable the company to supply its operations with more than 18 million megawatt hours (MWh) of renewable energy annually. This is enough to power 1.7 million U.S. homes for one year. These projects will supply renewable energy for Amazon's corporate offices, fulfillment centers, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers that support millions of customers globally. They will also help advance Amazon's goal to reach net-zero carbon emissions across its business by 2040. Part of that commitment is powering Amazon's infrastructure with 100% renewable energy, and the company is now on a path to achieve this milestone by 2025, five years ahead of the initial 2030 target. "Amazon is helping fight climate change by moving quickly to power our businesses with renewable energy," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. "With a total of 127 solar and wind projects, Amazon is now the biggest corporate buyer of renewable energy ever. We are on a path to running 100% of our business on renewable energy by 2025 — five years ahead of our original target of 2030. This is just one of the many steps we're taking that will help us meet our Climate Pledge. I couldn't be more proud of all the teams across Amazon that continue to work hard, smart, and fast to get these projects up and running." The 26 new wind and solar projects announced today are located in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, South Africa, Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S. The new projects are Amazon's first in France, Germany, Italy, and South Africa. In the U.S., Amazon has now enabled wind and solar projects in California, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia. Amazon has a total of 127 renewable energy projects globally, including 59 utility-scale wind and solar renewable energy projects and 68 solar rooftops on fulfillment centers and sort centers around the globe. "Private sector investment is essential to scaling renewable energy at the pace necessary to drive global climate action," said Miranda Ballentine, CEO of Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance (REBA). "The U.S.-based projects alone make Amazon's announcement 270% larger than the largest corporate procurement announcement from a single off-taker to date, and showcase the company's leadership and commitment to a clean and prosperous energy future." "On behalf of the renewable sector, we applaud Amazon for its unprecedented contribution to the renewable energy transition this year. With an impressive 35 major new renewable projects in 2020, Amazon deserves tremendous credit for its leadership in the global shift to renewable energy. Procuring more than 4,000 MW of new renewable power in a single year is an incredible achievement, and it marks big progress toward Amazon's goal of being powered by 100% renewable power. We are immensely grateful to Amazon for their efforts to help us stay within shouting distance of the greenhouse gas emission reductions scientists say are needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change," said Gregory Wetstone, President and CEO, American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE). Last year, Amazon and Global Optimism co-founded The Climate Pledge, a commitment to reach the Paris Agreement 10 years early and be net-zero carbon by 2040. The pledge now has 31 signatories, including Unilever, Verizon, Siemens, Microsoft, and Best Buy. To reach its goal, Amazon will continue to reduce emissions across its operations by establishing a path to power its operations with 100% renewable energy, five years ahead of the company's initial target of 2030; delivering its Shipment Zero vision to make all shipments net-zero carbon, with 50% net-zero carbon by 2030; and purchasing 100,000 electric delivery vehicles, the largest order ever of electric delivery vehicles. For more information, visit https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201210005304/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon

<p><em>The addition of 26 new utility-scale wind and solar projects in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, South Africa, Sweden, the UK, and the U.S. bring Amazon's total number of renewable energy projects to 127</em></p><p><em>Company's total renewable energy investments to date will supply 6.5 GW of electricity production capacity — enough to power 1.7 million U.S. homes for one year</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 10, 2020-- Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced 26 new utility-scale wind and solar energy projects totaling 3.4 gigawatts (GW) of electricity production capacity, bringing its total investment in renewable energy in 2020 to 35 projects and more than 4 GW of capacity — the largest corporate investment in renewable energy in a single year. These new projects will make Amazon the largest-ever corporate purchaser of renewable energy.</p><p>Amazon has now invested in 6.5 GW of wind and solar projects that will enable the company to supply its operations with more than 18 million megawatt hours (MWh) of renewable energy annually. This is enough to power 1.7 million U.S. homes for one year. These projects will supply renewable energy for Amazon's corporate offices, fulfillment centers, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers that support millions of customers globally. They will also help advance Amazon's goal to reach net-zero carbon emissions across its business by 2040. Part of that commitment is powering Amazon's infrastructure with 100% renewable energy, and the company is now on a path to achieve this milestone by 2025, five years ahead of the initial 2030 target.</p><p>"Amazon is helping fight climate change by moving quickly to power our businesses with renewable energy," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. "With a total of 127 solar and wind projects, Amazon is now the biggest corporate buyer of renewable energy ever. We are on a path to running 100% of our business on renewable energy by 2025 — five years ahead of our original target of 2030. This is just one of the many steps we're taking that will help us meet our Climate Pledge. I couldn't be more proud of all the teams across Amazon that continue to work hard, smart, and fast to get these projects up and running."</p><p>The 26 new wind and solar projects announced today are located in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, South Africa, Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S. The new projects are Amazon's first in France, Germany, Italy, and South Africa. In the U.S., Amazon has now enabled wind and solar projects in California, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia. Amazon has a total of 127 renewable energy projects globally, including 59 utility-scale wind and solar renewable energy projects and 68 solar rooftops on fulfillment centers and sort centers around the globe.</p><p>"Private sector investment is essential to scaling renewable energy at the pace necessary to drive global climate action," said Miranda Ballentine, CEO of Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance (REBA). "The U.S.-based projects alone make Amazon's announcement 270% larger than the largest corporate procurement announcement from a single off-taker to date, and showcase the company's leadership and commitment to a clean and prosperous energy future."</p><p>"On behalf of the renewable sector, we applaud Amazon for its unprecedented contribution to the renewable energy transition this year. With an impressive 35 major new renewable projects in 2020, Amazon deserves tremendous credit for its leadership in the global shift to renewable energy. Procuring more than 4,000 MW of new renewable power in a single year is an incredible achievement, and it marks big progress toward Amazon's goal of being powered by 100% renewable power. We are immensely grateful to Amazon for their efforts to help us stay within shouting distance of the greenhouse gas emission reductions scientists say are needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change," said Gregory Wetstone, President and CEO, American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE).</p><p>Last year, Amazon and Global Optimism co-founded The Climate Pledge, a commitment to reach the Paris Agreement 10 years early and be net-zero carbon by 2040. The pledge now has 31 signatories, including Unilever, Verizon, Siemens, Microsoft, and Best Buy. To reach its goal, Amazon will continue to reduce emissions across its operations by establishing a path to power its operations with 100% renewable energy, five years ahead of the company's initial target of 2030; delivering its Shipment Zero vision to make all shipments net-zero carbon, with 50% net-zero carbon by 2030; and purchasing 100,000 electric delivery vehicles, the largest order ever of electric delivery vehicles. For more information, visit https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201210005304/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon</p>

AWS and Arm Demonstrate Production-Scale Electronic Design Automation in the Cloud

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-and-Arm-Demonstrate-Production-Scale-Electronic-Design-Automation-in-the-Cloud/default.aspx

AWS-and-Arm-Demonstrate-Production-Scale-Electronic-Design-Automation-in-the-Cloud

12/10/2020 03:01:00

AWS and Arm Demonstrate Production-Scale Electronic Design Automation in the Cloud

12/10/2020

2020

By migrating semiconductor design and verification to AWS running on Graviton2-based instances, Arm is reducing cost and scheduling risks for new projects, increasing throughput by up to 10x, and freeing engineers to focus on innovation SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 10, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Arm, a global leader in semiconductor design and silicon intellectual property development and licensing, will leverage AWS for its cloud use, including the vast majority of its electronic design automation (EDA) workloads. Arm is migrating EDA workloads to AWS, leveraging AWS Graviton2-based instances (powered by Arm Neoverse cores), and leading the way for transformation of the semiconductor industry, which has traditionally used on-premises data centers for the computationally intensive work of verifying semiconductor designs. To carry out verification more efficiently, Arm uses the cloud to run simulations of real-world compute scenarios, taking advantage of AWS's virtually unlimited storage and high-performance computing infrastructure to scale the number of simulations it can run in parallel. Since beginning its AWS cloud migration, Arm has realized a 6x improvement in performance time for EDA workflows on AWS. In addition, by running telemetry (the collection and integration of data from remote sources) and analysis on AWS, Arm is generating more powerful engineering, business, and operational insights that help increase workflow efficiency and optimize costs and resources across the company. Arm ultimately plans to reduce its global datacenter footprint by at least 45% and its on-premises compute by 80% as it completes its migration to AWS. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201210005232/en/ Arm is migrating electronic design automation workloads to AWS, leveraging a range of Amazon EC2 instance types, including AWS Graviton2-based instances powered by Arm Neoverse cores. (Photo: Arm) Highly specialized semiconductor devices power the growing capabilities of everything from smartphones, to data center infrastructure, to medical equipment, to self-driving vehicles. Each chip can contain billions of transistors engineered down to the single-digit nanometer level (roughly 100,000x smaller than the width of a human hair) to drive maximum performance in minimal space. EDA is one of the key technologies that make such extreme engineering feasible. EDA workflows are complex and include front-end design, simulation, and verification, as well as increasingly large back-end workloads that include timing and power analysis, design rule checks, and other applications to prepare the chip for production. These highly iterative workflows traditionally take many months or even years to produce a new device, such as a system-on-a-chip, and involve massive compute power. Semiconductor companies that run these workloads on-premises must constantly balance costs, schedules, and data center resources to advance multiple projects at the same time. As a result, they can face shortages of compute power that slow progress or bear the expense of maintaining idle compute capacity. By migrating its EDA workloads to AWS, Arm overcomes the constraints of traditionally managed EDA workflows and gains elasticity through massively scalable compute power, enabling it to run simulations in parallel, simplify telemetry and analysis, reduce its iteration time for semiconductor designs, and add testing cycles without impacting delivery schedules. Arm leverages Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to streamline its costs and timelines by optimizing EDA workflows across the wide variety of specialized Amazon EC2 instance types. For example, the company uses AWS Graviton2-based instances to achieve high-performance and scalability, resulting in more cost-effective operations than running hundreds of thousands of on-premises servers. Arm uses AWS Compute Optimizer, a service that uses machine learning to recommend the optimal Amazon EC2 instance types for specific workloads, to help streamline its workflows. On top of the cost benefits, Arm leverages the high-performance of AWS Graviton2 instances to increase throughput for its engineering workloads, consistently improving throughput per dollar by over 40% compared to previous generation x86 processor-based M5 instances. In addition, Arm uses services from AWS partner Databricks to develop and run machine learning applications in the cloud. Through the Databricks platform running on Amazon EC2, Arm can process data from every step in its engineering workflows to generate actionable insights for the company's hardware and software groups and achieve measurable improvement in engineering efficiency. "Through our collaboration with AWS, we've focused on improving efficiencies and maximizing throughput to give precious time back to our engineers to focus on innovation," said Rene Haas, President, IPG, Arm. "Now that we can run on Amazon EC2 using AWS Graviton2 instances with Arm Neoverse-based processors, we're optimizing engineering workflows, reducing costs, and accelerating project timelines to deliver powerful results to our customers more quickly and cost effectively than ever before." "AWS provides truly elastic high performance computing, unmatched network performance, and scalable storage that is required for the next generation of EDA workloads, and this is why we are so excited to collaborate with Arm to power their demanding EDA workloads running our high-performance Arm-based Graviton2 processors," said Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, AWS. "Graviton2 processors can provide up to 40% price performance advantage over current-generation x86-based instances." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201210005232/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>By migrating semiconductor design and verification to AWS running on Graviton2-based instances, Arm is reducing cost and scheduling risks for new projects, increasing throughput by up to 10x, and freeing engineers to focus on innovation</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 10, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Arm, a global leader in semiconductor design and silicon intellectual property development and licensing, will leverage AWS for its cloud use, including the vast majority of its electronic design automation (EDA) workloads. Arm is migrating EDA workloads to AWS, leveraging AWS Graviton2-based instances (powered by Arm Neoverse cores), and leading the way for transformation of the semiconductor industry, which has traditionally used on-premises data centers for the computationally intensive work of verifying semiconductor designs. To carry out verification more efficiently, Arm uses the cloud to run simulations of real-world compute scenarios, taking advantage of AWS's virtually unlimited storage and high-performance computing infrastructure to scale the number of simulations it can run in parallel. Since beginning its AWS cloud migration, Arm has realized a 6x improvement in performance time for EDA workflows on AWS. In addition, by running telemetry (the collection and integration of data from remote sources) and analysis on AWS, Arm is generating more powerful engineering, business, and operational insights that help increase workflow efficiency and optimize costs and resources across the company. Arm ultimately plans to reduce its global datacenter footprint by at least 45% and its on-premises compute by 80% as it completes its migration to AWS.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201210005232/en/</p><div><p>Arm is migrating electronic design automation workloads to AWS, leveraging a range of Amazon EC2 instance types, including AWS Graviton2-based instances powered by Arm Neoverse cores. (Photo: Arm)</p></div><p>Highly specialized semiconductor devices power the growing capabilities of everything from smartphones, to data center infrastructure, to medical equipment, to self-driving vehicles. Each chip can contain billions of transistors engineered down to the single-digit nanometer level (roughly 100,000x smaller than the width of a human hair) to drive maximum performance in minimal space. EDA is one of the key technologies that make such extreme engineering feasible. EDA workflows are complex and include front-end design, simulation, and verification, as well as increasingly large back-end workloads that include timing and power analysis, design rule checks, and other applications to prepare the chip for production. These highly iterative workflows traditionally take many months or even years to produce a new device, such as a system-on-a-chip, and involve massive compute power. Semiconductor companies that run these workloads on-premises must constantly balance costs, schedules, and data center resources to advance multiple projects at the same time. As a result, they can face shortages of compute power that slow progress or bear the expense of maintaining idle compute capacity.</p><p>By migrating its EDA workloads to AWS, Arm overcomes the constraints of traditionally managed EDA workflows and gains elasticity through massively scalable compute power, enabling it to run simulations in parallel, simplify telemetry and analysis, reduce its iteration time for semiconductor designs, and add testing cycles without impacting delivery schedules. Arm leverages Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to streamline its costs and timelines by optimizing EDA workflows across the wide variety of specialized Amazon EC2 instance types. For example, the company uses AWS Graviton2-based instances to achieve high-performance and scalability, resulting in more cost-effective operations than running hundreds of thousands of on-premises servers. Arm uses AWS Compute Optimizer, a service that uses machine learning to recommend the optimal Amazon EC2 instance types for specific workloads, to help streamline its workflows.</p><p>On top of the cost benefits, Arm leverages the high-performance of AWS Graviton2 instances to increase throughput for its engineering workloads, consistently improving throughput per dollar by over 40% compared to previous generation x86 processor-based M5 instances. In addition, Arm uses services from AWS partner Databricks to develop and run machine learning applications in the cloud. Through the Databricks platform running on Amazon EC2, Arm can process data from every step in its engineering workflows to generate actionable insights for the company's hardware and software groups and achieve measurable improvement in engineering efficiency.</p><p>"Through our collaboration with AWS, we've focused on improving efficiencies and maximizing throughput to give precious time back to our engineers to focus on innovation," said Rene Haas, President, IPG, Arm. "Now that we can run on Amazon EC2 using AWS Graviton2 instances with Arm Neoverse-based processors, we're optimizing engineering workflows, reducing costs, and accelerating project timelines to deliver powerful results to our customers more quickly and cost effectively than ever before."</p><p>"AWS provides truly elastic high performance computing, unmatched network performance, and scalable storage that is required for the next generation of EDA workloads, and this is why we are so excited to collaborate with Arm to power their demanding EDA workloads running our high-performance Arm-based Graviton2 processors," said Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, AWS. "Graviton2 processors can provide up to 40% price performance advantage over current-generation x86-based instances."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201210005232/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

Unilever, Microsoft, Brooks, Neste, and ITV Are Among 13 More Companies to Join The Climate Pledge

/news/news-details/2020/Unilever-Microsoft-Brooks-Neste-and-ITV-Are-Among-13-More-Companies-to-Join-The-Climate-Pledge/default.aspx

Unilever-Microsoft-Brooks-Neste-and-ITV-Are-Among-13-More-Companies-to-Join-The-Climate-Pledge

12/09/2020 10:00:00

Unilever, Microsoft, Brooks, Neste, and ITV Are Among 13 More Companies to Join The Climate Pledge

12/09/2020

2020

Thirty-one companies have now joined The Climate Pledge, a commitment co-founded by Amazon and Global Optimism to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement 10 years early New signatories – Atos, Brooks, Canary Wharf Group, Coca-Cola European Partners, ERM, Groupe SEB France, Harbour Air, ITV, Microsoft, Neste, Rubicon, Unilever, and Vaude – are taking real, science-based, high-impact actions to tackle climate change, including deploying renewable energy, investing in sustainable buildings, and mobilizing supply chains SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 9, 2020-- Today, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Global Optimism announced that 13 new signatories—Atos, Brooks, Canary Wharf Group, Coca-Cola European Partners, ERM, Groupe SEB France, Harbour Air, ITV, Microsoft, Neste, Rubicon, Unilever, and Vaude—have joined The Climate Pledge, a commitment to be net-zero carbon by 2040, a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement's goal of 2050. Signatories to The Climate Pledge agree to: Measure and report greenhouse gas emissions on a regular basis; Implement decarbonization strategies in line with the Paris Agreement through real business changes and innovations, including efficiency improvements, renewable energy, materials reductions, and other carbon emission elimination strategies; Neutralize any remaining emissions with additional, quantifiable, real, permanent, and socially-beneficial offsets to achieve net-zero annual carbon emissions by 2040. "Last year, Amazon and Global Optimism co-founded The Climate Pledge to encourage companies to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement ten years early. Today, we have exciting news: 13 more companies, including Unilever and Microsoft, are joining this commitment to confront climate change together and save the planet for future generations," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. "There are now 31 companies from around the world that have signed The Climate Pledge, and collectively we are sending an important signal to the market that there is significant and rapidly growing demand for technologies that can help us build a zero-carbon economy." Atos As a leader in secure and decarbonized digital services, Atos has made it its mission to pave the way for a carbon-neutral and sustainable economy through technology innovations. Committed to reducing its environmental footprint and helping businesses succeed in their climate ambitions, Atos uses dedicated digital solutions and highly specialized skills to offer one of the most comprehensive approaches to decarbonization in the market. This year, Atos announced its commitment to net-zero carbon emissions by 2035 across scope 1, 2, and 3 carbon emissions, setting the highest decarbonization standards for its industry and accelerating its decade-long environmental program. "As a trusted transformation and innovation partner, it is our responsibility to use our unique set of capabilities to tackle the climate change emergency and enable others to do the same, starting with our ecosystem," said Elie Girard, Atos CEO. Brooks Brooks' commitment to sustainability spans a decade, and the high-performance running brand recently adopted a roadmap to reduce scope 1, 2, and 3 carbon emissions in line with climate science, and to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. "We live, work, and run as part of a global community. The planet is our home. And because more than 150 million people worldwide run outside, it's critical we take care of it," said Jim Weber, Brooks CEO. "As we create new gear and run our global business, we seek to minimize our environmental impact, create positive social change, and be transparent about areas where we can do better. We are very proud to be the first athletic brand to join The Climate Pledge. These partnerships will be critical to achieving our ambitious goals." Canary Wharf Group Canary Wharf Group (CWG) is responsible for Europe's biggest urban regeneration project in London, and it has delivered one of the largest environmentally certified portfolios in the UK, with over 10 million square feet of sustainably certified buildings to date. As part of its commitment to The Climate Pledge, CWG has launched its net-zero carbon pathway, setting out tangible steps to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions, as to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. "Tackling climate change is an urgent challenge facing all of us, and the property industry has a critical role to play. Canary Wharf is run on 100% renewable electricity and has been since 2012 but there is more to do," said Shobi Khan, Canary Wharf Group CEO. "We are committed to achieving net-zero carbon by 2030, and we will work with our tenants and suppliers over the next decade to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions, and support the global transition We are committed to reducing our carbon emissions to net zero by 2030, working hand-in-hand with our tenants and suppliers to make this a reality. Joining The Climate Pledge is recognition of this commitment." Coca-Cola European Partners Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP) aspires to become net zero by 2040 across its entire value chain, and it will reduce its absolute greenhouse gas emissions by 30% by 2030, in alignment with a 1.5°C pathway and the Science-Based Targets Initiative. CCEP has already reduced its emissions across its value chain by 30.5% since 2010 by shifting to using 100% renewable electricity with the support of RE100; reducing the energy intensity of its cold drink equipment fleet by 60% since 2010; and reducing its use of virgin oil-based plastic by a third in its PET bottles. "We are committed to playing our part in global efforts to address the climate crisis by reducing absolute greenhouse gas emissions across our value chain," said Damian Gammell, CCEP CEO. "We aim to do this by continuing to decarbonize our own business wherever possible and by encouraging our suppliers to set their own science-based targets and use 100% renewable electricity by 2023. It is a great pleasure to join The Climate Pledge and accelerate our ambition to become net zero by 2040." ERM ERM works with companies around the world to help them identify and address critical climate risks and opportunities. ERM's deep experience in climate science, policy, and economics, coupled with its digital expertise, provides its clients with the tools and insights required to navigate the complexities of the transition to a low-carbon future. ERM is also acutely aware of its responsibility to reduce its own footprint through better energy management, so it has switched to renewable power and is seeking credible approaches to offset emissions from travel. "Sustainability at ERM is a commitment to supporting socio-economic development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs," said Keryn James, ERM CEO. "Climate-related risk is a business issue that has a direct impact on ERM's financial health, our reputation, as well as our ability to attract and retain talent. As the leading global sustainability advisory firm, our purpose is to shape a sustainable future with the world's leading organizations and we are proud to join The Climate Pledge and redouble our efforts to achieve carbon neutrality in our operations." Groupe SEB France Aware of its responsibility to create a more sustainable planet, Groupe SEB France is committed to reducing the environmental impacts stemming from its business activities. Since it established its first environmental commitments, Groupe SEB France has recorded a 21% decrease in the energy used at its industrial and logistics sites, exceeded its objective on recycling with 35% of recycled materials in its products and packaging, and exceeded its goal on the reduction of logistics-related carbon emissions, with a 33% reduction per unit sold. "Our key ambitions are to step up innovation to guide our business model towards a more circular economy, and we continue to fight against climate change," said Richard Joaristi, Groupe SEB France General Manager. "We are excited to join The Climate Pledge as we continue our journey to net-zero carbon by 2040." Harbour Air Named one of Canada's best managed companies for 11 consecutive years, Harbour Air has been calculating and offsetting the airline's carbon footprint for over a decade. In 2007, the regional airline became the world's first and only carbon-neutral airline. Since then, Harbour Air has offset 100% of its emissions associated with seaplane fuel use and corporate operations. Last year, Harbour Air took its commitment to sustainability one step further and on December 10, 2019, the airline successfully converted and achieved the world's first flight of a fully electric commercial aircraft. The ePlane is now being certified and approved by the FAA and Transport Canada—a critical next step in Harbour Air's goals to become the first fully electric commercial airline. "Being a sustainable and responsible corporate citizen is not only embedded into our organizational values, but, I believe, is vital to our success in the community," said Greg McDougall, Harbour Air founder and CEO. "As the world's first and only carbon-neutral airline, we are proud of our industry leadership towards sustainability. We look forward to joining The Climate Pledge community and supporting other organizations and industry leaders such as Amazon, Global Optimism, and other signatories to reach net-zero carbon by 2040." ITV ITV, the UK TV company, believes that TV has a critical role to play not only in reducing emissions, but also in shifting culture and creating the new normal. ITV has committed to becoming net zero in operations, productions, and business travel by 2030. The company's strategy for achieving net-zero emissions is to reduce its impact so that it is as close to zero as possible, in line with the latest climate science. The company will also sequester the emissions it absolutely cannot reduce through third party-verified tree planting and blue-carbon offsetting projects. "Tackling climate change is one of the greatest challenges we will face in our lifetime. The effects of climate change are already here and the time to act is now," said Carolyn McCall, ITV CEO. "The scale of change needed demands that all of us, businesses, governments and citizens work collaboratively and act boldly. Reaching over 50 million people every month, we believe that ITV has a critical role to play; not only in reducing our own emissions, but in shifting culture and creating the new normal. ITV is proud to be a signatory of The Climate Pledge." Microsoft In January, Microsoft committed to be carbon negative by 2030 and remove from the environment all the carbon it has emitted directly or by electrical consumption by 2050. The company has been carbon neutral since 2012 and is committed to promoting sustainable development and low-carbon business practices globally through its cloud-enabled technologies. To meet the company's ambitious commitments and help partners and customers meet their own climate goals, collaboration is key and its one of the primary reasons Microsoft is signing on to The Climate Pledge. "No one company or organization can meaningfully address the climate crisis on their own. It will take aggressive approaches, new innovative technologies and strong commitment to collaboration across industries and economic sectors," said Lucas Joppa, Microsoft Chief Environmental Officer. "By joining The Climate Pledge community and working together, we will be able to collectively rise to the challenge and curb our emissions so that we can make progress toward a net zero future." Neste Neste, a global leader in renewable and circular solutions, is the first major energy company to sign The Climate Pledge. 15 years ago, Neste decided to transform from an oil company to a renewable products company. Since then, Neste has been consistently recognized for its pioneering sustainability leadership. The company has been included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices for 14 consecutive years and three years in the top three of the Global 100 list of the world's most sustainable companies by Corporate Knights. Continuing on its journey, Neste has set two ambitious climate commitments: to reduce customers' greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 million tons annually by 2030, and to reach carbon neutral production by 2035. These goals are driven by Neste's purpose to create a healthier planet for our children. "The climate crisis is one of the biggest challenges of our times," said Peter Vanacker, Neste President and CEO. "It will not be solved with one single solution, but calls for utilizing all available solutions and innovating new ones. This is team play. By joining The Climate Pledge we are reinforcing our commitment to sustainability and are excited to join a community that will share knowledge, ideas, and best practices. We look forward to working together on this important mission." Rubicon Rubicon is a software company that provides smart waste and recycling solutions for businesses and governments worldwide. Using technology to drive environmental innovation, they help businesses become more sustainable enterprises and neighborhoods into greener and smarter places to live and work. Through the design and implementation of circular solutions, which divert waste away from landfills, they help their partners cut greenhouse gas emissions and create a more sustainable world. Rubicon's mission is to end waste by helping its partners find economic value in their waste streams and confidently execute on their sustainability goals. "We believe that climate change is among the most urgent issues the world is facing, which makes our joining The Climate Pledge a defining moment for Rubicon. It is our declaration of alliance in the fight against climate change and a restatement of our company's mission to end waste," said David Rachelson, Rubicon Chief Sustainability Officer. "Every day, our team works tirelessly alongside our clients to reduce the accumulation of waste and to mitigate its harmful impact on the environment. Putting our name to this pledge reconfirms our dedication to creating a cleaner, healthier, and safer planet for all humankind. We are proud to stand alongside the other companies who have signed The Climate Pledge in this most pressing of global missions." Unilever Unilever first set value chain greenhouse gas footprint targets from cradle to grave back in 2010, as part of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. These include halving the greenhouse gas footprint of its products across the value chain and to have no greenhouse gas emissions from its own operations by 2030. The latter target was introduced in a new strategy launched in 2015 ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21) and included a shift to 100% renewable energy by 2030, with an interim milestone of 100% renewable grid electricity worldwide by 2020—which was achieved in January this year. In June this year, Unilever committed to net zero emissions from all its products, from sourcing to point of sale, by 2039. "We are delighted to be working with Amazon and Global Optimism on the Climate Pledge," said Rebecca Marmot, Unilever Chief Sustainability Officer. "Tackling the climate crisis is of paramount importance. At Unilever we have set ourselves a target of net zero emissions from sourcing to point of sale by 2039 and are investing €1bn into a fund to tackle climate change through our brands. With the rest of the Climate Pledge community, we look forward to raising the bar for ambitious collective action on the most urgent challenge of our time." Vaude Vaude is committed to reducing its carbon emissions in line with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. Since 2012, the company's headquarters has been certified as climate neutral. It has now set itself with an ambitious, science-based goal to produce all of its products worldwide with climate-neutral manufacturing. "In order to effectively tackle climate change, we must succeed in limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees in accordance with the Paris Agreement," said Antje von Dewitz, Vaude CEO. "At Vaude we want to make our contribution and have set ourselves the goal of manufacturing all products with climate-neutral production. We are proud to join The Climate Pledge, so that we can accelerate our trajectory towards achieving net-zero carbon by 2040." "The Paris Agreement set out a unifying roadmap for all countries and all people to address the climate crisis by taking action," said Christiana Figueres, the UN's former climate change chief and Global Optimism founding partner. "By joining The Climate Pledge, signatories are not just making a statement of commitment to the future, they are setting a pathway to significant actions and investments that will create jobs, spur innovation, regenerate the natural environment, and help consumers to buy more sustainable products starting now." For more information on The Climate Pledge, visit www.theclimatepledge.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about. About Global Optimism Global Optimism exists to precipitate transformational, sector-wide change. Achieving a zero emissions future is not a far-off challenge. It's one we must get on track for now. Every scientific assessment shows that to meet the goal of net -zero emissions by 2050, to keep global heating below 1.5 degrees Celsius, we must halve our emissions between 2020 and 2030. Tackling the climate crisis is only possible when everyone, everywhere plays their part. We work with like-minded collectives from all sectors who are willing to invest in the choices required to be on this challenging – and life-affirming – journey. For more information, visit https://globaloptimism.com/. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201209005672/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon

<p><em>Thirty-one companies have now joined The Climate Pledge, a commitment co-founded by Amazon and Global Optimism to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement 10 years early</em></p><p><em>New signatories – Atos, Brooks, Canary Wharf Group, Coca-Cola European Partners, ERM, Groupe SEB France, Harbour Air, ITV, Microsoft, Neste, Rubicon, Unilever, and Vaude – are taking real, science-based, high-impact actions to tackle climate change, including deploying renewable energy, investing in sustainable buildings, and mobilizing supply chains</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 9, 2020-- Today, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Global Optimism announced that 13 new signatories—Atos, Brooks, Canary Wharf Group, Coca-Cola European Partners, ERM, Groupe SEB France, Harbour Air, ITV, Microsoft, Neste, Rubicon, Unilever, and Vaude—have joined The Climate Pledge, a commitment to be net-zero carbon by 2040, a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement's goal of 2050.</p><p>Signatories to The Climate Pledge agree to:</p><ul><li>Measure and report greenhouse gas emissions on a regular basis;</li><li>Implement decarbonization strategies in line with the Paris Agreement through real business changes and innovations, including efficiency improvements, renewable energy, materials reductions, and other carbon emission elimination strategies;</li><li>Neutralize any remaining emissions with additional, quantifiable, real, permanent, and socially-beneficial offsets to achieve net-zero annual carbon emissions by 2040.</li></ul><p>"Last year, Amazon and Global Optimism co-founded The Climate Pledge to encourage companies to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement ten years early. Today, we have exciting news: 13 more companies, including Unilever and Microsoft, are joining this commitment to confront climate change together and save the planet for future generations," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. "There are now 31 companies from around the world that have signed The Climate Pledge, and collectively we are sending an important signal to the market that there is significant and rapidly growing demand for technologies that can help us build a zero-carbon economy."</p><p>Atos</p><p>As a leader in secure and decarbonized digital services, Atos has made it its mission to pave the way for a carbon-neutral and sustainable economy through technology innovations. Committed to reducing its environmental footprint and helping businesses succeed in their climate ambitions, Atos uses dedicated digital solutions and highly specialized skills to offer one of the most comprehensive approaches to decarbonization in the market. This year, Atos announced its commitment to net-zero carbon emissions by 2035 across scope 1, 2, and 3 carbon emissions, setting the highest decarbonization standards for its industry and accelerating its decade-long environmental program.</p><p>"As a trusted transformation and innovation partner, it is our responsibility to use our unique set of capabilities to tackle the climate change emergency and enable others to do the same, starting with our ecosystem," said Elie Girard, Atos CEO.</p><p>Brooks</p><p>Brooks' commitment to sustainability spans a decade, and the high-performance running brand recently adopted a roadmap to reduce scope 1, 2, and 3 carbon emissions in line with climate science, and to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.</p><p>"We live, work, and run as part of a global community. The planet is our home. And because more than 150 million people worldwide run outside, it's critical we take care of it," said Jim Weber, Brooks CEO. "As we create new gear and run our global business, we seek to minimize our environmental impact, create positive social change, and be transparent about areas where we can do better. We are very proud to be the first athletic brand to join The Climate Pledge. These partnerships will be critical to achieving our ambitious goals."</p><p>Canary Wharf Group</p><p>Canary Wharf Group (CWG) is responsible for Europe's biggest urban regeneration project in London, and it has delivered one of the largest environmentally certified portfolios in the UK, with over 10 million square feet of sustainably certified buildings to date. As part of its commitment to The Climate Pledge, CWG has launched its net-zero carbon pathway, setting out tangible steps to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions, as to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.</p><p>"Tackling climate change is an urgent challenge facing all of us, and the property industry has a critical role to play. Canary Wharf is run on 100% renewable electricity and has been since 2012 but there is more to do," said Shobi Khan, Canary Wharf Group CEO. "We are committed to achieving net-zero carbon by 2030, and we will work with our tenants and suppliers over the next decade to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions, and support the global transition We are committed to reducing our carbon emissions to net zero by 2030, working hand-in-hand with our tenants and suppliers to make this a reality. Joining The Climate Pledge is recognition of this commitment."</p><p>Coca-Cola European Partners</p><p>Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP) aspires to become net zero by 2040 across its entire value chain, and it will reduce its absolute greenhouse gas emissions by 30% by 2030, in alignment with a 1.5°C pathway and the Science-Based Targets Initiative. CCEP has already reduced its emissions across its value chain by 30.5% since 2010 by shifting to using 100% renewable electricity with the support of RE100; reducing the energy intensity of its cold drink equipment fleet by 60% since 2010; and reducing its use of virgin oil-based plastic by a third in its PET bottles.</p><p>"We are committed to playing our part in global efforts to address the climate crisis by reducing absolute greenhouse gas emissions across our value chain," said Damian Gammell, CCEP CEO. "We aim to do this by continuing to decarbonize our own business wherever possible and by encouraging our suppliers to set their own science-based targets and use 100% renewable electricity by 2023. It is a great pleasure to join The Climate Pledge and accelerate our ambition to become net zero by 2040."</p><p>ERM</p><p>ERM works with companies around the world to help them identify and address critical climate risks and opportunities. ERM's deep experience in climate science, policy, and economics, coupled with its digital expertise, provides its clients with the tools and insights required to navigate the complexities of the transition to a low-carbon future. ERM is also acutely aware of its responsibility to reduce its own footprint through better energy management, so it has switched to renewable power and is seeking credible approaches to offset emissions from travel.</p><p>"Sustainability at ERM is a commitment to supporting socio-economic development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs," said Keryn James, ERM CEO. "Climate-related risk is a business issue that has a direct impact on ERM's financial health, our reputation, as well as our ability to attract and retain talent. As the leading global sustainability advisory firm, our purpose is to shape a sustainable future with the world's leading organizations and we are proud to join The Climate Pledge and redouble our efforts to achieve carbon neutrality in our operations."</p><p>Groupe SEB France</p><p>Aware of its responsibility to create a more sustainable planet, Groupe SEB France is committed to reducing the environmental impacts stemming from its business activities. Since it established its first environmental commitments, Groupe SEB France has recorded a 21% decrease in the energy used at its industrial and logistics sites, exceeded its objective on recycling with 35% of recycled materials in its products and packaging, and exceeded its goal on the reduction of logistics-related carbon emissions, with a 33% reduction per unit sold.</p><p>"Our key ambitions are to step up innovation to guide our business model towards a more circular economy, and we continue to fight against climate change," said Richard Joaristi, Groupe SEB France General Manager. "We are excited to join The Climate Pledge as we continue our journey to net-zero carbon by 2040."</p><p>Harbour Air</p><p>Named one of Canada's best managed companies for 11 consecutive years, Harbour Air has been calculating and offsetting the airline's carbon footprint for over a decade. In 2007, the regional airline became the world's first and only carbon-neutral airline. Since then, Harbour Air has offset 100% of its emissions associated with seaplane fuel use and corporate operations. Last year, Harbour Air took its commitment to sustainability one step further and on December 10, 2019, the airline successfully converted and achieved the world's first flight of a fully electric commercial aircraft. The ePlane is now being certified and approved by the FAA and Transport Canada—a critical next step in Harbour Air's goals to become the first fully electric commercial airline.</p><p>"Being a sustainable and responsible corporate citizen is not only embedded into our organizational values, but, I believe, is vital to our success in the community," said Greg McDougall, Harbour Air founder and CEO. "As the world's first and only carbon-neutral airline, we are proud of our industry leadership towards sustainability. We look forward to joining The Climate Pledge community and supporting other organizations and industry leaders such as Amazon, Global Optimism, and other signatories to reach net-zero carbon by 2040."</p><p>ITV</p><p>ITV, the UK TV company, believes that TV has a critical role to play not only in reducing emissions, but also in shifting culture and creating the new normal. ITV has committed to becoming net zero in operations, productions, and business travel by 2030. The company's strategy for achieving net-zero emissions is to reduce its impact so that it is as close to zero as possible, in line with the latest climate science. The company will also sequester the emissions it absolutely cannot reduce through third party-verified tree planting and blue-carbon offsetting projects.</p><p>"Tackling climate change is one of the greatest challenges we will face in our lifetime. The effects of climate change are already here and the time to act is now," said Carolyn McCall, ITV CEO. "The scale of change needed demands that all of us, businesses, governments and citizens work collaboratively and act boldly. Reaching over 50 million people every month, we believe that ITV has a critical role to play; not only in reducing our own emissions, but in shifting culture and creating the new normal. ITV is proud to be a signatory of The Climate Pledge."</p><p>Microsoft</p><p>In January, Microsoft committed to be carbon negative by 2030 and remove from the environment all the carbon it has emitted directly or by electrical consumption by 2050. The company has been carbon neutral since 2012 and is committed to promoting sustainable development and low-carbon business practices globally through its cloud-enabled technologies. To meet the company's ambitious commitments and help partners and customers meet their own climate goals, collaboration is key and its one of the primary reasons Microsoft is signing on to The Climate Pledge.</p><p>"No one company or organization can meaningfully address the climate crisis on their own. It will take aggressive approaches, new innovative technologies and strong commitment to collaboration across industries and economic sectors," said Lucas Joppa, Microsoft Chief Environmental Officer. "By joining The Climate Pledge community and working together, we will be able to collectively rise to the challenge and curb our emissions so that we can make progress toward a net zero future."</p><p>Neste</p><p>Neste, a global leader in renewable and circular solutions, is the first major energy company to sign The Climate Pledge. 15 years ago, Neste decided to transform from an oil company to a renewable products company. Since then, Neste has been consistently recognized for its pioneering sustainability leadership. The company has been included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices for 14 consecutive years and three years in the top three of the Global 100 list of the world's most sustainable companies by Corporate Knights. Continuing on its journey, Neste has set two ambitious climate commitments: to reduce customers' greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 million tons annually by 2030, and to reach carbon neutral production by 2035. These goals are driven by Neste's purpose to create a healthier planet for our children.</p><p>"The climate crisis is one of the biggest challenges of our times," said Peter Vanacker, Neste President and CEO. "It will not be solved with one single solution, but calls for utilizing all available solutions and innovating new ones. This is team play. By joining The Climate Pledge we are reinforcing our commitment to sustainability and are excited to join a community that will share knowledge, ideas, and best practices. We look forward to working together on this important mission."</p><p>Rubicon</p><p>Rubicon is a software company that provides smart waste and recycling solutions for businesses and governments worldwide. Using technology to drive environmental innovation, they help businesses become more sustainable enterprises and neighborhoods into greener and smarter places to live and work. Through the design and implementation of circular solutions, which divert waste away from landfills, they help their partners cut greenhouse gas emissions and create a more sustainable world. Rubicon's mission is to end waste by helping its partners find economic value in their waste streams and confidently execute on their sustainability goals.</p><p>"We believe that climate change is among the most urgent issues the world is facing, which makes our joining The Climate Pledge a defining moment for Rubicon. It is our declaration of alliance in the fight against climate change and a restatement of our company's mission to end waste," said David Rachelson, Rubicon Chief Sustainability Officer. "Every day, our team works tirelessly alongside our clients to reduce the accumulation of waste and to mitigate its harmful impact on the environment. Putting our name to this pledge reconfirms our dedication to creating a cleaner, healthier, and safer planet for all humankind. We are proud to stand alongside the other companies who have signed The Climate Pledge in this most pressing of global missions."</p><p>Unilever</p><p>Unilever first set value chain greenhouse gas footprint targets from cradle to grave back in 2010, as part of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. These include halving the greenhouse gas footprint of its products across the value chain and to have no greenhouse gas emissions from its own operations by 2030. The latter target was introduced in a new strategy launched in 2015 ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21) and included a shift to 100% renewable energy by 2030, with an interim milestone of 100% renewable grid electricity worldwide by 2020—which was achieved in January this year. In June this year, Unilever committed to net zero emissions from all its products, from sourcing to point of sale, by 2039.</p><p>"We are delighted to be working with Amazon and Global Optimism on the Climate Pledge," said Rebecca Marmot, Unilever Chief Sustainability Officer. "Tackling the climate crisis is of paramount importance. At Unilever we have set ourselves a target of net zero emissions from sourcing to point of sale by 2039 and are investing €1bn into a fund to tackle climate change through our brands. With the rest of the Climate Pledge community, we look forward to raising the bar for ambitious collective action on the most urgent challenge of our time."</p><p>Vaude</p><p>Vaude is committed to reducing its carbon emissions in line with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. Since 2012, the company's headquarters has been certified as climate neutral. It has now set itself with an ambitious, science-based goal to produce all of its products worldwide with climate-neutral manufacturing.</p><p>"In order to effectively tackle climate change, we must succeed in limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees in accordance with the Paris Agreement," said Antje von Dewitz, Vaude CEO. "At Vaude we want to make our contribution and have set ourselves the goal of manufacturing all products with climate-neutral production. We are proud to join The Climate Pledge, so that we can accelerate our trajectory towards achieving net-zero carbon by 2040."</p><p>"The Paris Agreement set out a unifying roadmap for all countries and all people to address the climate crisis by taking action," said Christiana Figueres, the UN's former climate change chief and Global Optimism founding partner. "By joining The Climate Pledge, signatories are not just making a statement of commitment to the future, they are setting a pathway to significant actions and investments that will create jobs, spur innovation, regenerate the natural environment, and help consumers to buy more sustainable products starting now."</p><p>For more information on The Climate Pledge, visit www.theclimatepledge.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about.</p><p>About Global Optimism</p><p>Global Optimism exists to precipitate transformational, sector-wide change. Achieving a zero emissions future is not a far-off challenge. It's one we must get on track for now. Every scientific assessment shows that to meet the goal of net -zero emissions by 2050, to keep global heating below 1.5 degrees Celsius, we must halve our emissions between 2020 and 2030. Tackling the climate crisis is only possible when everyone, everywhere plays their part. We work with like-minded collectives from all sectors who are willing to invest in the choices required to be on this challenging – and life-affirming – journey. For more information, visit https://globaloptimism.com/.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201209005672/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon</p>

AWS Announces Amazon HealthLake

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-Amazon-HealthLake/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-Amazon-HealthLake

12/08/2020 13:00:00

AWS Announces Amazon HealthLake

12/08/2020

2020

Amazon HealthLake enables healthcare organizations to store, transform, and analyze all of their data in the cloud Cerner, Ciox Health, Konica Minolta Precision Medicine, and Orion Health among customers using Amazon HealthLake SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 8, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-eligible service for healthcare and life sciences organizations. Amazon HealthLake aggregates an organization's complete data across various silos and disparate formats into a centralized AWS data lake and automatically normalizes this information using machine learning. The service identifies each piece of clinical information, tags, and indexes events in a timeline view with standardized labels so it can be easily searched, and structures all of the data into the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) industry standard format for a complete view of the health of individual patients and entire populations. As a result, Amazon HealthLake makes it easier for customers to query, perform analytics, and run machine learning to derive meaningful value from the newly normalized data. Organizations such as healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies, clinical researchers, health insurers, and more can use Amazon HealthLake to help spot trends and anomalies in health data so they can make much more precise predictions about the progression of disease, the efficacy of clinical trials, the accuracy of insurance premiums, and many other applications. To learn more about Amazon HealthLake, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/healthlake. As machine learning becomes more mainstream, companies across every vertical business are trying to apply it to their data to deliver meaningful business value. Healthcare is applying machine learning to improve operations and patient care, with AWS customers like 3M, Anthem, AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, Cerner, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, GE Healthcare, Infor, Pfizer, and Philips embracing the cloud and machine learning to get more value out of their vast data troves. From family history and clinical observations to diagnoses and medications, healthcare organizations are creating huge volumes of patient information every day with the goal of getting a full view of a patient's health and applying analytics and machine learning to improve care, analyze population health trends, and improve operational efficiency. However, clinical data is complex and renowned for being siloed, incomplete, incompatible, and stored in on-premises systems spread across multiple locations. Getting all this information aggregated and in the FHIR format is a start toward the goal of standardizing structured data, but the majority of data remains unstructured and still needs to be tagged, indexed, and structured in chronological order to make all of the data understandable and able to query. Some healthcare organizations build rule-based tools to automate the process of transforming unstructured data (e.g., medical histories, physician notes, and medical imaging reports) and tagging clinical information (e.g., diagnoses, medications, and procedures), but these solutions often fail because the data needs to be normalized across disparate systems and because the tools can't account for every possible variation in spelling, unintended typos, and grammatical errors. Other organizations use general-purpose optical character recognition (OCR) software to process data sources, but these tools lack the medical expertise to be effective and so organizations resort to manual data entry by medical professionals which adds expense to the digitization process. Even if organizations are able to aggregate and structure their data, they still need to build their own analytics and machine learning applications to uncover relationships in the data, discover trends, and make precise predictions. The cost and operational complexity of doing all this work is prohibitive to most organizations; and as a result, the vast majority of organizations end up missing out on the untapped potential to use their data to improve the health of patients and communities. Amazon HealthLake offers medical providers, health insurers, and pharmaceutical companies a service that brings together and makes sense of all their patient data, so healthcare organizations can make more precise predictions about the health of patients and populations. The new HIPAA-eligible service enables organizations to store, tag, index, standardize, query, and apply machine learning to analyze data at petabyte scale in the cloud. Amazon HealthLake allows organizations to easily copy health data from on-premises systems to a secure data lake in the cloud and normalize every patient record across disparate formats automatically. Upon ingestion, Amazon HealthLake uses machine learning trained to understand medical terminology to identify and tag each piece of clinical information, index events into a timeline view, and enrich the data with standardized labels (e.g., medications, conditions, diagnoses, procedures, etc.) so all this information can be easily searched. For example, organizations can quickly and accurately find answers to their questions like, "How has the use of cholesterol-lowering medications helped our patients with high blood pressure last year?" To do this, customers can create a list of patients by selecting "High Cholesterol" from a standard list of medical conditions, "Oral Drugs" from a menu of treatments, and blood pressure values from the "Blood Pressure" structured field – and then they can further refine the list by choosing attributes like time frame, gender, and age. Because Amazon HealthLake also automatically structures all of a healthcare organization's data into the FHIR industry format, the information can be easily and securely shared between health systems and with third-party applications, enabling providers to collaborate more effectively and allowing patients unfettered access to their medical information. "There has been an explosion of digitized health data in recent years with the advent of electronic medical records, but organizations are telling us that unlocking the value from this information using technology like machine learning is still challenging and riddled with barriers," said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Amazon Machine Learning for AWS. "With Amazon HealthLake, healthcare organizations can reduce the time it takes to transform health data in the cloud from weeks to minutes so that it can be analyzed securely, even at petabyte scale. This completely reinvents what's possible with healthcare and brings us that much closer to everyone's goal of providing patients with more personalized and predictive treatment for individuals and across entire populations." By aggregating, labeling, indexing, and structuring all their data, Amazon HealthLake makes it easy for customers to query, analyze, and use machine learning to make sense of their data. Customers can use other AWS analytics and machine learning services with Amazon HealthLake like Amazon QuickSight for interactive dashboards and Amazon SageMaker for easily building, training, and deploying custom machine learning models. For example, healthcare organizations can use Jupyter Notebook templates in Amazon SageMaker to quickly and easily run analysis for common tasks like diagnosis predictions, hospital re-admittance probability, and operating room utilization forecasts. Healthcare and life science organizations can use Amazon HealthLake to get a complete view of patient and population health, derive insights using analytics and machine learning, and discover previously obscured relationships and trends. Cerner Corporation, a global healthcare technology company, is focused on using data to help solve issues at the speed of innovation - evolving healthcare to enhance clinical and operational outcomes, help resolve clinician burnout, and improve health equity. "At Cerner we are committed to transforming the future of healthcare through cloud delivery, machine learning, and AI. Working alongside AWS, we are in a position to accelerate innovation in healthcare. That starts with data. We are excited about the launch of Amazon HealthLake and its potential to quickly ingest patient data from various diverse sources and transform the data to perform advanced analytics to unlock new insights and serve many of our initiatives across population health," said Ryan Hamilton, SVP, Population Health, Cerner. Ciox Health is a health technology company that is dedicated to improving U.S. health outcomes by transforming clinical data into actionable insights. "At Ciox, we work to enable greater health by improving the way health information is managed," said Sasidhar Mukkamala, SVP of Data Management, Ciox Health. "Much of the health information that we ingest is unstructured, like notes and handwritten PDFs, and it is a challenge to find solutions that allow us to realize the full analytic value of that data. With 60 percent of the market share in risk adjustments, this is a huge opportunity. We are excited about getting started with Amazon HealthLake and its potential to help us meet this need and deliver better risk adjustments, predictions, billing, and much more, all informed by health data." Konica Minolta Precision Medicine (KMPM) is a life science company dedicated to the advancement of precision medicine to more accurately predict, detect, treat, and ultimately cure disease. "We are building a multi-modal platform at KMPM to handle a significant amount of health data inclusive of pathology, imaging, and genetic information. Amazon HealthLake will allow us to unlock the real power of this multi-modal approach to find novel associations and signals in our data. It will provide our expert team of data scientists and developers the ability to integrate, label, and structure this data faster, and discover insights that our clinicians and pharmaceutical partners require to truly drive precision medicine," said Kiyotaka Fujii, President of Global Healthcare, Konica Minolta. Orion Health is a global, award-winning provider of health information technology, advancing population health and precision medicine solutions for the delivery of care across the entire health ecosystem. "At Orion Health, we believe that there is significant untapped potential to transform the healthcare sector by improving how technology is used and providing insights into the data being generated. We are pleased to find a like-minded company in AWS who, with Amazon HealthLake, is now taking the next step in using machine learning to help make sense of health data in a secure, complaint, and auditable way," said Anne O'Hanlon, Product Director, Orion Health. "Data is frequently messy and incomplete, which is costly and time consuming to clean up. We are excited to work alongside AWS to deliver new ways for patients to interact with the healthcare system, supporting initiatives such as the 21st Century Cures Act designed to make healthcare more accessible and affordable, and Digital Front Door, which aims to improve health outcomes by helping patients receive the perfect care for them from the comfort of their home. Expanding the relationship we enjoy with AWS gives us an opportunity to innovate and explore new ways to deliver patient-centered healthcare and high quality health outcomes that help people live a healthier life." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

<p><em>Amazon HealthLake enables healthcare organizations to store, transform, and analyze all of their data in the cloud</em></p><p><em>Cerner, Ciox Health, Konica Minolta Precision Medicine,</em><em> and Orion Health among customers using Amazon HealthLake</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 8, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-eligible service for healthcare and life sciences organizations. Amazon HealthLake aggregates an organization's complete data across various silos and disparate formats into a centralized AWS data lake and automatically normalizes this information using machine learning. The service identifies each piece of clinical information, tags, and indexes events in a timeline view with standardized labels so it can be easily searched, and structures all of the data into the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) industry standard format for a complete view of the health of individual patients and entire populations. As a result, Amazon HealthLake makes it easier for customers to query, perform analytics, and run machine learning to derive meaningful value from the newly normalized data. Organizations such as healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies, clinical researchers, health insurers, and more can use Amazon HealthLake to help spot trends and anomalies in health data so they can make much more precise predictions about the progression of disease, the efficacy of clinical trials, the accuracy of insurance premiums, and many other applications. To learn more about Amazon HealthLake, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/healthlake.</p><p>As machine learning becomes more mainstream, companies across every vertical business are trying to apply it to their data to deliver meaningful business value. Healthcare is applying machine learning to improve operations and patient care, with AWS customers like 3M, Anthem, AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, Cerner, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, GE Healthcare, Infor, Pfizer, and Philips embracing the cloud and machine learning to get more value out of their vast data troves. From family history and clinical observations to diagnoses and medications, healthcare organizations are creating huge volumes of patient information every day with the goal of getting a full view of a patient's health and applying analytics and machine learning to improve care, analyze population health trends, and improve operational efficiency. However, clinical data is complex and renowned for being siloed, incomplete, incompatible, and stored in on-premises systems spread across multiple locations. Getting all this information aggregated and in the FHIR format is a start toward the goal of standardizing structured data, but the majority of data remains unstructured and still needs to be tagged, indexed, and structured in chronological order to make all of the data understandable and able to query. Some healthcare organizations build rule-based tools to automate the process of transforming unstructured data (e.g., medical histories, physician notes, and medical imaging reports) and tagging clinical information (e.g., diagnoses, medications, and procedures), but these solutions often fail because the data needs to be normalized across disparate systems and because the tools can't account for every possible variation in spelling, unintended typos, and grammatical errors. Other organizations use general-purpose optical character recognition (OCR) software to process data sources, but these tools lack the medical expertise to be effective and so organizations resort to manual data entry by medical professionals which adds expense to the digitization process. Even if organizations are able to aggregate and structure their data, they still need to build their own analytics and machine learning applications to uncover relationships in the data, discover trends, and make precise predictions. The cost and operational complexity of doing all this work is prohibitive to most organizations; and as a result, the vast majority of organizations end up missing out on the untapped potential to use their data to improve the health of patients and communities.</p><p>Amazon HealthLake offers medical providers, health insurers, and pharmaceutical companies a service that brings together and makes sense of all their patient data, so healthcare organizations can make more precise predictions about the health of patients and populations. The new HIPAA-eligible service enables organizations to store, tag, index, standardize, query, and apply machine learning to analyze data at petabyte scale in the cloud. Amazon HealthLake allows organizations to easily copy health data from on-premises systems to a secure data lake in the cloud and normalize every patient record across disparate formats automatically. Upon ingestion, Amazon HealthLake uses machine learning trained to understand medical terminology to identify and tag each piece of clinical information, index events into a timeline view, and enrich the data with standardized labels (e.g., medications, conditions, diagnoses, procedures, etc.) so all this information can be easily searched. For example, organizations can quickly and accurately find answers to their questions like, "<em>How has the use of cholesterol-lowering medications helped our patients with high blood pressure last year</em>?" To do this, customers can create a list of patients by selecting "High Cholesterol" from a standard list of medical conditions, "Oral Drugs" from a menu of treatments, and blood pressure values from the "Blood Pressure" structured field – and then they can further refine the list by choosing attributes like time frame, gender, and age. Because Amazon HealthLake also automatically structures all of a healthcare organization's data into the FHIR industry format, the information can be easily and securely shared between health systems and with third-party applications, enabling providers to collaborate more effectively and allowing patients unfettered access to their medical information.</p><p>"There has been an explosion of digitized health data in recent years with the advent of electronic medical records, but organizations are telling us that unlocking the value from this information using technology like machine learning is still challenging and riddled with barriers," said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Amazon Machine Learning for AWS. "With Amazon HealthLake, healthcare organizations can reduce the time it takes to transform health data in the cloud from weeks to minutes so that it can be analyzed securely, even at petabyte scale. This completely reinvents what's possible with healthcare and brings us that much closer to everyone's goal of providing patients with more personalized and predictive treatment for individuals and across entire populations."</p><p>By aggregating, labeling, indexing, and structuring all their data, Amazon HealthLake makes it easy for customers to query, analyze, and use machine learning to make sense of their data. Customers can use other AWS analytics and machine learning services with Amazon HealthLake like Amazon QuickSight for interactive dashboards and Amazon SageMaker for easily building, training, and deploying custom machine learning models. For example, healthcare organizations can use Jupyter Notebook templates in Amazon SageMaker to quickly and easily run analysis for common tasks like diagnosis predictions, hospital re-admittance probability, and operating room utilization forecasts. Healthcare and life science organizations can use Amazon HealthLake to get a complete view of patient and population health, derive insights using analytics and machine learning, and discover previously obscured relationships and trends.</p><p>Cerner Corporation, a global healthcare technology company, is focused on using data to help solve issues at the speed of innovation - evolving healthcare to enhance clinical and operational outcomes, help resolve clinician burnout, and improve health equity. "At Cerner we are committed to transforming the future of healthcare through cloud delivery, machine learning, and AI. Working alongside AWS, we are in a position to accelerate innovation in healthcare. That starts with data. We are excited about the launch of Amazon HealthLake and its potential to quickly ingest patient data from various diverse sources and transform the data to perform advanced analytics to unlock new insights and serve many of our initiatives across population health," said Ryan Hamilton, SVP, Population Health, Cerner.</p><p>Ciox Health is a health technology company that is dedicated to improving U.S. health outcomes by transforming clinical data into actionable insights. "At Ciox, we work to enable greater health by improving the way health information is managed," said Sasidhar Mukkamala, SVP of Data Management, Ciox Health. "Much of the health information that we ingest is unstructured, like notes and handwritten PDFs, and it is a challenge to find solutions that allow us to realize the full analytic value of that data. With 60 percent of the market share in risk adjustments, this is a huge opportunity. We are excited about getting started with Amazon HealthLake and its potential to help us meet this need and deliver better risk adjustments, predictions, billing, and much more, all informed by health data."</p><p>Konica Minolta Precision Medicine (KMPM) is a life science company dedicated to the advancement of precision medicine to more accurately predict, detect, treat, and ultimately cure disease. "We are building a multi-modal platform at KMPM to handle a significant amount of health data inclusive of pathology, imaging, and genetic information. Amazon HealthLake will allow us to unlock the real power of this multi-modal approach to find novel associations and signals in our data. It will provide our expert team of data scientists and developers the ability to integrate, label, and structure this data faster, and discover insights that our clinicians and pharmaceutical partners require to truly drive precision medicine," said Kiyotaka Fujii, President of Global Healthcare, Konica Minolta.</p><p>Orion Health is a global, award-winning provider of health information technology, advancing population health and precision medicine solutions for the delivery of care across the entire health ecosystem. "At Orion Health, we believe that there is significant untapped potential to transform the healthcare sector by improving how technology is used and providing insights into the data being generated. We are pleased to find a like-minded company in AWS who, with Amazon HealthLake, is now taking the next step in using machine learning to help make sense of health data in a secure, complaint, and auditable way," said Anne O'Hanlon, Product Director, Orion Health. "Data is frequently messy and incomplete, which is costly and time consuming to clean up. We are excited to work alongside AWS to deliver new ways for patients to interact with the healthcare system, supporting initiatives such as the 21st Century Cures Act designed to make healthcare more accessible and affordable, and Digital Front Door, which aims to improve health outcomes by helping patients receive the perfect care for them from the comfort of their home. Expanding the relationship we enjoy with AWS gives us an opportunity to innovate and explore new ways to deliver patient-centered healthcare and high quality health outcomes that help people live a healthier life."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p>

AWS Announces Nine New Amazon SageMaker Capabilities

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-Nine-New-Amazon-SageMaker-Capabilities/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-Nine-New-Amazon-SageMaker-Capabilities

12/08/2020 13:00:00

AWS Announces Nine New Amazon SageMaker Capabilities

12/08/2020

2020

Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler provides the fastest and easiest way for developers to prepare data for machine learning Amazon SageMaker Feature Store delivers a purpose-built data store for storing, updating, retrieving, and sharing machine learning features Amazon SageMaker Pipelines gives developers the first purpose-built, easy-to-use continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning Amazon SageMaker Clarify provides developers with greater visibility into their training data so they can limit bias in machine learning models and explain predictions Deep profiling for Amazon SageMaker Debugger monitors machine learning training performance to help developers train models faster Distributed Training on Amazon SageMaker delivers new capabilities that can train large models up to two times faster than would otherwise be possible with today's machine learning processors Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager delivers machine learning model monitoring and management for edge devices to ensure that models deployed in production are operating correctly Amazon SageMaker JumpStart provides a developer portal for pre-trained models and pre-built workflows SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 8, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced nine new capabilities for its industry-leading machine learning service, Amazon SageMaker, making it even easier for developers to automate and scale all steps of the end-to-end machine learning workflow. Today's announcements bring together powerful new capabilities like faster data preparation, a purpose-built repository for prepared data, workflow automation, greater transparency into training data to mitigate bias and explain predictions, distributed training capabilities to train large models up to two times faster, and model monitoring on edge devices. To get started with Amazon SageMaker, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/sagemaker Machine learning is becoming more mainstream, but it is still evolving at a rapid clip. With all the attention machine learning has received, it seems like it should be simple to create machine learning models, but it isn't. In order to create a model, developers need to start with the highly manual process of preparing the data. Then they need to visualize it in notebooks, pick the right algorithm, set up the framework, train the model, tune millions of possible parameters, deploy the model, and monitor its performance. This process needs to be continuously repeated to ensure that the model is performing as expected over time. In the past, this process put machine learning out of the reach of all but the most skilled developers. However, Amazon SageMaker has changed that. Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that removes challenges from each stage of the machine learning process, making it radically easier and faster for everyday developers and data scientists to build, train, and deploy machine learning models. Tens of thousands of customers utilize Amazon SageMaker to help accelerate their machine learning deployments, including 3M, ADP, AstraZeneca, Avis, Bayer, Bundesliga, Capital One, Cerner, Chick-fil-A, Convoy, Domino's Pizza, Fidelity Investments, GE Healthcare, Georgia-Pacific, Hearst, iFood, iHeartMedia, JPMorgan Chase, Intuit, Lenovo, Lyft, National Football League, Nerdwallet, T-Mobile, Thomson Reuters, and Vanguard. Today's announcements build on the more than 50 new Amazon SageMaker capabilities that AWS has delivered in the past year to make it even easier for developers and data scientists to prepare, build, train, deploy, and manage machine learning models, including: Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler automated data preparation: Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler provides the fastest and easiest way to prepare data for machine learning. Data preparation for machine learning is a difficult process. This difficulty arises from the fact that data attributes (known as features) used to train a machine learning model often come from different sources and exist in various formats. This means that developers must spend considerable time extracting and normalizing this data so it's consistently easy to use with machine learning. Customers might also want to combine features into composite features to give the machine learning model more helpful inputs. For example, a customer might want to create a feature that describes a group of customers that are prolific spenders so they can be offered loyalty program rewards by combining features for items previously purchased, amount spent, and frequency of purchases. The work associated with transforming data into features is called feature engineering, and it consumes a lot of time for developers when they're building machine learning models. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler radically simplifies the process of data preparation and feature engineering. With Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, customers can choose the data they want from their various data stores and import it with a single click. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler contains over 300 built-in data transformers that can help customers normalize, transform, and combine features without having to write any code, while managing all of the processing infrastructure under the hood. Customers can quickly preview and inspect that these transformations are what was intended by viewing them in SageMaker Studio (the first end-to-end Integrated Development Environment for machine learning). Once the features have been engineered, Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler will save them for reuse in the Amazon SageMaker Feature Store. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store feature storage and management: Amazon SageMaker Feature Store provides a new repository that makes it easy to store, update, retrieve, and share machine learning features for training and inference. Today, customers can save their features to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). This works well for a simple set of features that are mapped to a single model, but most features are not mapped to only one model. Most features are used repeatedly by multiple models and multiple developers and data scientists, and as new features are created, developers also want to be able to reuse them repeatedly. This leads to multiple S3 objects to manage, which can quickly become difficult to manage. Developers and data scientists try to solve this by using spreadsheets, paper notes, and emails. Sometimes they even try to build a custom application to keep track of the features, but this is a lot of work and error-prone. Further, developers and data scientists need the same features not only to train multiple models with all of the data available and where this activity can happen over hours, but also to use during inference when the predictions need to be returned in milliseconds and often use just a subset of the data in relevant features. For example, a developer might want to create a model that predicts the next best song in a playlist. To do this, developers would train the model on thousands of songs and then provide the model the last three songs played during inference to predict the next song. Training and inference are very different uses cases. During training, the models can access the features offline and in batch, but for inference, the model needs only a subset of the features in near real-time. Since machine learning models have a single source of features that need to be consistent, these different access patterns make it challenging to keep the features consistent and up to date. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store solves this problem by providing a purpose-built feature store where developers can access and share features that make it much easier to name, organize, find, and share sets of features among teams of developers and data scientists. Since Amazon SageMaker Feature Store resides in Amazon SageMaker Studio—close to where machine learning models are run—it provides single-digit millisecond latency for inference. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store makes it simple and easy to organize and update large batches of features for training and smaller instantiations of them for inference. That way, there's one consistent view of features for machine learning models to use and it becomes significantly easier to generate models that produce highly accurate predictions. Amazon SageMaker Pipelines workflow management and automation: Amazon SageMaker Pipelines is the first purpose-built, easy-to-use continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning. As customers can see with feature engineering, machine learning comprises multiple steps that can benefit from orchestration and automation. This is not dissimilar to traditional programming, where customers have tools like CI/CD to help them develop and deploy applications more quickly. However, with machine learning, CI/CD tools are rarely used because they don't exist or because they are hard to set up, configure, and manage. With Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, developers can define each step of an end-to-end machine learning workflow. These workflows include the data-load steps, transformations from Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, features stored in Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, training configuration and algorithm set up, debugging steps, and optimization steps. With Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, developers can easily re-run an end-to-end workflow from Amazon SageMaker Studio, using the same settings to get the exact same model every time, or they can re-run the workflow on a regular schedule with new data to update a model. Amazon SageMaker Pipelines logs each step in Amazon SageMaker Experiments (an Amazon SageMaker capability that organizes and tracks machine learning experiments and model versions) every time a workflow is run. This helps developers visualize and compare machine learning model iterations, training parameters, and outcomes. With Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, workflows can be shared and re-used between teams, either to recreate a model or to act as a starting point for making improvements through new features, algorithms, or optimizations. Amazon SageMaker Clarify bias detection and explainability: Amazon SageMaker Clarify provides bias detection across the machine learning workflow, enabling developers to build greater fairness and transparency into their machine learning models. Once developers have prepared data for training and inference, they need to try to ensure the data is free from statistical bias and that model predictions are transparent, so they can explain how the model features are contributing to predictions. Today, developers sometimes try to use open source tools to detect statistical bias in their data, but these tools require a lot of manual effort and coding and are typically error prone. With Amazon SageMaker Clarify, developers can now more easily detect statistical bias across the entire machine learning workflow and provide explanations for predictions their machine learning models are making. Amazon SageMaker Clarify integrates with Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler where it runs a set of algorithms on features to identify bias during data preparation with visualizations that include a description of the sources and severity of possible bias. This way, developers can take steps for mitigation. Amazon SageMaker Clarify also integrates with Amazon SageMaker Experiments to make it easier to check trained models for statistical bias. It also details how each feature inputted into the model is affecting predictions. Finally, Amazon SageMaker Clarify integrates with Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor (an Amazon SageMaker capability that continuously monitors the quality of machine learning models in production) to alert developers if the importance of model features shifts and causes model behavior to change. Deep Profiling for Amazon SageMaker Debugger model training profiler: Deep Profiling for Amazon SageMaker Debugger now enables developers to train their models faster by automatically monitoring system resource utilization and providing alerts for training bottlenecks. Today, developers don't have a standard way to monitor system utilization (e.g. GPU, CPU, network throughput, and memory I/O) to identify and troubleshoot bottlenecks in their training jobs. As a result, developers can't train models as quickly and cost effectively as possible. Amazon SageMaker Debugger solves this problem with Deep Profiling's newly announced capabilities, which provide developers the ability to visually profile and monitor system resource utilization in Amazon SageMaker Studio. This makes it easier to root cause issues and reduce the time and cost of training machine learning models. With these new capabilities, Amazon SageMaker Debugger expands its scope to monitor the utilization of system resources, send out alerts on problems during training in Amazon SageMaker Studio or via AWS CloudWatch, and correlate usage to different phases in the training job or a specific point in time during training (e.g. 28 minutes after the training job started). Amazon SageMaker Debugger can also trigger actions based on alerts (e.g. stop a training job when irregularities in GPU usage are detected). Amazon SageMaker Debugger's Deep Profiling works across frameworks (PyTorch, Apache MXNet, and TensorFlow) and collects necessary system and training metrics automatically without requiring any code changes in training scripts. This allows developers to visualize how their system resources were used during training in Amazon SageMaker Studio. Distributed Training on Amazon SageMaker accelerates training times: New Distributed Training on Amazon SageMaker makes it possible to train large, complex deep learning models up to two times faster than current approaches. Today, advanced machine learning use cases—such as natural language processing for intelligent assistants, object detection and classification for autonomous vehicles, and image classification for large-scale content moderation—demand increasingly large datasets and more graphics processing unit (GPU) memory for training. However, some of these models are too big to fit in the memory provided by a single GPU. Customers can attempt to split models across multiple GPUs, but finding the best way to split the model and adjusting training code can often take weeks of tedious experimentation. To overcome these challenges, Distributed Training on Amazon SageMaker offers two distributed training capabilities that enable developers to train large models up to two times faster at no additional cost. Distributed Training with Amazon SageMaker's Data Parallelism engine scales training jobs from one GPU to hundreds or thousands by automatically splitting data across multiple GPUs, improving training time by up to 40%. The reduction in training time is possible because Amazon SageMaker's Data Parallelism engine manages GPUs for optimal synchronization using algorithms that are purposefully built to fully utilize AWS infrastructure with near-linear scaling efficiency. Distributed Training with Amazon SageMaker's Model Parallelism engine can efficiently split large, complex models with billions of parameters across multiple GPUs by automatically profiling and identifying the best way to partition models. They do this by using graph partitioning algorithms to optimally balance computation and minimize communication between GPUs, resulting in minimal code changes and fewer errors caused by GPU memory constraints. Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager model management for edge devices: Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager allows developers to optimize, secure, monitor, and maintain machine learning models deployed on fleets of edge devices. Today, customers use Amazon SageMaker Neo to create optimized models for edge devices that run up to twice as fast, with less than a tenth of the memory footprint and no loss in accuracy. However, after deployment on edge devices, customers still need to manage and monitor the models to ensure they continue to perform with high accuracy. Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager optimizes models to run faster on target devices and provides model management for edge devices, so customers can prepare, run, monitor, and update deployed machine learning models across fleets of devices at the edge. Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager gives customers the ability to cryptographically sign their models, upload prediction data from their devices to Amazon SageMaker for monitoring and analysis, and view a dashboard that tracks and visually reports on the operation of the deployed models within the Amazon SageMaker console. Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager extends capabilities that were previously only available in the cloud by sampling data from edge devices and sending it to Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor for analysis, so developers can continuously improve model quality by retraining them when their accuracy declines over time. Amazon SageMaker JumpStart enables the machine learning journey: Amazon SageMaker JumpStartprovides developers an easy-to-use, searchable interface to find best-in-class solutions, algorithms, and sample notebooks. Today, some customers that lack experience with machine learning have difficulty getting started with machine learning deployments, while more advanced developers find it difficult to adopt machine learning for all of their use cases. With today's launch of Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, customers can now quickly find relevant information specific to their machine learning use cases. Developers new to machine learning will be able to select from several complete end-to-end machine learning solutions (e.g. fraud detection, customer churn prediction, or forecasting) and deploy them directly in their Amazon SageMaker Studio environments. And, experienced users will be able to choose from more than a hundred machine learning models to quickly get started on building and training models. "Hundreds of thousands of everyday developers and data scientists have used our industry-leading machine learning service, Amazon SageMaker, to remove barriers to building, training, and deploying custom machine learning models. One of the best parts about having such a widely-adopted service like SageMaker is that we get lots of customer suggestions which fuel our next set of deliverables," said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President, Amazon Machine Learning, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "Today, we are announcing a set of tools for Amazon SageMaker that makes it much easier for developers to build end-to-end machine learning pipelines to prepare, build, train, explain, inspect, monitor, debug, and run custom machine learning models with greater visibility, explainability, and automation at scale." With corporate operations in 70 countries and sales in 200, 3M is creating the technology and products that advance every company, enhance every home, and improve everyday life. "3M's success is grounded in our entrepreneurial researchers and our constant focus on science. One way we have advanced the science of our products is the adoption of machine learning on AWS," said David Frazee, Technical Director at 3M Corporate Systems Research Lab. "Using machine learning, 3M is improving tried-and-tested products, like sandpaper, and driving innovation in several other spaces, including healthcare. As we plan to scale machine learning to more areas of 3M, we see the amount of data and models growing rapidly – doubling every year. We are enthusiastic about the new Amazon SageMaker features because they will help us scale. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler makes it much easier to prepare data for model training, and Amazon SageMaker Feature Store will eliminate the need to create the same model features over and over. Finally, Amazon SageMaker Pipelines will help us automate data prep, model building, and model deployment into an end-to-end workflow so we can speed time to market for our models. Our researchers are looking forward to taking advantage of the new speed of science at 3M." Deloitte is helping transform organizations around the globe. The organization continuously evolves how it works and how it looks at marketplace challenges so it can continue to deliver measurable, sustainable results for its clients and communities. "Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler enables us to hit the ground running to address our data preparation needs with a rich collection of transformation tools that accelerate the process of machine learning data preparation needed to take new products to market," said Frank Farrall, Principal, AI Ecosystems and Platforms Leader at Deloitte. "In turn, our clients benefit from the rate at which we scale deployments, enabling us to deliver measurable, sustainable results that meet the needs of our clients in a matter of days rather than months." A subsidiary of Koch Industries since 2004, INVISTA brings to market the proprietary ingredients for nylon 6,6 and recognized brands including STAINMASTER, CORDURA, and ANTRON. It is one of the world's largest integrated producers of chemical intermediates, polymers, and fibers. "At INVISTA, we are driven by transformation and look to develop products and technologies that benefit customers around the globe," said Caleb Wilkinson, Lead Data Scientist at INVISTA. "We see machine learning as a way to improve the customer experience, but with datasets that span hundreds of millions of rows, we needed a solution to help us prepare data, and develop, deploy, and manage machine learning models at scale. To speed these processes, we worked with the AWS team on several new features. With Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, we can now interactively select, clean, explore, and understand our data effectively, empowering our data science team to create feature engineering pipelines that can scale effortlessly to datasets that span hundreds of millions of rows. We can also easily automate and manage machine learning workflows at scale with Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, so we can easily stitch together individual steps of the machine learning workflow. Together with Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler and Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, we can operationalize our machine learning workflows faster." Snowflake Data Cloud shatters the barriers that have prevented organizations of all sizes from unleashing the true value from their data. "One of the biggest challenges our enterprise customers face is preparing data for machine learning projects," said Christian Kleinerman, SVP of Product at Snowflake. "We're excited about Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, which makes it easier for organizations to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning. With the addition of Snowflake as a data source in Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, joint customers will soon be able to leverage the integrated platform capabilities of Snowflake, together with the interactive data preparation and machine learning capabilities of Amazon SageMaker. Customers will have the ability to go from raw data to machine learning models and insights faster than previously possible." Founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow, Databricks brings together data engineering, science, and analytics on an open, unified platform so data teams can collaborate and innovate faster. "At Databricks, we are committed to bringing together data engineering and science and analytics so data teams can collaborate and innovate faster," said Adam Conway, SVP of Products at Databricks. "We are looking forward to continuing our partnership with AWS in 2021, especially with the seamless integration our customers can experience with AWS on Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. With this partnership, our customers can leverage Delta Lake with Amazon SageMaker to prepare robust training data so they can create the most accurate machine learning models." MongoDB Atlas is the fully managed service for MongoDB, the popular database designed to help teams build, scale, and iterate quickly. "Our mission at MongoDB is to free the genius within everyone by making data stunningly easy to work with. MongoDB Atlas runs more than 1.5 million database clusters, powering critical applications for our customers; we want to make it easy to build, train, and deploy machine learning models based on the data those applications generate," said Mark Porter, CTO at MongoDB. "We are excited that our customers now have a faster, visual way to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. Coming in 2021, our customers will soon be able to query and analyze data across Amazon S3 and MongoDB Atlas within Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, enabling them to get more value from their data faster." Intuit is a mission-driven, global financial platform company and proud maker of TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint. "We chose to build Intuit's new machine learning platform on AWS in 2017, combining Amazon SageMaker's powerful capabilities for model development, training, and hosting with Intuit's own capabilities in orchestration and feature engineering," said Mammad Zadeh, Intuit Vice President of Engineering, Data Platform. "As a result, we cut our model development lifecycle dramatically. What used to take six full months now takes less than a week, making it possible for us to push AI capabilities into our TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint products at a greatly accelerated rate. We have worked closely with AWS in the lead up to the release of Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, and we are excited by the prospect of a fully managed feature store so that we no longer have to maintain multiple feature repositories across our organization. Our data scientists will be able to use existing features from a central store and drive both standardization and reuse of features across teams and models." The Climate Corporation (Climate) is a subsidiary of Bayer and the industry leader in bringing digital innovation to farmers around the world by increasing their productivity using digital tools. Climate is focused on helping farmers understand their fields in ways that have never been possible before and derive impactful recommendations from agricultural data. "At Climate, we believe in providing the world's farmers with accurate information to make data-driven decisions and maximize their return on every acre," said Daniel McCaffrey, Vice President, Data and Analytics at Climate. "To achieve this, we have invested in technologies such as machine learning tools to build models using measurable entities known as features, such as yield for a grower's field. With Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, we can accelerate the development of machine learning models with a central feature store to access and reuse features across multiple teams easily. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store makes it easy to access features in real-time using the online store or run features on a schedule using the offline store for different use cases. With Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, we can develop machine learning models faster." DeNA is a leading provider of mobile and online services, including games, e-commerce, and entertainment content distribution in Japan. "At DeNA, our mission is to deliver impact and delight customers using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Providing value-based services is our primary goal, and we want to ensure our businesses and services are ready to achieve that goal," said Kenshin Yamada, General Manager, AI Systems at DeNA. "One of our key initiatives is to expand our capabilities in artificial Intelligence and machine learning. Amazon SageMaker has helped us in our path to implement machine learning in many of our businesses by providing extensive capabilities to train and deploy accurate models. One of the areas we want to focus is on data preparation and make it easy for our engineering teams. With Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, we believe we can hit the ground running with a rich collection of transformation tools without the need to write additional code. As we become more efficient with data preparation, we also want to ensure our teams across our diverse businesses do not repeat or duplicate work in building similar features for our applications. We would like to discover and reuse features across the organization, and Amazon SageMaker Feature Store helps us with an easy and efficient way to reuse features for different applications. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store also helps us in maintaining standard feature definitions and helps us with a consistent methodology as we train models and deploy them to production. With these new capabilities of Amazon SageMaker, we can train and deploy machine learning models faster, keeping us on our path to delight our customers with the best services." iFood is an online food delivery portal and one of the largest food delivery companies in Latin America offering quality services to consumers. "At iFood, we strive to delight our customers through our services using technology such as machine learning," said Sandor Caetano, Chief Data Scientist at iFood. "We have been using Amazon SageMaker for our machine learning models to build high-quality applications throughout our business. Building a complete and seamless workflow to develop, train, and deploy models has been a critical part of our journey to scale machine learning. Amazon SageMaker Pipelines helps us to quickly build multiple scalable automated machine learning workflows, and makes it easy to deploy and manage our models effectively. Amazon SageMaker Pipelines enables us to be more efficient with our development cycle. We continue to emphasize our leadership in using artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver superior customer service and efficiency with all these new capabilities of Amazon SageMaker." Since naming AWS as its official technology provider in January 2020, the DFL Deutsche Fußball Liga – organizer and marketer of Germany's top soccer leagues Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 – and AWS have embarked on a journey together to bring advanced sports analytics, by way of Bundesliga Match Facts powered by AWS, to life for fans and TV broadcasters around the globe. "Amazon SageMaker Clarify seamlessly integrates with the rest of the Bundesliga Match Facts digital platform and is a key part of our long-term strategy of standardizing our machine learning workflows on Amazon SageMaker," said Andreas Heyden, Executive Vice President of Digital Innovations for the DFL Group. "By using AWS's innovative technologies, such as machine learning, to deliver more in-depth insights and provide fans a better understanding of the split-second decisions made on the pitch, Bundesliga Match Facts enables viewers to gain deeper insights into the key decisions in each match." CS DISCO is a SaaS provider that offers solutions to automate and simplify a variety of legal tasks, including discovery. "At CS DISCO we have revolutionized the way legal evidence is reviewed with our DISCO AI platform for ediscovery," said Alan Lockett, Principal Data Scientist at CS DISCO. "We are always looking to improve how quickly our advanced deep learning models train. Our team has worked with the Amazon SageMaker team at AWS and believes that technologies such as distributed training and others can help accelerate our AI use cases." Turbine is a simulation-driven drug discovery company delivering targeted cancer therapies to patients. "We use machine learning to train our in silico human cell model, called Simulated Cell™, based on a proprietary network architecture. By accurately predicting various interventions on the molecular level, Simulated Cell™ helps us to discover new cancer drugs and find combination partners for existing therapies," said Kristóf Szalay, CTO at Turbine. "Training of our simulation is something we continuously iterate on, but on a single machine each training takes days, hindering our ability to iterate on new ideas quickly. We are very excited about Distributed Training on Amazon SageMaker, which we are expecting to decrease our training times by 90% and to help us focus on our main task: to write a best-of-the-breed codebase for the cell model training. Amazon SageMaker ultimately allows us to become more effective in our primary mission: to identify and develop novel cancer drugs for patients." Latent Space is a startup focused on building the world's first fully AI-rendered 3D game engine. "At Latent Space, we're building a neural rendered game engine where anyone can create at the speed of thought. Driven by advances in language modelling, we're working to incorporate semantic understanding of both text and images to determine what to generate," said Sara Jane, Co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Latent Space. "Our current focus is on utilizing information retrieval to augment large-scale model training, for which we have sophisticated machine learning pipelines. This setup presents a challenge on top of distributed training since there are multiple data sources and models being trained at the same time. As such, we're leveraging the new distributed training capabilities in Amazon SageMaker to efficiently scale training for large generative models." Lenovo is the world's largest maker of personal computers. Lenovo designs and manufactures devices such as laptops, tablets, smartphones and a variety of smart IoT devices. "At Lenovo, we're more than a hardware provider and are committed to being a trusted partner in transforming customers' device experience and delivering on their business goals. Lenovo Device Intelligence is a great example of how we're doing this with the power of machine learning, enhanced by Amazon SageMaker," said Igor Bergman, Lenovo Vice President, Cloud & Software of PCs & Smart Devices. "With Lenovo Device Intelligence, IT administrators can proactively diagnose PC issues and help predict potential system failures before they occur, helping to decrease downtime and increase employee productivity. By incorporating Amazon SageMaker Neo, we've already seen a substantial improvement in the execution of our on-device predictive models – an encouraging sign for the new Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager that will be added in the coming weeks. The new Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager will help eliminate the manual effort required to optimize, monitor, and continuously improve the models after deployment. With it, we expect our models will run faster and consume less memory than with other comparable machine-learning platforms. As we extend AI to new applications across the Lenovo services portfolio, we will continue to require a high-performance pipeline that is flexible and scalable both in the cloud and on millions of edge devices. That's why we selected the Amazon SageMaker platform. With its rich edge-to-cloud and CI/CD workflow capabilities, we can effectively bring our machine learning models to any device workflow for much higher productivity." Basler AG is a leading manufacturer of high-quality digital cameras and accessories for industry, medicine, transportation and a variety of other markets. "Basler AG delivers intelligent computer vision solutions in a variety of industries, including manufacturing, medical, and retail applications. We are excited to extend our software offering with new features made possible by Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager," said Mark Hebbel, Head of Software Solutions at Basler. "To ensure our machine learning solutions are performant and reliable, we need a scalable edge to cloud MLOps tool that allows us to continuously monitor, maintain, and improve machine learning models on edge devices. Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager allows us to automatically sample data at the edge, send it securely to the cloud, and monitor the quality of each model on each device continuously after deployment. This enables us to remotely monitor, improve, and update the models on our edge devices around the world and at the same time saves us and our customers' time and costs." Mission Automate handcrafts software solutions on behalf of their global customers. "We constantly look for new solutions that can provide the best quality software to our customers, but as a small organization, we don't have the same ability to specialize in silos like other organizations," said Alex Panait, CEO at Mission Automate. "Amazon SageMaker JumpStart now provides us a way to get started with machine learning faster, including new techniques that we can use in our own workflows to increase our service offerings and reduce costs. The option to select machine learning models and algorithms from popular model zoos allows us to quickly train customized machine learning models, which helps our customers get to market faster. Thanks to Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, we are able to launch machine learning solutions within days to fulfill machine learning prediction needs faster and more reliably." MyCase offers a powerful legal practice management software that helps law firms run efficiently from anywhere, provide an exceptional client experience, and easily track firm performance. "We have several business and product elements that can be improved with machine learning," said Gus Nguyen, Software Engineer at MyCase. "Amazon SageMaker JumpStart allows us to launch end-to-end solutions with one click and access a collection of notebooks to help us more deeply understand customers and use predictions to better serve their needs. Thanks to Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, we can have better starting points which makes it so that we can deploy a machine learning solution for our own use cases in four to six weeks instead of three to four months." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201208005335/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler provides the fastest and easiest way for developers to prepare data for machine learning</em></p><p><em>Amazon SageMaker Feature Store delivers a purpose-built data store for storing, updating, retrieving, and sharing machine learning features</em></p><p><em>Amazon SageMaker Pipelines gives developers the first purpose-built, easy-to-use continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning</em></p><p><em>Amazon SageMaker Clarify provides developers with greater visibility into their training data so they can limit bias in machine learning models and explain predictions</em></p><p><em>Deep profiling for Amazon SageMaker Debugger monitors machine learning training performance to help developers train models faster</em></p><p><em>Distributed Training on Amazon SageMaker delivers new capabilities that can train large models up to two times faster than would otherwise be possible with today's machine learning processors</em></p><p><em>Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager delivers machine learning model monitoring and management for edge devices to ensure that models deployed in production are operating correctly</em></p><p><em>Amazon SageMaker JumpStart provides a developer portal for pre-trained models and pre-built workflows</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 8, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced nine new capabilities for its industry-leading machine learning service, Amazon SageMaker, making it even easier for developers to automate and scale all steps of the end-to-end machine learning workflow. Today's announcements bring together powerful new capabilities like faster data preparation, a purpose-built repository for prepared data, workflow automation, greater transparency into training data to mitigate bias and explain predictions, distributed training capabilities to train large models up to two times faster, and model monitoring on edge devices. To get started with Amazon SageMaker, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/sagemaker</p><p>Machine learning is becoming more mainstream, but it is still evolving at a rapid clip. With all the attention machine learning has received, it seems like it should be simple to create machine learning models, but it isn't. In order to create a model, developers need to start with the highly manual process of preparing the data. Then they need to visualize it in notebooks, pick the right algorithm, set up the framework, train the model, tune millions of possible parameters, deploy the model, and monitor its performance. This process needs to be continuously repeated to ensure that the model is performing as expected over time. In the past, this process put machine learning out of the reach of all but the most skilled developers. However, Amazon SageMaker has changed that. Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that removes challenges from each stage of the machine learning process, making it radically easier and faster for everyday developers and data scientists to build, train, and deploy machine learning models. Tens of thousands of customers utilize Amazon SageMaker to help accelerate their machine learning deployments, including 3M, ADP, AstraZeneca, Avis, Bayer, Bundesliga, Capital One, Cerner, Chick-fil-A, Convoy, Domino's Pizza, Fidelity Investments, GE Healthcare, Georgia-Pacific, Hearst, iFood, iHeartMedia, JPMorgan Chase, Intuit, Lenovo, Lyft, National Football League, Nerdwallet, T-Mobile, Thomson Reuters, and Vanguard.</p><p>Today's announcements build on the more than 50 new Amazon SageMaker capabilities that AWS has delivered in the past year to make it even easier for developers and data scientists to prepare, build, train, deploy, and manage machine learning models, including:</p><ul><li>Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler automated data preparation: Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler provides the fastest and easiest way to prepare data for machine learning. Data preparation for machine learning is a difficult process. This difficulty arises from the fact that data attributes (known as features) used to train a machine learning model often come from different sources and exist in various formats. This means that developers must spend considerable time extracting and normalizing this data so it's consistently easy to use with machine learning. Customers might also want to combine features into composite features to give the machine learning model more helpful inputs. For example, a customer might want to create a feature that describes a group of customers that are prolific spenders so they can be offered loyalty program rewards by combining features for items previously purchased, amount spent, and frequency of purchases. The work associated with transforming data into features is called feature engineering, and it consumes a lot of time for developers when they're building machine learning models. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler radically simplifies the process of data preparation and feature engineering. With Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, customers can choose the data they want from their various data stores and import it with a single click. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler contains over 300 built-in data transformers that can help customers normalize, transform, and combine features without having to write any code, while managing all of the processing infrastructure under the hood. Customers can quickly preview and inspect that these transformations are what was intended by viewing them in SageMaker Studio (the first end-to-end Integrated Development Environment for machine learning). Once the features have been engineered, Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler will save them for reuse in the Amazon SageMaker Feature Store.</li><li>Amazon SageMaker Feature Store feature storage and management: Amazon SageMaker Feature Store provides a new repository that makes it easy to store, update, retrieve, and share machine learning features for training and inference. Today, customers can save their features to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). This works well for a simple set of features that are mapped to a single model, but most features are not mapped to only one model. Most features are used repeatedly by multiple models and multiple developers and data scientists, and as new features are created, developers also want to be able to reuse them repeatedly. This leads to multiple S3 objects to manage, which can quickly become difficult to manage. Developers and data scientists try to solve this by using spreadsheets, paper notes, and emails. Sometimes they even try to build a custom application to keep track of the features, but this is a lot of work and error-prone. Further, developers and data scientists need the same features not only to train multiple models with all of the data available and where this activity can happen over hours, but also to use during inference when the predictions need to be returned in milliseconds and often use just a subset of the data in relevant features. For example, a developer might want to create a model that predicts the next best song in a playlist. To do this, developers would train the model on thousands of songs and then provide the model the last three songs played during inference to predict the next song. Training and inference are very different uses cases. During training, the models can access the features offline and in batch, but for inference, the model needs only a subset of the features in near real-time. Since machine learning models have a single source of features that need to be consistent, these different access patterns make it challenging to keep the features consistent and up to date. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store solves this problem by providing a purpose-built feature store where developers can access and share features that make it much easier to name, organize, find, and share sets of features among teams of developers and data scientists. Since Amazon SageMaker Feature Store resides in Amazon SageMaker Studio—close to where machine learning models are run—it provides single-digit millisecond latency for inference. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store makes it simple and easy to organize and update large batches of features for training and smaller instantiations of them for inference. That way, there's one consistent view of features for machine learning models to use and it becomes significantly easier to generate models that produce highly accurate predictions.</li><li>Amazon SageMaker Pipelines workflow management and automation: Amazon SageMaker Pipelines is the first purpose-built, easy-to-use continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning. As customers can see with feature engineering, machine learning comprises multiple steps that can benefit from orchestration and automation. This is not dissimilar to traditional programming, where customers have tools like CI/CD to help them develop and deploy applications more quickly. However, with machine learning, CI/CD tools are rarely used because they don't exist or because they are hard to set up, configure, and manage. With Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, developers can define each step of an end-to-end machine learning workflow. These workflows include the data-load steps, transformations from Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, features stored in Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, training configuration and algorithm set up, debugging steps, and optimization steps. With Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, developers can easily re-run an end-to-end workflow from Amazon SageMaker Studio, using the same settings to get the exact same model every time, or they can re-run the workflow on a regular schedule with new data to update a model. Amazon SageMaker Pipelines logs each step in Amazon SageMaker Experiments (an Amazon SageMaker capability that organizes and tracks machine learning experiments and model versions) every time a workflow is run. This helps developers visualize and compare machine learning model iterations, training parameters, and outcomes. With Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, workflows can be shared and re-used between teams, either to recreate a model or to act as a starting point for making improvements through new features, algorithms, or optimizations.</li><li>Amazon SageMaker Clarify bias detection and explainability: Amazon SageMaker Clarify provides bias detection across the machine learning workflow, enabling developers to build greater fairness and transparency into their machine learning models. Once developers have prepared data for training and inference, they need to try to ensure the data is free from statistical bias and that model predictions are transparent, so they can explain how the model features are contributing to predictions. Today, developers sometimes try to use open source tools to detect statistical bias in their data, but these tools require a lot of manual effort and coding and are typically error prone. With Amazon SageMaker Clarify, developers can now more easily detect statistical bias across the entire machine learning workflow and provide explanations for predictions their machine learning models are making. Amazon SageMaker Clarify integrates with Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler where it runs a set of algorithms on features to identify bias during data preparation with visualizations that include a description of the sources and severity of possible bias. This way, developers can take steps for mitigation. Amazon SageMaker Clarify also integrates with Amazon SageMaker Experiments to make it easier to check trained models for statistical bias. It also details how each feature inputted into the model is affecting predictions. Finally, Amazon SageMaker Clarify integrates with Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor (an Amazon SageMaker capability that continuously monitors the quality of machine learning models in production) to alert developers if the importance of model features shifts and causes model behavior to change.</li><li>Deep Profiling for Amazon SageMaker Debugger model training profiler: Deep Profiling for Amazon SageMaker Debugger now enables developers to train their models faster by automatically monitoring system resource utilization and providing alerts for training bottlenecks. Today, developers don't have a standard way to monitor system utilization (e.g. GPU, CPU, network throughput, and memory I/O) to identify and troubleshoot bottlenecks in their training jobs. As a result, developers can't train models as quickly and cost effectively as possible. Amazon SageMaker Debugger solves this problem with Deep Profiling's newly announced capabilities, which provide developers the ability to visually profile and monitor system resource utilization in Amazon SageMaker Studio. This makes it easier to root cause issues and reduce the time and cost of training machine learning models. With these new capabilities, Amazon SageMaker Debugger expands its scope to monitor the utilization of system resources, send out alerts on problems during training in Amazon SageMaker Studio or via AWS CloudWatch, and correlate usage to different phases in the training job or a specific point in time during training (e.g. 28 minutes after the training job started). Amazon SageMaker Debugger can also trigger actions based on alerts (e.g. stop a training job when irregularities in GPU usage are detected). Amazon SageMaker Debugger's Deep Profiling works across frameworks (PyTorch, Apache MXNet, and TensorFlow) and collects necessary system and training metrics automatically without requiring any code changes in training scripts. This allows developers to visualize how their system resources were used during training in Amazon SageMaker Studio.</li><li>Distributed Training on Amazon SageMaker accelerates training times: New Distributed Training on Amazon SageMaker makes it possible to train large, complex deep learning models up to two times faster than current approaches. Today, advanced machine learning use cases—such as natural language processing for intelligent assistants, object detection and classification for autonomous vehicles, and image classification for large-scale content moderation—demand increasingly large datasets and more graphics processing unit (GPU) memory for training. However, some of these models are too big to fit in the memory provided by a single GPU. Customers can attempt to split models across multiple GPUs, but finding the best way to split the model and adjusting training code can often take weeks of tedious experimentation. To overcome these challenges, Distributed Training on Amazon SageMaker offers two distributed training capabilities that enable developers to train large models up to two times faster at no additional cost. Distributed Training with Amazon SageMaker's Data Parallelism engine scales training jobs from one GPU to hundreds or thousands by automatically splitting data across multiple GPUs, improving training time by up to 40%. The reduction in training time is possible because Amazon SageMaker's Data Parallelism engine manages GPUs for optimal synchronization using algorithms that are purposefully built to fully utilize AWS infrastructure with near-linear scaling efficiency. Distributed Training with Amazon SageMaker's Model Parallelism engine can efficiently split large, complex models with billions of parameters across multiple GPUs by automatically profiling and identifying the best way to partition models. They do this by using graph partitioning algorithms to optimally balance computation and minimize communication between GPUs, resulting in minimal code changes and fewer errors caused by GPU memory constraints.</li><li>Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager model management for edge devices: Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager allows developers to optimize, secure, monitor, and maintain machine learning models deployed on fleets of edge devices. Today, customers use Amazon SageMaker Neo to create optimized models for edge devices that run up to twice as fast, with less than a tenth of the memory footprint and no loss in accuracy. However, after deployment on edge devices, customers still need to manage and monitor the models to ensure they continue to perform with high accuracy. Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager optimizes models to run faster on target devices and provides model management for edge devices, so customers can prepare, run, monitor, and update deployed machine learning models across fleets of devices at the edge. Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager gives customers the ability to cryptographically sign their models, upload prediction data from their devices to Amazon SageMaker for monitoring and analysis, and view a dashboard that tracks and visually reports on the operation of the deployed models within the Amazon SageMaker console. Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager extends capabilities that were previously only available in the cloud by sampling data from edge devices and sending it to Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor for analysis, so developers can continuously improve model quality by retraining them when their accuracy declines over time.</li><li>Amazon SageMaker JumpStart enables the machine learning journey: Amazon SageMaker JumpStartprovides developers an easy-to-use, searchable interface to find best-in-class solutions, algorithms, and sample notebooks. Today, some customers that lack experience with machine learning have difficulty getting started with machine learning deployments, while more advanced developers find it difficult to adopt machine learning for all of their use cases. With today's launch of Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, customers can now quickly find relevant information specific to their machine learning use cases. Developers new to machine learning will be able to select from several complete end-to-end machine learning solutions (e.g. fraud detection, customer churn prediction, or forecasting) and deploy them directly in their Amazon SageMaker Studio environments. And, experienced users will be able to choose from more than a hundred machine learning models to quickly get started on building and training models.</li></ul><p>"Hundreds of thousands of everyday developers and data scientists have used our industry-leading machine learning service, Amazon SageMaker, to remove barriers to building, training, and deploying custom machine learning models. One of the best parts about having such a widely-adopted service like SageMaker is that we get lots of customer suggestions which fuel our next set of deliverables," said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President, Amazon Machine Learning, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "Today, we are announcing a set of tools for Amazon SageMaker that makes it much easier for developers to build end-to-end machine learning pipelines to prepare, build, train, explain, inspect, monitor, debug, and run custom machine learning models with greater visibility, explainability, and automation at scale."</p><p>With corporate operations in 70 countries and sales in 200, 3M is creating the technology and products that advance every company, enhance every home, and improve everyday life. "3M's success is grounded in our entrepreneurial researchers and our constant focus on science. One way we have advanced the science of our products is the adoption of machine learning on AWS," said David Frazee, Technical Director at 3M Corporate Systems Research Lab. "Using machine learning, 3M is improving tried-and-tested products, like sandpaper, and driving innovation in several other spaces, including healthcare. As we plan to scale machine learning to more areas of 3M, we see the amount of data and models growing rapidly – doubling every year. We are enthusiastic about the new Amazon SageMaker features because they will help us scale. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler makes it much easier to prepare data for model training, and Amazon SageMaker Feature Store will eliminate the need to create the same model features over and over. Finally, Amazon SageMaker Pipelines will help us automate data prep, model building, and model deployment into an end-to-end workflow so we can speed time to market for our models. Our researchers are looking forward to taking advantage of the new speed of science at 3M."</p><p>Deloitte is helping transform organizations around the globe. The organization continuously evolves how it works and how it looks at marketplace challenges so it can continue to deliver measurable, sustainable results for its clients and communities. "Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler enables us to hit the ground running to address our data preparation needs with a rich collection of transformation tools that accelerate the process of machine learning data preparation needed to take new products to market," said Frank Farrall, Principal, AI Ecosystems and Platforms Leader at Deloitte. "In turn, our clients benefit from the rate at which we scale deployments, enabling us to deliver measurable, sustainable results that meet the needs of our clients in a matter of days rather than months."</p><p>A subsidiary of Koch Industries since 2004, INVISTA brings to market the proprietary ingredients for nylon 6,6 and recognized brands including STAINMASTER, CORDURA, and ANTRON. It is one of the world's largest integrated producers of chemical intermediates, polymers, and fibers. "At INVISTA, we are driven by transformation and look to develop products and technologies that benefit customers around the globe," said Caleb Wilkinson, Lead Data Scientist at INVISTA. "We see machine learning as a way to improve the customer experience, but with datasets that span hundreds of millions of rows, we needed a solution to help us prepare data, and develop, deploy, and manage machine learning models at scale. To speed these processes, we worked with the AWS team on several new features. With Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, we can now interactively select, clean, explore, and understand our data effectively, empowering our data science team to create feature engineering pipelines that can scale effortlessly to datasets that span hundreds of millions of rows. We can also easily automate and manage machine learning workflows at scale with Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, so we can easily stitch together individual steps of the machine learning workflow. Together with Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler and Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, we can operationalize our machine learning workflows faster."</p><p>Snowflake Data Cloud shatters the barriers that have prevented organizations of all sizes from unleashing the true value from their data. "One of the biggest challenges our enterprise customers face is preparing data for machine learning projects," said Christian Kleinerman, SVP of Product at Snowflake. "We're excited about Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, which makes it easier for organizations to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning. With the addition of Snowflake as a data source in Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, joint customers will soon be able to leverage the integrated platform capabilities of Snowflake, together with the interactive data preparation and machine learning capabilities of Amazon SageMaker. Customers will have the ability to go from raw data to machine learning models and insights faster than previously possible."</p><p>Founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow, Databricks brings together data engineering, science, and analytics on an open, unified platform so data teams can collaborate and innovate faster. "At Databricks, we are committed to bringing together data engineering and science and analytics so data teams can collaborate and innovate faster," said Adam Conway, SVP of Products at Databricks. "We are looking forward to continuing our partnership with AWS in 2021, especially with the seamless integration our customers can experience with AWS on Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. With this partnership, our customers can leverage Delta Lake with Amazon SageMaker to prepare robust training data so they can create the most accurate machine learning models."</p><p>MongoDB Atlas is the fully managed service for MongoDB, the popular database designed to help teams build, scale, and iterate quickly. "Our mission at MongoDB is to free the genius within everyone by making data stunningly easy to work with. MongoDB Atlas runs more than 1.5 million database clusters, powering critical applications for our customers; we want to make it easy to build, train, and deploy machine learning models based on the data those applications generate," said Mark Porter, CTO at MongoDB. "We are excited that our customers now have a faster, visual way to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. Coming in 2021, our customers will soon be able to query and analyze data across Amazon S3 and MongoDB Atlas within Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, enabling them to get more value from their data faster."</p><p>Intuit is a mission-driven, global financial platform company and proud maker of TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint. "We chose to build Intuit's new machine learning platform on AWS in 2017, combining Amazon SageMaker's powerful capabilities for model development, training, and hosting with Intuit's own capabilities in orchestration and feature engineering," said Mammad Zadeh, Intuit Vice President of Engineering, Data Platform. "As a result, we cut our model development lifecycle dramatically. What used to take six full months now takes less than a week, making it possible for us to push AI capabilities into our TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint products at a greatly accelerated rate. We have worked closely with AWS in the lead up to the release of Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, and we are excited by the prospect of a fully managed feature store so that we no longer have to maintain multiple feature repositories across our organization. Our data scientists will be able to use existing features from a central store and drive both standardization and reuse of features across teams and models."</p><p>The Climate Corporation (Climate) is a subsidiary of Bayer and the industry leader in bringing digital innovation to farmers around the world by increasing their productivity using digital tools. Climate is focused on helping farmers understand their fields in ways that have never been possible before and derive impactful recommendations from agricultural data. "At Climate, we believe in providing the world's farmers with accurate information to make data-driven decisions and maximize their return on every acre," said Daniel McCaffrey, Vice President, Data and Analytics at Climate. "To achieve this, we have invested in technologies such as machine learning tools to build models using measurable entities known as features, such as yield for a grower's field. With Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, we can accelerate the development of machine learning models with a central feature store to access and reuse features across multiple teams easily. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store makes it easy to access features in real-time using the online store or run features on a schedule using the offline store for different use cases. With Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, we can develop machine learning models faster."</p><p>DeNA is a leading provider of mobile and online services, including games, e-commerce, and entertainment content distribution in Japan. "At DeNA, our mission is to deliver impact and delight customers using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Providing value-based services is our primary goal, and we want to ensure our businesses and services are ready to achieve that goal," said Kenshin Yamada, General Manager, AI Systems at DeNA. "One of our key initiatives is to expand our capabilities in artificial Intelligence and machine learning. Amazon SageMaker has helped us in our path to implement machine learning in many of our businesses by providing extensive capabilities to train and deploy accurate models. One of the areas we want to focus is on data preparation and make it easy for our engineering teams. With Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, we believe we can hit the ground running with a rich collection of transformation tools without the need to write additional code. As we become more efficient with data preparation, we also want to ensure our teams across our diverse businesses do not repeat or duplicate work in building similar features for our applications. We would like to discover and reuse features across the organization, and Amazon SageMaker Feature Store helps us with an easy and efficient way to reuse features for different applications. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store also helps us in maintaining standard feature definitions and helps us with a consistent methodology as we train models and deploy them to production. With these new capabilities of Amazon SageMaker, we can train and deploy machine learning models faster, keeping us on our path to delight our customers with the best services."</p><p>iFood is an online food delivery portal and one of the largest food delivery companies in Latin America offering quality services to consumers. "At iFood, we strive to delight our customers through our services using technology such as machine learning," said Sandor Caetano, Chief Data Scientist at iFood. "We have been using Amazon SageMaker for our machine learning models to build high-quality applications throughout our business. Building a complete and seamless workflow to develop, train, and deploy models has been a critical part of our journey to scale machine learning. Amazon SageMaker Pipelines helps us to quickly build multiple scalable automated machine learning workflows, and makes it easy to deploy and manage our models effectively. Amazon SageMaker Pipelines enables us to be more efficient with our development cycle. We continue to emphasize our leadership in using artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver superior customer service and efficiency with all these new capabilities of Amazon SageMaker."</p><p>Since naming AWS as its official technology provider in January 2020, the DFL Deutsche Fußball Liga – organizer and marketer of Germany's top soccer leagues Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 – and AWS have embarked on a journey together to bring advanced sports analytics, by way of Bundesliga Match Facts powered by AWS, to life for fans and TV broadcasters around the globe. "Amazon SageMaker Clarify seamlessly integrates with the rest of the Bundesliga Match Facts digital platform and is a key part of our long-term strategy of standardizing our machine learning workflows on Amazon SageMaker," said Andreas Heyden, Executive Vice President of Digital Innovations for the DFL Group. "By using AWS's innovative technologies, such as machine learning, to deliver more in-depth insights and provide fans a better understanding of the split-second decisions made on the pitch, Bundesliga Match Facts enables viewers to gain deeper insights into the key decisions in each match."</p><p>CS DISCO is a SaaS provider that offers solutions to automate and simplify a variety of legal tasks, including discovery. "At CS DISCO we have revolutionized the way legal evidence is reviewed with our DISCO AI platform for ediscovery," said Alan Lockett, Principal Data Scientist at CS DISCO. "We are always looking to improve how quickly our advanced deep learning models train. Our team has worked with the Amazon SageMaker team at AWS and believes that technologies such as distributed training and others can help accelerate our AI use cases."</p><p>Turbine is a simulation-driven drug discovery company delivering targeted cancer therapies to patients. "We use machine learning to train our in silico human cell model, called Simulated Cell™, based on a proprietary network architecture. By accurately predicting various interventions on the molecular level, Simulated Cell™ helps us to discover new cancer drugs and find combination partners for existing therapies," said Kristóf Szalay, CTO at Turbine. "Training of our simulation is something we continuously iterate on, but on a single machine each training takes days, hindering our ability to iterate on new ideas quickly. We are very excited about Distributed Training on Amazon SageMaker, which we are expecting to decrease our training times by 90% and to help us focus on our main task: to write a best-of-the-breed codebase for the cell model training. Amazon SageMaker ultimately allows us to become more effective in our primary mission: to identify and develop novel cancer drugs for patients."</p><p>Latent Space is a startup focused on building the world's first fully AI-rendered 3D game engine. "At Latent Space, we're building a neural rendered game engine where anyone can create at the speed of thought. Driven by advances in language modelling, we're working to incorporate semantic understanding of both text and images to determine what to generate," said Sara Jane, Co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Latent Space. "Our current focus is on utilizing information retrieval to augment large-scale model training, for which we have sophisticated machine learning pipelines. This setup presents a challenge on top of distributed training since there are multiple data sources and models being trained at the same time. As such, we're leveraging the new distributed training capabilities in Amazon SageMaker to efficiently scale training for large generative models."</p><p>Lenovo is the world's largest maker of personal computers. Lenovo designs and manufactures devices such as laptops, tablets, smartphones and a variety of smart IoT devices. "At Lenovo, we're more than a hardware provider and are committed to being a trusted partner in transforming customers' device experience and delivering on their business goals. Lenovo Device Intelligence is a great example of how we're doing this with the power of machine learning, enhanced by Amazon SageMaker," said Igor Bergman, Lenovo Vice President, Cloud &amp; Software of PCs &amp; Smart Devices. "With Lenovo Device Intelligence, IT administrators can proactively diagnose PC issues and help predict potential system failures before they occur, helping to decrease downtime and increase employee productivity. By incorporating Amazon SageMaker Neo, we've already seen a substantial improvement in the execution of our on-device predictive models – an encouraging sign for the new Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager that will be added in the coming weeks. The new Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager will help eliminate the manual effort required to optimize, monitor, and continuously improve the models after deployment. With it, we expect our models will run faster and consume less memory than with other comparable machine-learning platforms. As we extend AI to new applications across the Lenovo services portfolio, we will continue to require a high-performance pipeline that is flexible and scalable both in the cloud and on millions of edge devices. That's why we selected the Amazon SageMaker platform. With its rich edge-to-cloud and CI/CD workflow capabilities, we can effectively bring our machine learning models to any device workflow for much higher productivity."</p><p>Basler AG is a leading manufacturer of high-quality digital cameras and accessories for industry, medicine, transportation and a variety of other markets. "Basler AG delivers intelligent computer vision solutions in a variety of industries, including manufacturing, medical, and retail applications. We are excited to extend our software offering with new features made possible by Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager," said Mark Hebbel, Head of Software Solutions at Basler. "To ensure our machine learning solutions are performant and reliable, we need a scalable edge to cloud MLOps tool that allows us to continuously monitor, maintain, and improve machine learning models on edge devices. Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager allows us to automatically sample data at the edge, send it securely to the cloud, and monitor the quality of each model on each device continuously after deployment. This enables us to remotely monitor, improve, and update the models on our edge devices around the world and at the same time saves us and our customers' time and costs."</p><p>Mission Automate handcrafts software solutions on behalf of their global customers. "We constantly look for new solutions that can provide the best quality software to our customers, but as a small organization, we don't have the same ability to specialize in silos like other organizations," said Alex Panait, CEO at Mission Automate. "Amazon SageMaker JumpStart now provides us a way to get started with machine learning faster, including new techniques that we can use in our own workflows to increase our service offerings and reduce costs. The option to select machine learning models and algorithms from popular model zoos allows us to quickly train customized machine learning models, which helps our customers get to market faster. Thanks to Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, we are able to launch machine learning solutions within days to fulfill machine learning prediction needs faster and more reliably."</p><p>MyCase offers a powerful legal practice management software that helps law firms run efficiently from anywhere, provide an exceptional client experience, and easily track firm performance. "We have several business and product elements that can be improved with machine learning," said Gus Nguyen, Software Engineer at MyCase. "Amazon SageMaker JumpStart allows us to launch end-to-end solutions with one click and access a collection of notebooks to help us more deeply understand customers and use predictions to better serve their needs. Thanks to Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, we can have better starting points which makes it so that we can deploy a machine learning solution for our own use cases in four to six weeks instead of three to four months."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201208005335/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

Thomson Reuters Taps AWS to Power Digital Transformation

/news/news-details/2020/Thomson-Reuters-Taps-AWS-to-Power-Digital-Transformation/default.aspx

Thomson-Reuters-Taps-AWS-to-Power-Digital-Transformation

12/08/2020 09:00:00

Thomson Reuters Taps AWS to Power Digital Transformation

12/08/2020

2020

Leading provider of business information services taps AWS to drive large-scale migration to cloud, driving innovation and adopting machine learning across its business SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 8, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Thomson Reuters, a leading global provider of business information services, has successfully completed a large scale migration to AWS – a critical part of their digital transformation strategy – which will enable the company to innovate faster, develop and act on new insights, and become a more agile business in the cloud. As part of its ongoing move to the cloud, Thomson Reuters migrated thousands of servers and hundreds of revenue-generating applications to AWS. Expanding its longstanding relationship with AWS, Thomson Reuters is also leveraging AWS's unparalleled portfolio of cloud services including analytics, database, containers, serverless, storage, machine learning, and security to innovate new digital products for its customers and reveal greater insights into the industries it covers. Thomson Reuters provides highly specialized information-enabled software and tools for legal, tax, accounting, and compliance professionals, combined with Reuters, the world's global news service. Across these sectors, its products and tools help professionals better understand their industries, streamline operations, increase efficiencies, and mitigate risk. In 2018, Thomson Reuters partnered with AWS Professional Services, AWS Managed Services (where AWS operates infrastructure on a customer's behalf), and AWS Certified third-party experts from multiple consulting partners who provided hands-on expertise, day-to-day infrastructure management, and cost optimization. The decision to use these AWS resources enabled Thomson Reuters to complete this migration project five months ahead of schedule. By leveraging AWS Managed Services, Thomson Reuters moved hundreds of mission-critical, legacy applications from across their global business units to the cloud and into production quickly. To further streamline this migration, Thomson Reuters leveraged the AWS Marketplace to access simplified software contracting services to rapidly procure and integrate their preferred third-party software into their AWS environment. Additionally, Thomson Reuters has developed an internal platform to apply machine learning at scale using Amazon SageMaker – AWS's service for building, training, and deploying machine learning models in the cloud and on the edge – to help developers and data scientists quickly gain new insights from real-time and historical data in a fully managed and secure environment. The platform saves developers and data scientists countless hours of coding by providing all of the components used for machine learning in a single toolset so models get to production faster with much less effort and at a lower cost, enabling Thomson Reuters to deliver new, intelligent solutions for their customers. Thomson Reuters uses Amazon SageMaker to automatically shut down GPU instances when a training job is done and leverages Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances – unused EC2 capacity that is available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices – to reduce the cost of machine learning model inference. "Thomson Reuters provides the intelligence, technology, and expertise that our customers need to solve their toughest regulatory, legal, and compliance challenges," said Justin Wright, Vice President of Architecture and Development, Thomson Reuters. "We're leveraging AWS's comprehensive set of cloud services to develop insightful new products and services that will help our customers reinvent the way they work and operate effectively in complex arenas. AWS is a trusted resource for us – especially AWS Managed Services and AWS Professional Services – providing the expertise to accelerate our move to cloud and helped migrate data centers ahead of schedule." "Thomson Reuters is using the cloud to put accurate data and information into the hands of professionals across the legal, tax and accounting, and news industries to make important and timely decisions," said Greg Pearson, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at Amazon Web Services, Inc. "By leveraging AWS's depth and breadth of services with the expertise of AWS Managed Services, Thomson Reuters is able to eliminate the heavy lifting of managing infrastructure operations and focus on innovating new ways to deliver in-depth information and digital solutions to deliver new and timely insights to customers around the world." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are just some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201208005197/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>Leading provider of business information services taps AWS to drive large-scale migration to cloud, driving innovation and adopting machine learning across its business</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 8, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Thomson Reuters, a leading global provider of business information services, has successfully completed a large scale migration to AWS – a critical part of their digital transformation strategy – which will enable the company to innovate faster, develop and act on new insights, and become a more agile business in the cloud. As part of its ongoing move to the cloud, Thomson Reuters migrated thousands of servers and hundreds of revenue-generating applications to AWS. Expanding its longstanding relationship with AWS, Thomson Reuters is also leveraging AWS's unparalleled portfolio of cloud services including analytics, database, containers, serverless, storage, machine learning, and security to innovate new digital products for its customers and reveal greater insights into the industries it covers.</p><p>Thomson Reuters provides highly specialized information-enabled software and tools for legal, tax, accounting, and compliance professionals, combined with Reuters, the world's global news service. Across these sectors, its products and tools help professionals better understand their industries, streamline operations, increase efficiencies, and mitigate risk. In 2018, Thomson Reuters partnered with AWS Professional Services, AWS Managed Services (where AWS operates infrastructure on a customer's behalf), and AWS Certified third-party experts from multiple consulting partners who provided hands-on expertise, day-to-day infrastructure management, and cost optimization. The decision to use these AWS resources enabled Thomson Reuters to complete this migration project five months ahead of schedule. By leveraging AWS Managed Services, Thomson Reuters moved hundreds of mission-critical, legacy applications from across their global business units to the cloud and into production quickly. To further streamline this migration, Thomson Reuters leveraged the AWS Marketplace to access simplified software contracting services to rapidly procure and integrate their preferred third-party software into their AWS environment.</p><p>Additionally, Thomson Reuters has developed an internal platform to apply machine learning at scale using Amazon SageMaker – AWS's service for building, training, and deploying machine learning models in the cloud and on the edge – to help developers and data scientists quickly gain new insights from real-time and historical data in a fully managed and secure environment. The platform saves developers and data scientists countless hours of coding by providing all of the components used for machine learning in a single toolset so models get to production faster with much less effort and at a lower cost, enabling Thomson Reuters to deliver new, intelligent solutions for their customers. Thomson Reuters uses Amazon SageMaker to automatically shut down GPU instances when a training job is done and leverages Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances – unused EC2 capacity that is available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices – to reduce the cost of machine learning model inference.</p><p>"Thomson Reuters provides the intelligence, technology, and expertise that our customers need to solve their toughest regulatory, legal, and compliance challenges," said Justin Wright, Vice President of Architecture and Development, Thomson Reuters. "We're leveraging AWS's comprehensive set of cloud services to develop insightful new products and services that will help our customers reinvent the way they work and operate effectively in complex arenas. AWS is a trusted resource for us – especially AWS Managed Services and AWS Professional Services – providing the expertise to accelerate our move to cloud and helped migrate data centers ahead of schedule."</p><p>"Thomson Reuters is using the cloud to put accurate data and information into the hands of professionals across the legal, tax and accounting, and news industries to make important and timely decisions," said Greg Pearson, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at Amazon Web Services, Inc. "By leveraging AWS's depth and breadth of services with the expertise of AWS Managed Services, Thomson Reuters is able to eliminate the heavy lifting of managing infrastructure operations and focus on innovating new ways to deliver in-depth information and digital solutions to deliver new and timely insights to customers around the world."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are just some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201208005197/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

AWS and ViacomCBS Expand Strategic Agreement to Transform Content Creation and Delivery

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-and-ViacomCBS-Expand-Strategic-Agreement-to-Transform-Content-Creation-and-Delivery/default.aspx

AWS-and-ViacomCBS-Expand-Strategic-Agreement-to-Transform-Content-Creation-and-Delivery

12/08/2020 09:00:00

AWS and ViacomCBS Expand Strategic Agreement to Transform Content Creation and Delivery

12/08/2020

2020

Global media leader selects AWS as its preferred broadcast cloud provider to power one of the largest digital transformations in the media and entertainment industry SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 8, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), and ViacomCBS (NASDAQ: VIAC) announced an agreement that makes AWS the preferred cloud provider for ViacomCBS's global broadcast media operations. As part of the strategic agreement, ViacomCBS will migrate operations for its entire broadcast footprint, which spans 425 linear television channels and 40 global data and media centers, to the world's leading cloud – one of the first such large-scale transformations in the media and entertainment industry. The migration will enable ViacomCBS to drive greater efficiencies and cost savings, simplify access to content for its licensing partners, and reliably deliver new viewing experiences to consumers by broadcasting and streaming content on any device. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201208005361/en/ ViacomCBS will leverage AWS's industry-leading infrastructure and comprehensive cloud capabilities, including serverless, containers, databases, media services, analytics, and machine learning, to build a cloud-based broadcast and media supply chain operating model. This new cloud-based hub will help the broadcaster spin up new channels faster, dynamically assemble live content to optimize delivery over any distribution channel, add image and video analysis to applications, and automate workflows. ViacomCBS plans to use AWS Elemental media services as well as AWS machine learning technologies, including Amazon Rekognition (AWS's service that adds intelligent image and video analysis to applications) and Amazon SageMaker (AWS's service for building, training, and deploying machine learning models), to quickly scale video processing resources, automate workflows, and predict audience preferences. These capabilities will aid ViacomCBS in producing and streaming dynamic content and enabling efficient national and local news distribution on CBSN, CBS News's 24/7 digital streaming service. "We are expanding our strategic relationship with AWS to support our industry-leading technology and operations transformation," said Phil Wiser, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at ViacomCBS. "With AWS, we will be able to automate and streamline our processes for content production, licensing, and distribution to consumer streaming services and innovate faster to deliver improved customer experiences. We are thinking and acting aggressively to build on the major disruptions that ViacomCBS is bringing to the market with our leading global content and services. AWS's deep portfolio of services will help us unleash the power of content in new and interesting ways that benefit our advertisers, licensing partners, and streaming services." "We are excited to deepen our relationship with ViacomCBS to redefine video delivery of media and entertainment content for global audiences across any platform," said Greg Pearson, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at Amazon Web Services, Inc. "Moving its broadcast media operations to AWS gives ViacomCBS the agility to lower costs, take advantage of new distribution models, and drive efficiency and innovation across its entire global media operations. Using AWS's proven operational experience and unparalleled portfolio of services, ViacomCBS can create and deliver new video content experiences with the utmost reliability and reach audiences no matter what platform they use." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. About ViacomCBS ViacomCBS (NASDAQ: VIAC; VIACA) is a leading global media and entertainment company that creates premium content and experiences for audiences worldwide. Driven by iconic consumer brands, its portfolio includes CBS, Showtime Networks, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, CBS All Access, Pluto TV and Simon & Schuster, among others. The company delivers the largest share of the U.S. television audience and boasts one of the industry's most important and extensive libraries of TV and film titles. In addition to offering innovative streaming services and digital video products, ViacomCBS provides powerful capabilities in production, distribution and advertising solutions for partners on five continents. For more information about ViacomCBS, please visit www.viacomcbs.com and follow @ViacomCBS on social platforms. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201208005361/en/ ViacomCBSSarah DiefenbachSarah.Diefenbach@cbs.com Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>Global media leader selects AWS as its preferred broadcast cloud provider to power one of the largest digital transformations in the media and entertainment industry</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 8, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), and ViacomCBS (NASDAQ: VIAC) announced an agreement that makes AWS the preferred cloud provider for ViacomCBS's global broadcast media operations. As part of the strategic agreement, ViacomCBS will migrate operations for its entire broadcast footprint, which spans 425 linear television channels and 40 global data and media centers, to the world's leading cloud – one of the first such large-scale transformations in the media and entertainment industry. The migration will enable ViacomCBS to drive greater efficiencies and cost savings, simplify access to content for its licensing partners, and reliably deliver new viewing experiences to consumers by broadcasting and streaming content on any device.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201208005361/en/</p><p>ViacomCBS will leverage AWS's industry-leading infrastructure and comprehensive cloud capabilities, including serverless, containers, databases, media services, analytics, and machine learning, to build a cloud-based broadcast and media supply chain operating model. This new cloud-based hub will help the broadcaster spin up new channels faster, dynamically assemble live content to optimize delivery over any distribution channel, add image and video analysis to applications, and automate workflows. ViacomCBS plans to use AWS Elemental media services as well as AWS machine learning technologies, including Amazon Rekognition (AWS's service that adds intelligent image and video analysis to applications) and Amazon SageMaker (AWS's service for building, training, and deploying machine learning models), to quickly scale video processing resources, automate workflows, and predict audience preferences. These capabilities will aid ViacomCBS in producing and streaming dynamic content and enabling efficient national and local news distribution on CBSN, CBS News's 24/7 digital streaming service.</p><p>"We are expanding our strategic relationship with AWS to support our industry-leading technology and operations transformation," said Phil Wiser, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at ViacomCBS. "With AWS, we will be able to automate and streamline our processes for content production, licensing, and distribution to consumer streaming services and innovate faster to deliver improved customer experiences. We are thinking and acting aggressively to build on the major disruptions that ViacomCBS is bringing to the market with our leading global content and services. AWS's deep portfolio of services will help us unleash the power of content in new and interesting ways that benefit our advertisers, licensing partners, and streaming services."</p><p>"We are excited to deepen our relationship with ViacomCBS to redefine video delivery of media and entertainment content for global audiences across any platform," said Greg Pearson, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at Amazon Web Services, Inc. "Moving its broadcast media operations to AWS gives ViacomCBS the agility to lower costs, take advantage of new distribution models, and drive efficiency and innovation across its entire global media operations. Using AWS's proven operational experience and unparalleled portfolio of services, ViacomCBS can create and deliver new video content experiences with the utmost reliability and reach audiences no matter what platform they use."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>About ViacomCBS</p><p>ViacomCBS (NASDAQ: VIAC; VIACA) is a leading global media and entertainment company that creates premium content and experiences for audiences worldwide. Driven by iconic consumer brands, its portfolio includes CBS, Showtime Networks, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, CBS All Access, Pluto TV and Simon &amp; Schuster, among others. The company delivers the largest share of the U.S. television audience and boasts one of the industry's most important and extensive libraries of TV and film titles. In addition to offering innovative streaming services and digital video products, ViacomCBS provides powerful capabilities in production, distribution and advertising solutions for partners on five continents.</p><p>For more information about ViacomCBS, please visit www.viacomcbs.com and follow @ViacomCBS on social platforms.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201208005361/en/</p><p>ViacomCBSSarah DiefenbachSarah.Diefenbach@cbs.com</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

The BMW Group and AWS Team Up to Accelerate Data-Driven Innovation in the Automotive Industry

/news/news-details/2020/The-BMW-Group-and-AWS-Team-Up-to-Accelerate-Data-Driven-Innovation-in-the-Automotive-Industry/default.aspx

The-BMW-Group-and-AWS-Team-Up-to-Accelerate-Data-Driven-Innovation-in-the-Automotive-Industry

12/08/2020 03:01:00

The BMW Group and AWS Team Up to Accelerate Data-Driven Innovation in the Automotive Industry

12/08/2020

2020

AWS and the BMW Group will jointly develop innovative cloud-enabled solutions and upskill up to 5,000 BMW Group-affiliated software engineers in cloud technologies SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 8, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), and the BMW Group (OTCMKTS: BMWYY) announced a comprehensive strategic collaboration to further accelerate the automaker's pace of innovation by placing data and analytics at the center of its decision-making. The companies will combine their strengths as industry leaders to jointly develop cloud-enabled solutions that increase efficiency, performance, and sustainability across every aspect of the automotive life cycle, from vehicle design to after-sales services. As part of the wide-ranging collaboration, the BMW Group will migrate data from across its business units and operations in over a hundred countries to AWS. The move will encompass a number of the BMW Group's core IT systems and databases for functions such as sales, manufacturing, and maintenance, and will help them increase agility, achieve new insights, and more quickly innovate new customer experiences. In addition, the companies will invest in enabling and training up to 5,000 BMW Group-affiliated software engineers in the latest AWS technologies and empower the company's global workforce to make better use of data. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201208005443/en/ Central to its strategy, the BMW Group is working to expand a company-wide data lake built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), named the "Cloud Data Hub," so that it can leverage data to deliver innovation across its global businesses. The Cloud Data Hub provides employees throughout the company with a common operating picture of their entire organization and a central starting point for new development efforts. From the Cloud Data Hub, BMW Group employees will have access to the breadth and depth of AWS services, including Amazon SageMaker (AWS's service that helps developers and data scientists build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly in the cloud and at the edge), to process, interrogate, and enrich several petabytes of engineering, manufacturing, sales, and vehicle performance data. The BMW Group's third-party partners like car dealerships, suppliers, and technology companies will also be able to securely contribute vehicle operating and maintenance data to the Cloud Data Hub and benefit from insights driven by machine learning. For instance, the BMW Group can apply machine learning to forecast demand for its range of vehicle models and individual equipment on a worldwide scale, as well as optimize planning across its sales, production, and purchasing units to deliver improved customer experiences. AWS and the BMW Group will also collaborate on innovative products and solutions to improve operational performance and increase transparency in the supply chain. The BMW Group's PartChain Platform uses AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) in conjunction with open-source blockchain management tools to enhance the traceability of automotive parts and critical raw materials throughout the automotive industry's highly complex global supply chain. This allows the BMW Group to link specific parts and vehicles to assist in defect investigations, as well as validate that materials are coming from socially responsible sources. The BMW Group is also using Amazon SageMaker to examine data from vehicle subsystems, leveraging machine learning to predict the performance of parts, proactively recommend maintenance, and inform parts suppliers of potential issues with their manufacturing processes to improve quality. As a core piece of this agreement, the companies will upskill and enable BMW Group employees to better apply data and analytics in their roles and take full advantage of the latest cloud technologies. AWS Professional Services and the BMW Group's data scientists will work with BMW Group employees to identify business challenges, evaluate emerging technologies, and develop new cloud-enabled solutions for the automotive industry. For example, the companies plan to develop a natural language processing solution, optimized for terminology used in the automotive industry, that can automatically extract, process, and translate data from diverse text sources like factory reports, social media, and customer-facing chatbots to provide a more comprehensive view of issues across the BMW Group's operations and identify insights relevant to customer service, marketing, compliance, maintenance, and related functions. With the support of AWS Training and Certification, the BMW Group plans to train up to 5,000 software engineers affiliated with the company, and certify more than 2,000 of that number, on AWS services, with an emphasis on machine learning and data analytics, to empower the company's workforce to innovate. "The BMW Group is driving digitalization and innovation in the automotive industry," said Alexander Buresch, CIO and Senior Vice President, BMW Group IT. "We are making data central to the way we work and we look forward to collaborating with AWS to merge our talents, continuing to raise the bar for innovation among automakers and delivering exciting new experiences for our customers around the world." "AWS provides the most comprehensive suite of cloud offerings to enable automakers to build applications that touch every point in the customer journey. By combining the domain expertise of the BMW Group with AWS's demonstrated leadership in the cloud, we're expanding our impact across the automotive industry so that stakeholders, from parts manufacturers to mechanics, can benefit from greater visibility and insights," said Matt Garman, Vice President of Sales & Marketing, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "As customer expectations evolve alongside automotive technologies, automakers can rely on AWS to help them seize opportunities and take the lead in areas such as electric and autonomous vehicles, ridesharing, data services, and more." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. About the BMW Group With its four brands BMW, MINI, Rolls-Royce and BMW Motorrad, the BMW Group is the world's leading premium manufacturer of automobiles and motorcycles and also provides premium financial and mobility services. The BMW Group production network comprises 31 production and assembly facilities in 15 countries; the company has a global sales network in more than 140 countries. In 2019, the BMW Group sold over 2.5 million passenger vehicles and more than 175,000 motorcycles worldwide. The profit before tax in the financial year 2019 was € 7.118 billion on revenues amounting to € 104.210 billion. As of 31 December 2019, the BMW Group had a workforce of 126,016 employees. The success of the BMW Group has always been based on long-term thinking and responsible action. The company has therefore established ecological and social sustainability throughout the value chain, comprehensive product responsibility and a clear commitment to conserving resources as an integral part of its strategy. www.bmwgroup.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201208005443/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>AWS and the BMW Group will jointly develop innovative cloud-enabled solutions and upskill up to 5,000 BMW Group-affiliated software engineers in cloud technologies</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 8, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), and the BMW Group (OTCMKTS: BMWYY) announced a comprehensive strategic collaboration to further accelerate the automaker's pace of innovation by placing data and analytics at the center of its decision-making. The companies will combine their strengths as industry leaders to jointly develop cloud-enabled solutions that increase efficiency, performance, and sustainability across every aspect of the automotive life cycle, from vehicle design to after-sales services. As part of the wide-ranging collaboration, the BMW Group will migrate data from across its business units and operations in over a hundred countries to AWS. The move will encompass a number of the BMW Group's core IT systems and databases for functions such as sales, manufacturing, and maintenance, and will help them increase agility, achieve new insights, and more quickly innovate new customer experiences. In addition, the companies will invest in enabling and training up to 5,000 BMW Group-affiliated software engineers in the latest AWS technologies and empower the company's global workforce to make better use of data.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201208005443/en/</p><p>Central to its strategy, the BMW Group is working to expand a company-wide data lake built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), named the "Cloud Data Hub," so that it can leverage data to deliver innovation across its global businesses. The Cloud Data Hub provides employees throughout the company with a common operating picture of their entire organization and a central starting point for new development efforts. From the Cloud Data Hub, BMW Group employees will have access to the breadth and depth of AWS services, including Amazon SageMaker (AWS's service that helps developers and data scientists build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly in the cloud and at the edge), to process, interrogate, and enrich several petabytes of engineering, manufacturing, sales, and vehicle performance data. The BMW Group's third-party partners like car dealerships, suppliers, and technology companies will also be able to securely contribute vehicle operating and maintenance data to the Cloud Data Hub and benefit from insights driven by machine learning. For instance, the BMW Group can apply machine learning to forecast demand for its range of vehicle models and individual equipment on a worldwide scale, as well as optimize planning across its sales, production, and purchasing units to deliver improved customer experiences.</p><p>AWS and the BMW Group will also collaborate on innovative products and solutions to improve operational performance and increase transparency in the supply chain. The BMW Group's PartChain Platform uses AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) in conjunction with open-source blockchain management tools to enhance the traceability of automotive parts and critical raw materials throughout the automotive industry's highly complex global supply chain. This allows the BMW Group to link specific parts and vehicles to assist in defect investigations, as well as validate that materials are coming from socially responsible sources. The BMW Group is also using Amazon SageMaker to examine data from vehicle subsystems, leveraging machine learning to predict the performance of parts, proactively recommend maintenance, and inform parts suppliers of potential issues with their manufacturing processes to improve quality.</p><p>As a core piece of this agreement, the companies will upskill and enable BMW Group employees to better apply data and analytics in their roles and take full advantage of the latest cloud technologies. AWS Professional Services and the BMW Group's data scientists will work with BMW Group employees to identify business challenges, evaluate emerging technologies, and develop new cloud-enabled solutions for the automotive industry. For example, the companies plan to develop a natural language processing solution, optimized for terminology used in the automotive industry, that can automatically extract, process, and translate data from diverse text sources like factory reports, social media, and customer-facing chatbots to provide a more comprehensive view of issues across the BMW Group's operations and identify insights relevant to customer service, marketing, compliance, maintenance, and related functions. With the support of AWS Training and Certification, the BMW Group plans to train up to 5,000 software engineers affiliated with the company, and certify more than 2,000 of that number, on AWS services, with an emphasis on machine learning and data analytics, to empower the company's workforce to innovate.</p><p>"The BMW Group is driving digitalization and innovation in the automotive industry," said Alexander Buresch, CIO and Senior Vice President, BMW Group IT. "We are making data central to the way we work and we look forward to collaborating with AWS to merge our talents, continuing to raise the bar for innovation among automakers and delivering exciting new experiences for our customers around the world."</p><p>"AWS provides the most comprehensive suite of cloud offerings to enable automakers to build applications that touch every point in the customer journey. By combining the domain expertise of the BMW Group with AWS's demonstrated leadership in the cloud, we're expanding our impact across the automotive industry so that stakeholders, from parts manufacturers to mechanics, can benefit from greater visibility and insights," said Matt Garman, Vice President of Sales &amp; Marketing, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "As customer expectations evolve alongside automotive technologies, automakers can rely on AWS to help them seize opportunities and take the lead in areas such as electric and autonomous vehicles, ridesharing, data services, and more."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>About the BMW Group</p><p>With its four brands BMW, MINI, Rolls-Royce and BMW Motorrad, the BMW Group is the world's leading premium manufacturer of automobiles and motorcycles and also provides premium financial and mobility services. The BMW Group production network comprises 31 production and assembly facilities in 15 countries; the company has a global sales network in more than 140 countries. In 2019, the BMW Group sold over 2.5 million passenger vehicles and more than 175,000 motorcycles worldwide. The profit before tax in the financial year 2019 was € 7.118 billion on revenues amounting to € 104.210 billion. As of 31 December 2019, the BMW Group had a workforce of 126,016 employees.</p><p>The success of the BMW Group has always been based on long-term thinking and responsible action. The company has therefore established ecological and social sustainability throughout the value chain, comprehensive product responsibility and a clear commitment to conserving resources as an integral part of its strategy. www.bmwgroup.com</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201208005443/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

AWS Announces Plans to Open Second Region in Australia

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-Plans-to-Open-Second-Region-in-Australia/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-Plans-to-Open-Second-Region-in-Australia

12/07/2020 18:13:00

AWS Announces Plans to Open Second Region in Australia

12/07/2020

2020

New AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region will be available in the second half of 2022, supporting hundreds of thousands of AWS customers with lower latency, and even greater fault tolerance and resiliency for critical cloud workloads SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 7, 2020-- Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced plans to open a second infrastructure region in Australia in the second half of 2022. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region, which will consist of three Availability Zones (AZs) at launch, will join the existing 25 Availability Zones in eight AWS Regions across Asia Pacific in Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea, and Singapore. Globally, AWS has 77 Availability Zones across 24 geographic regions, with plans to launch 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, and the new region in Australia. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region will enable even more developers, startups, and enterprises as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations to run their applications and serve end users from data centers located in Australia. For more information on AWS's global infrastructure, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/. "Over the last decade, customers in Australia have relied upon the cloud to transform businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies, and with another AWS Region coming to Asia Pacific, we look forward to helping accelerate these transformations," said Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, AWS. "Together with our AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, we're providing customers with more flexibility and choice, while allowing them to architect their infrastructure for even greater fault tolerance, resiliency, and availability across geographic locations." "We welcome the investment of one of the world's leading tech companies into Melbourne – the new AWS Region will draw on our highly skilled talent, culture of innovation, and renowned capabilities in growing employment fields such as cloud computing," said Tim Pallas, Victorian Minister for Economic Development. "Attracting companies like AWS will not only strengthen our world-leading tech reputation but contribute to our economic recovery." AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which are technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers' business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault tolerance. The launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region will provide customers with even lower latency across the country. Additionally, Australian customers, from startups to enterprises and the public sector, will have additional infrastructure to leverage advanced technologies from the world's leading cloud with the broadest and deepest suite of cloud services including compute, storage, analytics, artificial intelligence, database, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, mobile services, serverless, and more to drive innovation. Customers in Australia also benefit from Amazon's continued investment in its global backbone through the Hawaiki Submarine Cable, a 15,000- kilometre transpacific cable system operational since 2018 that provides a low-latency and high-bandwidth connection from Australia to New Zealand and the United States. Customers and AWS Partners welcome the news of the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region Hundreds of thousands of active customers use AWS services in Australia each month to accelerate innovation, increase agility, and drive cost savings. This includes the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), Woodside, David Jones, Network Ten, Australia Post, National Australia Bank (NAB), The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Kmart Group, Origin Energy, Telstra, Qantas, Atlassian, Canva, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Siteminder, Realestate.com.au, Afterpay, Xero, David Jones, Myer, SEEK, Australia Post, and Swinburne University, among many others. CBA is Australia's leading provider of personal, business and institutional banking, and share brokering services."Having safe, secure and resilient infrastructure is paramount to providing the best banking experiences for our customers. CBA has long been an advocate of cloud computing as a way of taking advantage of modern compute infrastructure. As more traditional banking services continue to become available online, our annual investments in technology and innovation will continue to meet this demand, underpinned by our ongoing development of cloud-first, resilient, and modern platforms," said Mark Vudrag, Executive General Manager, Global Technology Services, Commonwealth Bank of Australia. "CBA has been using AWS since the launch of its first Australian AWS Region in 2012, and the new region in Australia will further support the resiliency and reliability of our cloud services." Swinburne University of Technology is a leading Australian university that focuses on innovation, industry engagement, and social inclusion. "We have worked with AWS since 2016, and in that time have collaborated on many innovations that support communities in Victoria. This includes the Swinburne Data for Social Good Cloud Innovation Centre, which uses cloud technologies and intelligent data analytics to solve real-world health, wellbeing, and social challenges affecting Australians, and the recent Beatcovid19now symptom tracker to provide valuable information to health authorities in Australia to deal with the pandemic," said Swinburne's Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research and Enterprise), Professor Bronwyn Fox. "A new AWS Region here in Melbourne will allow us to further scale our innovation, and continue to transform our research and development projects that protect, prioritise, and benefit people across the city, state, and country." XY Sense is a Melbourne-based technology startup using smart sensors and machine learning powered analytics to create technology-enabled workplaces. "AWS is like rocket fuel for startups. They've been with us from the early days of our big data platform design and today we leverage many of their machine learning and IoT capabilities to help us quickly process billions of anonymous data points. It's not just about the support we receive on the tech side of things but about how the AWS Partner programs have helped us scale our go-to-market launch this year. With a second local AWS Region and AWS's incredible enablement programs for startups such as Activate, we will be able to continue to evolve our service capabilities and accelerate our growth," said Alex Birch, CEO and co-founder of XY Sense. The AWS Partner Network (APN) includes tens of thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and Systems Integrators (SI) around the world. AWS Partners build innovative solutions and services on AWS, and the APN helps by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support. SI Consulting Partners supporting enterprise and public sector customers migrating to AWS include Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte, Versent, Wipro, DXC, TCS and many others. AWS ISVs in Australia including Atlassian, Faethm, Whispir, Max Kelsen, Contino, and many others are already using AWS to deliver their software to customers around the world and intend to serve their Australian customers from the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region at launch. For the full list of AWS Partner Network (APN) members, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/partners/ Versent Group is an Australian company, headquartered in Melbourne, comprising specialist digital transformation consultants and a world-class managed services team. "Our collaboration with AWS has been critical to our long-term growth, and just as critical to our ability to pivot and support customers during recent times. The announcement of a new AWS Region in Melbourne will allow us to continue to innovate rapidly, hire more skilled Australians for the 70-plus roles we currently have open, and ensure the availability and delivery of world-leading technology foundations to businesses around Australia. Since our inception, we have experienced double-digit growth year on year and now have 350 employees across Australia, Singapore, and the US with offices in Perth, Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne. With the new region in Australia, we expect that we will be able to expand our business and hire more highly skilled tech employees, further supporting the local workforce," said Thor Essman, CEO of Versent. Deloitte is one of Australia's leading professional services firms. "Deloitte has been an AWS Strategic Global Premier Partner since 2015, and with AWS, we have delivered advanced technology products and services to Australian businesses and public sector agencies, including the University of Newcastle, Jemena, and David Jones. Critical to this has been arming our employees with the latest skills needed to help these – and many more – businesses adapt quicker than ever, which is why we have given more than 4,000 employees across Deloitte the opportunity to further develop their skills in cloud computing via the Deloitte Cloud Guild, a technology training program in collaboration with AWS. The announcement of the Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region will allow us to leverage these enhanced cloud skills to deliver secure, highly available, and disruptive solutions to our customers," said Rob Hillard, Deloitte Asia Pacific Chief Transformation Officer. Amazon Continued Investment in Australia  The new AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region demonstrates Amazon's continuing investment in Australia. Over the last decade, Amazon has invested more than AUD $3 billion in Australia, including infrastructure and compensation. In 2012, Amazon established its first infrastructure in Australia, launching the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region followed by Amazon CloudFront Points of Presence infrastructure in Sydney, Melbourne (July 2014), and Perth (January 2018). Amazon currently has four fulfillment centers (FCs) in Australia Dandenong South, Melbourne, (December 2017); Moorebank, Sydney (August 2018); Perth's Airport Precinct (November 2019); and its most recent in Lytton, Brisbane (June 2020). This year Amazon opened 10 logistics sites in Australia across Sydney (4), Melbourne (4), Brisbane (1) and Perth (1). Amazon also announced a second Melbourne FC in Ravenhall and Australia's first Amazon Robotics FC. Amazon continues to create jobs in Australia, with more than 3,000 employees across amazon.com.au, AWS, Kindle, Audible, Alexa and Prime Video. Additionally, Amazon is committed to running its business in the most environmentally friendly way. To further its commitment to sustainability, Amazon aims to reach net zero carbon across all of Amazon's operations by 2040 as part of The Climate Pledge. Amazon has invested in two renewable energy projects in Australia, which in total will add a combined 165 megawatts (MWs) of capacity and are expected to generate 392,000 MWh annually – or enough to power 63,000 average Australian homes each year. Amazon is also continuing to invest in the upskilling of local developers, students, and the next generation of IT leaders in Australia through programs such as AWS re/Start, AWS Academy, and AWS Educate. AWS re/Start is a digital skills training program that prepares unemployed, underemployed, and transitioning individuals for careers in cloud computing and connects students to potential employers. AWS Academy provides higher education institutions with a free, ready-to-teach cloud computing curriculum that prepares students to pursue industry-recognised certifications and in-demand cloud jobs. AWS Educate provides student access to AWS services and content designed to build knowledge and skills in cloud computing. Customers and AWS Partners looking to learn more about AWS should visit https://aws.amazon.com About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201207005969/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services

<p><em>New AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region will be available in the second half of 2022, supporting hundreds of thousands of AWS customers with lower latency, and even greater fault tolerance and resiliency for critical cloud workloads</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 7, 2020-- Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced plans to open a second infrastructure region in Australia in the second half of 2022. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region, which will consist of three Availability Zones (AZs) at launch, will join the existing 25 Availability Zones in eight AWS Regions across Asia Pacific in Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea, and Singapore. Globally, AWS has 77 Availability Zones across 24 geographic regions, with plans to launch 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, and the new region in Australia. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region will enable even more developers, startups, and enterprises as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations to run their applications and serve end users from data centers located in Australia. For more information on AWS's global infrastructure, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/.</p><p>"Over the last decade, customers in Australia have relied upon the cloud to transform businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies, and with another AWS Region coming to Asia Pacific, we look forward to helping accelerate these transformations," said Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, AWS. "Together with our AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, we're providing customers with more flexibility and choice, while allowing them to architect their infrastructure for even greater fault tolerance, resiliency, and availability across geographic locations."</p><p>"We welcome the investment of one of the world's leading tech companies into Melbourne – the new AWS Region will draw on our highly skilled talent, culture of innovation, and renowned capabilities in growing employment fields such as cloud computing," said Tim Pallas, Victorian Minister for Economic Development. "Attracting companies like AWS will not only strengthen our world-leading tech reputation but contribute to our economic recovery."</p><p>AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which are technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers' business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault tolerance. The launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region will provide customers with even lower latency across the country. Additionally, Australian customers, from startups to enterprises and the public sector, will have additional infrastructure to leverage advanced technologies from the world's leading cloud with the broadest and deepest suite of cloud services including compute, storage, analytics, artificial intelligence, database, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, mobile services, serverless, and more to drive innovation. Customers in Australia also benefit from Amazon's continued investment in its global backbone through the Hawaiki Submarine Cable, a 15,000- kilometre transpacific cable system operational since 2018 that provides a low-latency and high-bandwidth connection from Australia to New Zealand and the United States.</p><p>Customers and AWS Partners welcome the news of the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region</p><p>Hundreds of thousands of active customers use AWS services in Australia each month to accelerate innovation, increase agility, and drive cost savings. This includes the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), Woodside, David Jones, Network Ten, Australia Post, National Australia Bank (NAB), The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Kmart Group, Origin Energy, Telstra, Qantas, Atlassian, Canva, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Siteminder, Realestate.com.au, Afterpay, Xero, David Jones, Myer, SEEK, Australia Post, and Swinburne University, among many others.</p><p>CBA is Australia's leading provider of personal, business and institutional banking, and share brokering services."Having safe, secure and resilient infrastructure is paramount to providing the best banking experiences for our customers. CBA has long been an advocate of cloud computing as a way of taking advantage of modern compute infrastructure. As more traditional banking services continue to become available online, our annual investments in technology and innovation will continue to meet this demand, underpinned by our ongoing development of cloud-first, resilient, and modern platforms," said Mark Vudrag, Executive General Manager, Global Technology Services, Commonwealth Bank of Australia. "CBA has been using AWS since the launch of its first Australian AWS Region in 2012, and the new region in Australia will further support the resiliency and reliability of our cloud services."</p><p>Swinburne University of Technology is a leading Australian university that focuses on innovation, industry engagement, and social inclusion. "We have worked with AWS since 2016, and in that time have collaborated on many innovations that support communities in Victoria. This includes the Swinburne Data for Social Good Cloud Innovation Centre, which uses cloud technologies and intelligent data analytics to solve real-world health, wellbeing, and social challenges affecting Australians, and the recent Beatcovid19now symptom tracker to provide valuable information to health authorities in Australia to deal with the pandemic," said Swinburne's Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research and Enterprise), Professor Bronwyn Fox. "A new AWS Region here in Melbourne will allow us to further scale our innovation, and continue to transform our research and development projects that protect, prioritise, and benefit people across the city, state, and country."</p><p>XY Sense is a Melbourne-based technology startup using smart sensors and machine learning powered analytics to create technology-enabled workplaces. "AWS is like rocket fuel for startups. They've been with us from the early days of our big data platform design and today we leverage many of their machine learning and IoT capabilities to help us quickly process billions of anonymous data points. It's not just about the support we receive on the tech side of things but about how the AWS Partner programs have helped us scale our go-to-market launch this year. With a second local AWS Region and AWS's incredible enablement programs for startups such as Activate, we will be able to continue to evolve our service capabilities and accelerate our growth," said Alex Birch, CEO and co-founder of XY Sense.</p><p>The AWS Partner Network (APN) includes tens of thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and Systems Integrators (SI) around the world. AWS Partners build innovative solutions and services on AWS, and the APN helps by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support. SI Consulting Partners supporting enterprise and public sector customers migrating to AWS include Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte, Versent, Wipro, DXC, TCS and many others. AWS ISVs in Australia including Atlassian, Faethm, Whispir, Max Kelsen, Contino, and many others are already using AWS to deliver their software to customers around the world and intend to serve their Australian customers from the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region at launch. For the full list of AWS Partner Network (APN) members, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/partners/</p><p>Versent Group is an Australian company, headquartered in Melbourne, comprising specialist digital transformation consultants and a world-class managed services team. "Our collaboration with AWS has been critical to our long-term growth, and just as critical to our ability to pivot and support customers during recent times. The announcement of a new AWS Region in Melbourne will allow us to continue to innovate rapidly, hire more skilled Australians for the 70-plus roles we currently have open, and ensure the availability and delivery of world-leading technology foundations to businesses around Australia. Since our inception, we have experienced double-digit growth year on year and now have 350 employees across Australia, Singapore, and the US with offices in Perth, Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne. With the new region in Australia, we expect that we will be able to expand our business and hire more highly skilled tech employees, further supporting the local workforce," said Thor Essman, CEO of Versent.</p><p>Deloitte is one of Australia's leading professional services firms. "Deloitte has been an AWS Strategic Global Premier Partner since 2015, and with AWS, we have delivered advanced technology products and services to Australian businesses and public sector agencies, including the University of Newcastle, Jemena, and David Jones. Critical to this has been arming our employees with the latest skills needed to help these – and many more – businesses adapt quicker than ever, which is why we have given more than 4,000 employees across Deloitte the opportunity to further develop their skills in cloud computing via the Deloitte Cloud Guild, a technology training program in collaboration with AWS. The announcement of the Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region will allow us to leverage these enhanced cloud skills to deliver secure, highly available, and disruptive solutions to our customers," said Rob Hillard, Deloitte Asia Pacific Chief Transformation Officer.</p><p>Amazon Continued Investment in Australia </p><p>The new AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region demonstrates Amazon's continuing investment in Australia. Over the last decade, Amazon has invested more than AUD $3 billion in Australia, including infrastructure and compensation. In 2012, Amazon established its first infrastructure in Australia, launching the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region followed by Amazon CloudFront Points of Presence infrastructure in Sydney, Melbourne (July 2014), and Perth (January 2018). Amazon currently has four fulfillment centers (FCs) in Australia Dandenong South, Melbourne, (December 2017); Moorebank, Sydney (August 2018); Perth's Airport Precinct (November 2019); and its most recent in Lytton, Brisbane (June 2020). This year Amazon opened 10 logistics sites in Australia across Sydney (4), Melbourne (4), Brisbane (1) and Perth (1). Amazon also announced a second Melbourne FC in Ravenhall and Australia's first Amazon Robotics FC. Amazon continues to create jobs in Australia, with more than 3,000 employees across amazon.com.au, AWS, Kindle, Audible, Alexa and Prime Video.</p><p>Additionally, Amazon is committed to running its business in the most environmentally friendly way. To further its commitment to sustainability, Amazon aims to reach net zero carbon across all of Amazon's operations by 2040 as part of The Climate Pledge. Amazon has invested in two renewable energy projects in Australia, which in total will add a combined 165 megawatts (MWs) of capacity and are expected to generate 392,000 MWh annually – or enough to power 63,000 average Australian homes each year.</p><p>Amazon is also continuing to invest in the upskilling of local developers, students, and the next generation of IT leaders in Australia through programs such as AWS re/Start, AWS Academy, and AWS Educate. AWS re/Start is a digital skills training program that prepares unemployed, underemployed, and transitioning individuals for careers in cloud computing and connects students to potential employers. AWS Academy provides higher education institutions with a free, ready-to-teach cloud computing curriculum that prepares students to pursue industry-recognised certifications and in-demand cloud jobs. AWS Educate provides student access to AWS services and content designed to build knowledge and skills in cloud computing.</p><p>Customers and AWS Partners looking to learn more about AWS should visit https://aws.amazon.com</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201207005969/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services</p>

Amazon Announces New Fulfillment Center in Missouri City, TX

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Announces-New-Fulfillment-Center-in-Missouri-City-TX/default.aspx

Amazon-Announces-New-Fulfillment-Center-in-Missouri-City-TX

12/07/2020 10:03:00

Amazon Announces New Fulfillment Center in Missouri City, TX

12/07/2020

2020

New one million square-foot site to create over 500 new, full-time jobs SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 7, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) plans to open its first fulfillment center in Missouri City, Texas. The new fulfillment center, which is anticipated to launch in 2021, will create over 500 new full-time jobs with industry-leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one. See Our Fulfillment Centers in Action "We're excited to be expanding our network of operations in Missouri City," said Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon's vice president of global customer fulfillment. "We are grateful for the strong support we've received from local and state leaders as we broaden our footprint throughout Texas. Every day at Amazon, incredible employees come together to deliver magical experiences for customers and we look forward to creating over 500 jobs for the local community, with industry-leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one." In the new one million square-foot fulfillment center Amazon associates will work to pick, pack, and ship bulky or larger-sized customer items such as patio furniture, outdoor equipment, or rugs. "Missouri City and Amazon are alike when it comes to success, diversity, customer service and community. We are looking forward to this new business model, which focuses on customer service and expands the economy as this is another partnership that will build on our commercial tax base, helping to ease the property tax burden on residents," said Missouri City Mayor Yolanda Ford. "Expanding the economic base is a citizen and City Council priority, and this new Amazon center helps to achieve that goal. It's just another step in moving Missouri City's economy forward into the future." On top of Amazon's industry-leading minimum $15 per hour wage, the company offers full-time employees comprehensive benefits including full medical, vision, and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) with 50 percent match starting on day one. Amazon prioritizes the safety and health of its employees and has invested millions of dollars to provide a safe workplace. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families. Amazon leverages its scale to help support local communities. Amazon has also pledged to invest over $700 million to provide upskilling training for 100,000 U.S. employees for in-demand jobs. The programs will help Amazon team members from all backgrounds access training to move into highly skilled roles across the company's corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and transportation network, or pursue career paths outside of Amazon. "We welcome Amazon to Missouri City and are excited that this piece of the City's long-term economic development plan has come to fruition," said City Manager Odis Jones. "Our teams have been working hand-in-hand the last few weeks to finalize the deal and we are looking forward to continuing our corporate-community partnership with this industry giant for years to come." Amazon in Texas: Since 2010, Amazon has created more than 43,000 jobs in Texas and invested more than $16.9 billion across the state, including infrastructure and compensation to its employees. Amazon's investments have contributed more than $18.8 billion in GDP to the Texas economy and have helped create over 49,000 indirect jobs on top of Amazon's direct hires – from jobs in construction and logistics to professional services. More than 116,000 independent authors and small and medium businesses in Texas are selling to customers in Amazon's store, creating thousands of additional jobs across the state. Additional Resources: See an Amazon Fulfillment Center In Action Amazon Job Creation and Investment U.S. U.S. Investment Map About Amazon: Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/ and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201207005605/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>New one million square-foot site to create over 500 new, full-time jobs</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 7, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) plans to open its first fulfillment center in Missouri City, Texas. The new fulfillment center, which is anticipated to launch in 2021, will create over 500 new full-time jobs with industry-leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one.</p><p>See Our Fulfillment Centers in Action</p><p>"We're excited to be expanding our network of operations in Missouri City," said Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon's vice president of global customer fulfillment. "We are grateful for the strong support we've received from local and state leaders as we broaden our footprint throughout Texas. Every day at Amazon, incredible employees come together to deliver magical experiences for customers and we look forward to creating over 500 jobs for the local community, with industry-leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one."</p><p>In the new one million square-foot fulfillment center Amazon associates will work to pick, pack, and ship bulky or larger-sized customer items such as patio furniture, outdoor equipment, or rugs.</p><p>"Missouri City and Amazon are alike when it comes to success, diversity, customer service and community. We are looking forward to this new business model, which focuses on customer service and expands the economy as this is another partnership that will build on our commercial tax base, helping to ease the property tax burden on residents," said Missouri City Mayor Yolanda Ford. "Expanding the economic base is a citizen and City Council priority, and this new Amazon center helps to achieve that goal. It's just another step in moving Missouri City's economy forward into the future."</p><p>On top of Amazon's industry-leading minimum $15 per hour wage, the company offers full-time employees comprehensive benefits including full medical, vision, and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) with 50 percent match starting on day one. Amazon prioritizes the safety and health of its employees and has invested millions of dollars to provide a safe workplace. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families.</p><p>Amazon leverages its scale to help support local communities. Amazon has also pledged to invest over $700 million to provide upskilling training for 100,000 U.S. employees for in-demand jobs. The programs will help Amazon team members from all backgrounds access training to move into highly skilled roles across the company's corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and transportation network, or pursue career paths outside of Amazon.</p><p>"We welcome Amazon to Missouri City and are excited that this piece of the City's long-term economic development plan has come to fruition," said City Manager Odis Jones. "Our teams have been working hand-in-hand the last few weeks to finalize the deal and we are looking forward to continuing our corporate-community partnership with this industry giant for years to come."</p><p>Amazon in Texas:</p><ul><li>Since 2010, Amazon has created more than 43,000 jobs in Texas and invested more than $16.9 billion across the state, including infrastructure and compensation to its employees.</li><li>Amazon's investments have contributed more than $18.8 billion in GDP to the Texas economy and have helped create over 49,000 indirect jobs on top of Amazon's direct hires – from jobs in construction and logistics to professional services.</li><li>More than 116,000 independent authors and small and medium businesses in Texas are selling to customers in Amazon's store, creating thousands of additional jobs across the state.</li></ul><p>Additional Resources:</p><ul><li>See an Amazon Fulfillment Center In Action</li><li>Amazon Job Creation and Investment U.S.</li><li>U.S. Investment Map</li></ul><p>About Amazon: Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/ and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201207005605/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

AWS Announces Partnership with MGM to Modernize its Media Supply Chain

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-Partnership-with-MGM-to-Modernize-its-Media-Supply-Chain/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-Partnership-with-MGM-to-Modernize-its-Media-Supply-Chain

12/07/2020 09:00:00

AWS Announces Partnership with MGM to Modernize its Media Supply Chain

12/07/2020

2020

Leading entertainment company will rely upon AWS's unmatched portfolio of cloud services to develop new business models for distributing film and TV content SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 7, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced a multi-year collaboration with Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) to reimagine its core media supply chain and enterprise-wide media distribution platform. MGM owns one of the world's largest libraries of premium film and television content, including the Bond and Rocky film franchises, as well as the series Fargo, Vikings, and The Handmaid's Tale,and is focused on the production, acquisition, licensing, and global distribution of its film and television content across all media platforms. MGM is migrating its content library and critical SAP workloads to AWS to power its media supply chain as well as support its content rights and distribution processes. Running on AWS, MGM will distribute content across multiple platforms quickly and at scale. Traditional media supply chains are highly decentralized, expensive to maintain, and rely on manual processes and third parties to distribute content to new and existing platforms. MGM's new cloud-based media supply chain will leverage AWS compute, serverless, storage, machine learning, and media services to modernize its infrastructure. MGM will build a data lake on AWS using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) that will provide up-to-date content rights and ownership information and connect to a microservices architecture that will simplify and automate workflows and processes throughout MGM's complex media supply chain. MGM and AWS are working together to innovate across MGM's development and fulfillment processes, tackling challenges from intellectual property acquisition and development, through the delivery of professional content and servicing materials. MGM will leverage AWS Media Services, including AWS Elemental MediaConvert, to more fully automate the processes for preparing and delivering MGM's library of feature film and premium television content, optimizing video for viewing on any screen. Using AWS Lambda serverless compute and AWS container services, the new media supply chain will enable MGM to transfer, process, and package video for all media channels on demand without having to procure, plan, and run infrastructure. In addition, Amazon S3, Amazon S3 Glacier, and Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive will provide MGM with secure and cost effective content and data storage and archiving. Applying machine learning services like Amazon Rekognition (AWS's service that adds intelligent image and video analysis to applications) will enable MGM to analyze content, as well as create and tag specific video frames with metadata, making it easier for MGM's partners to find and license film and TV shows for their lineups. In addition, MGM will leverage AWS analytics services like Amazon EMR (AWS's industry-leading cloud big data service for processing vast amounts of data using open source tools) and machine learning services such as Amazon SageMaker (AWS's service that helps developers and data scientists build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly in the cloud and at the edge) to predict content viewing and sales trends so they can forecast demand for their vast content library. "MGM has one of the world's deepest libraries of premium film and television content, and we're innovating in the cloud to improve how we get this extensive, rich content out to distributors around the world using scalable, microservices-based architectures," said Doug Rousso, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of MGM. "AWS gives us the flexibility, scalability, reliability, and security to deliver premium content to customers through intelligent and automated supply chain solutions. Our new cloud-based media supply chain will give us increased visibility into owned content, the ability to better inform our sales teams, and faster processing of licensing deal that will help us deliver more content experiences to viewers and grow new revenue opportunities." "MGM is reinventing its media supply chain in the world's leading cloud, leveraging AWS's unmatched functionality and scalability to more effectively deliver its vast library of content to existing and new TV and viewer platforms," said Greg Pearson, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at Amazon Web Services, Inc. "AWS's proven performance and comprehensive set of cloud and professional services will help MGM succeed in its cloud transformation and create a complete, modern media supply chain for video. We look forward to expanding our work together to continue to drive innovation across this supply chain and deliver improved customer experiences to audiences around the world." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are just some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. About Metro Goldwyn Mayer Metro Goldwyn Mayer is a leading entertainment company focused on the production and global distribution of film and television content across all platforms. The company owns one of the world's deepest libraries of premium film and television content. In addition, MGM has investments in numerous television channels. For more information, visit www.mgm.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201207005103/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>Leading entertainment company will rely upon AWS's unmatched portfolio of cloud services to develop new business models for distributing film and TV content</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 7, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced a multi-year collaboration with Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) to reimagine its core media supply chain and enterprise-wide media distribution platform. MGM owns one of the world's largest libraries of premium film and television content, including the <em>Bond</em> and <em>Rocky</em> film franchises, as well as the series <em>Fargo</em>, <em>Vikings</em>, and <em>The Handmaid's Tale</em>,and is focused on the production, acquisition, licensing, and global distribution of its film and television content across all media platforms. MGM is migrating its content library and critical SAP workloads to AWS to power its media supply chain as well as support its content rights and distribution processes. Running on AWS, MGM will distribute content across multiple platforms quickly and at scale.</p><p>Traditional media supply chains are highly decentralized, expensive to maintain, and rely on manual processes and third parties to distribute content to new and existing platforms. MGM's new cloud-based media supply chain will leverage AWS compute, serverless, storage, machine learning, and media services to modernize its infrastructure. MGM will build a data lake on AWS using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) that will provide up-to-date content rights and ownership information and connect to a microservices architecture that will simplify and automate workflows and processes throughout MGM's complex media supply chain. MGM and AWS are working together to innovate across MGM's development and fulfillment processes, tackling challenges from intellectual property acquisition and development, through the delivery of professional content and servicing materials.</p><p>MGM will leverage AWS Media Services, including AWS Elemental MediaConvert, to more fully automate the processes for preparing and delivering MGM's library of feature film and premium television content, optimizing video for viewing on any screen. Using AWS Lambda serverless compute and AWS container services, the new media supply chain will enable MGM to transfer, process, and package video for all media channels on demand without having to procure, plan, and run infrastructure. In addition, Amazon S3, Amazon S3 Glacier, and Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive will provide MGM with secure and cost effective content and data storage and archiving.</p><p>Applying machine learning services like Amazon Rekognition (AWS's service that adds intelligent image and video analysis to applications) will enable MGM to analyze content, as well as create and tag specific video frames with metadata, making it easier for MGM's partners to find and license film and TV shows for their lineups. In addition, MGM will leverage AWS analytics services like Amazon EMR (AWS's industry-leading cloud big data service for processing vast amounts of data using open source tools) and machine learning services such as Amazon SageMaker (AWS's service that helps developers and data scientists build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly in the cloud and at the edge) to predict content viewing and sales trends so they can forecast demand for their vast content library.</p><p>"MGM has one of the world's deepest libraries of premium film and television content, and we're innovating in the cloud to improve how we get this extensive, rich content out to distributors around the world using scalable, microservices-based architectures," said Doug Rousso, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of MGM. "AWS gives us the flexibility, scalability, reliability, and security to deliver premium content to customers through intelligent and automated supply chain solutions. Our new cloud-based media supply chain will give us increased visibility into owned content, the ability to better inform our sales teams, and faster processing of licensing deal that will help us deliver more content experiences to viewers and grow new revenue opportunities."</p><p>"MGM is reinventing its media supply chain in the world's leading cloud, leveraging AWS's unmatched functionality and scalability to more effectively deliver its vast library of content to existing and new TV and viewer platforms," said Greg Pearson, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at Amazon Web Services, Inc. "AWS's proven performance and comprehensive set of cloud and professional services will help MGM succeed in its cloud transformation and create a complete, modern media supply chain for video. We look forward to expanding our work together to continue to drive innovation across this supply chain and deliver improved customer experiences to audiences around the world."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are just some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>About Metro Goldwyn Mayer</p><p>Metro Goldwyn Mayer is a leading entertainment company focused on the production and global distribution of film and television content across all platforms. The company owns one of the world's deepest libraries of premium film and television content. In addition, MGM has investments in numerous television channels. For more information, visit www.mgm.com.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201207005103/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

Amazon Donates $2.25 Million to The Housing Fund to Help Preserve Homeownership for Hundreds of Nashville Residents Amid Ongoing Challenges of 2020

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Donates-2.25-Million-to-The-Housing-Fund-to-Help-Preserve-Homeownership-for-Hundreds-of-Nashville-Residents-Amid-Ongoing-Challenges-of-2020/default.aspx

Amazon-Donates-2.25-Million-to-The-Housing-Fund-to-Help-Preserve-Homeownership-for-Hundreds-of-Nashville-Residents-Amid-Ongoing-Challenges-of-2020

12/07/2020 08:45:00

Amazon Donates $2.25 Million to The Housing Fund to Help Preserve Homeownership for Hundreds of Nashville Residents Amid Ongoing Challenges of 2020

12/07/2020

2020

\ Amazon's donation will help mitigate the impact of rising housing costs for low-to-moderate income households to preserve homeownership and build financial stability The Housing Fund launching Housing Resiliency Fund to make payments to mortgage companies and Metro government on behalf of qualified residents NASHVILLE, Tenn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 7, 2020-- Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and The Housing Fund today announced a $2.25 million donation from Amazon to help preserve homeownership for hundreds of Nashville-area residents facing housing insecurity amid the unprecedented challenges of 2020, including tornado recovery, job loss, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and tax increases. With this donation, The Housing Fund will launch the Housing Resiliency Fund and will make financial grants to help ensure that low- and moderate-income families can keep their homes and maintain critical, long-term financial stability. "Amazon's donation will help us keep more families in their homes, which is always our ultimate goal, because home ownership is the key to long-term wealth building," said Marshall Crawford, CEO, The Housing Fund. "Across Middle Tennessee, there is a growing divide between wages and housing costs, forcing moderate-income families to make unprecedented decisions about the future of their living conditions. For these families, these grants will be game-changing. We hope it spurs additional local partners to step up and donate because everyone benefits when more people can pay their bills." The Housing Fund's guiding mission is to provide resources and creative leadership to help individuals and communities create and maintain affordable and healthy households. Approaching its 25th Anniversary in 2021, The Housing Fund will put Amazon's donation towards preserving long-term housing affordability for low- and moderate-income families struggling due to recent stressors. Through the new Housing Resiliency Fund, The Housing Fund will make payments on behalf of qualified residents to mortgage companies and the Metro government to help mitigate the impact of rising housing costs. Additionally, The Housing Fund will conduct community outreach, maintain strong personal relationships, and through a partnership with Citizens Savings Bank & Trust – the oldest African American bank in the country – coach and educate local residents so they can best budget and plan for the future. All of these efforts are part of The Housing Fund's recently launched Power of 10 initiative, focused on bringing resources to residents facing housing insecurity. "Amazon's $2.25 million donation to The Housing Fund will immediately support hundreds of families across Nashville, a community we are now proud to call home," said Holly Sullivan, Head of Worldwide Economic Development, Amazon. "We applaud Marshall and his team's steadfast leadership and commitment to equitable housing solutions in this region and congratulate him on his well-deserved recognition as one of Nashville's Most Admired CEOs." "My office is committed to helping working families thrive, so I commend Amazon for stepping in to provide generous support for Nashvillians who need it most," said Nashville Mayor John Cooper. "Amazon's timely gift of relief funds and its partnership with The Housing Fund provides working families with immediate financial relief during this trying time." In November 2018, Amazon announced that it would invest in a new office in Nashville, bringing more than 5,000 corporate and technology jobs to the community to support Amazon's operations business. Amazon recently crossed the 1,000-employee milestone in Nashville. As Amazon grows in Nashville, it is committed to supporting the local community with contributions and delivery service for local food banks and funding computer science education for dozens of Metro Nashville Public Schools. This month, in addition to today's housing announcement, Amazon is committing additional donations supporting a range of Nashville nonprofits working in areas like diversity and inclusion, child literacy, support for domestic violence survivors, assistance for musicians economically impacted by the pandemic and the arts. Since 2010, Amazon has created more than 12,000 jobs in Tennessee and invested more than $8.9 billion across the state, including infrastructure (from fulfillment centers to delivery stations to Whole Foods Markets) and compensation. These investments have contributed an additional $8.7 billion to the Tennessee economy and have helped create 12,700 indirect jobs on top of Amazon's direct hires—from jobs in construction and logistics to professional services. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. About The Housing Fund  The Housing Fund provides resources and creative leadership to help individuals and communities create and maintain affordable and healthy places in which low- and moderate-income people live. Through our various loan products and education programs, we strive to make affordable housing and healthy communities available for all Tennesseans. For more information about our programs, visit thehousingfund.org. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201207005254/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon

<p>\</p><p><em>Amazon's donation will help mitigate the impact of rising housing costs for low-to-moderate income households to preserve homeownership and build financial stability</em></p><p><em>The Housing Fund launching Housing Resiliency Fund to make payments to mortgage companies and Metro government on behalf of qualified residents</em></p><p>NASHVILLE, Tenn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 7, 2020-- Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and The Housing Fund today announced a $2.25 million donation from Amazon to help preserve homeownership for hundreds of Nashville-area residents facing housing insecurity amid the unprecedented challenges of 2020, including tornado recovery, job loss, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and tax increases. With this donation, The Housing Fund will launch the Housing Resiliency Fund and will make financial grants to help ensure that low- and moderate-income families can keep their homes and maintain critical, long-term financial stability.</p><p>"Amazon's donation will help us keep more families in their homes, which is always our ultimate goal, because home ownership is the key to long-term wealth building," said Marshall Crawford, CEO, The Housing Fund. "Across Middle Tennessee, there is a growing divide between wages and housing costs, forcing moderate-income families to make unprecedented decisions about the future of their living conditions. For these families, these grants will be game-changing. We hope it spurs additional local partners to step up and donate because everyone benefits when more people can pay their bills."</p><p>The Housing Fund's guiding mission is to provide resources and creative leadership to help individuals and communities create and maintain affordable and healthy households. Approaching its 25^th Anniversary in 2021, The Housing Fund will put Amazon's donation towards preserving long-term housing affordability for low- and moderate-income families struggling due to recent stressors. Through the new Housing Resiliency Fund, The Housing Fund will make payments on behalf of qualified residents to mortgage companies and the Metro government to help mitigate the impact of rising housing costs. Additionally, The Housing Fund will conduct community outreach, maintain strong personal relationships, and through a partnership with Citizens Savings Bank &amp; Trust – the oldest African American bank in the country – coach and educate local residents so they can best budget and plan for the future. All of these efforts are part of The Housing Fund's recently launched Power of 10 initiative, focused on bringing resources to residents facing housing insecurity.</p><p>"Amazon's $2.25 million donation to The Housing Fund will immediately support hundreds of families across Nashville, a community we are now proud to call home," said Holly Sullivan, Head of Worldwide Economic Development, Amazon. "We applaud Marshall and his team's steadfast leadership and commitment to equitable housing solutions in this region and congratulate him on his well-deserved recognition as one of Nashville's Most Admired CEOs."</p><p>"My office is committed to helping working families thrive, so I commend Amazon for stepping in to provide generous support for Nashvillians who need it most," said Nashville Mayor John Cooper. "Amazon's timely gift of relief funds and its partnership with The Housing Fund provides working families with immediate financial relief during this trying time."</p><p>In November 2018, Amazon announced that it would invest in a new office in Nashville, bringing more than 5,000 corporate and technology jobs to the community to support Amazon's operations business. Amazon recently crossed the 1,000-employee milestone in Nashville. As Amazon grows in Nashville, it is committed to supporting the local community with contributions and delivery service for local food banks and funding computer science education for dozens of Metro Nashville Public Schools. This month, in addition to today's housing announcement, Amazon is committing additional donations supporting a range of Nashville nonprofits working in areas like diversity and inclusion, child literacy, support for domestic violence survivors, assistance for musicians economically impacted by the pandemic and the arts. Since 2010, Amazon has created more than 12,000 jobs in Tennessee and invested more than $8.9 billion across the state, including infrastructure (from fulfillment centers to delivery stations to Whole Foods Markets) and compensation. These investments have contributed an additional $8.7 billion to the Tennessee economy and have helped create 12,700 indirect jobs on top of Amazon's direct hires—from jobs in construction and logistics to professional services.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>About The Housing Fund </p><p>The Housing Fund provides resources and creative leadership to help individuals and communities create and maintain affordable and healthy places in which low- and moderate-income people live. Through our various loan products and education programs, we strive to make affordable housing and healthy communities available for all Tennesseans. For more information about our programs, visit thehousingfund.org.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201207005254/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon</p>

Amazon and YETI File Joint Lawsuit against Counterfeiters

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-and-YETI-File-Joint-Lawsuit-against-Counterfeiters/default.aspx

Amazon-and-YETI-File-Joint-Lawsuit-against-Counterfeiters

12/03/2020 13:32:00

Amazon and YETI File Joint Lawsuit against Counterfeiters

12/03/2020

2020

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 3, 2020-- Today, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and YETI Coolers, LLC. ("YETI") (NYSE: YETI) jointly filed a lawsuit against two US-based individuals (the "defendants") for counterfeiting YETI's products, including YETI's popular Rambler® mug. The defendants attempted to offer the infringing products in Amazon's store, violating Amazon's policies, YETI's intellectual property rights, and the law. The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington and alleges the defendants, Michael White and Karen White of San Diego, California, operated in concert with each other in their attempts to sell counterfeit YETI products. Amazon closed their selling accounts and refunded impacted customers. Amazon strictly prohibits counterfeit products in its stores, and in 2019 alone, invested more than $500 million to protect customers and brands from fraud and abuse, including counterfeit. Amazon's proactive investments in preventing counterfeit include robust seller vetting, advanced machine-learning based technologies, and industry-leading brand protection tools like Project Zero, Brand Registry, and Transparency. As a result of Amazon's efforts, 99.9% of all products viewed by customers on Amazon have not received a valid counterfeit complaint. In June 2020, Amazon launched its Counterfeit Crimes Unit, a global team dedicated to pursuing bad actors and holding them accountable to the fullest extent of the law, including working with law enforcement. Amazon has filed a series of lawsuits against counterfeiters, including a suit against individuals using social media to promote and facilitate the sale of counterfeits, as well as joint lawsuits with Italian luxury fashion house Valentino, cosmetics brand KF Beauty, and family travel accessory brand JL Childress. Statement, attributable to Amazon: "We do not allow counterfeits in our store and we take aggressive action to hold bad actors that attempt to evade our proactive protections accountable," said Cristina Posa, Associate General Counsel and Director, Amazon Counterfeit Crimes Unit. "We appreciate YETI's close cooperation throughout this investigation." Statement, attributable to YETI: "YETI works aggressively to protect our consumers, our intellectual property rights, and our brand from the actions of counterfeiters and those who facilitate the importation and sale of counterfeit goods," said Bryan Barksdale, Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary at YETI. "We appreciate Amazon's commitment to this shared objective." You can see the court filing here: Case: 2:20-cv-01773, United States District Court for the Western District of Washington Amazon has an extensive history protecting brands and taking action to hold bad actors accountable: Amazon Project Zero launches in 7 new countries Amazon Transparency protects more than 10,000 brands Amazon Establishes Counterfeit Crimes Unit to Bring Counterfeits to Justice IPR Center, Amazon Launch ‘Operation Fulfilled Action' to Stop Counterfeiters Amazon Files Lawsuit Against Counterfeiters Using Social Media to Promote Sales Amazon Supports Resolution of 3M Case Against Fraudsters Amazon Supports Investigation, Prosecution of New York Defendants Charged in Fraud Scheme Amazon and KF Beauty File Joint Lawsuit Against Counterfeiters Amazon and Valentino File Joint Lawsuit Against New York-Based Counterfeit About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. About YETI Holdings, Inc. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, YETI is a global designer, retailer, and distributor of innovative outdoor products. From coolers and drinkware to backpacks and bags, YETI products are built to meet the unique and varying needs of diverse outdoor pursuits, whether in the remote wilderness, at the beach, or anywhere life takes our customers. By consistently delivering high-performing, exceptional products, we have built a strong following of brand loyalists throughout the world, ranging from serious outdoor enthusiasts to individuals who simply value products of uncompromising quality and design. We have an unwavering commitment to outdoor and recreation communities, and we are relentless in our pursuit of building superior products for people to confidently enjoy life outdoors and beyond. For more information, please visit www.YETI.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201203005914/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon

<p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 3, 2020-- Today, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and YETI Coolers, LLC. ("YETI") (NYSE: YETI) jointly filed a lawsuit against two US-based individuals (the "defendants") for counterfeiting YETI's products, including YETI's popular Rambler® mug. The defendants attempted to offer the infringing products in Amazon's store, violating Amazon's policies, YETI's intellectual property rights, and the law.</p><p>The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington and alleges the defendants, Michael White and Karen White of San Diego, California, operated in concert with each other in their attempts to sell counterfeit YETI products. Amazon closed their selling accounts and refunded impacted customers.</p><p>Amazon strictly prohibits counterfeit products in its stores, and in 2019 alone, invested more than $500 million to protect customers and brands from fraud and abuse, including counterfeit. Amazon's proactive investments in preventing counterfeit include robust seller vetting, advanced machine-learning based technologies, and industry-leading brand protection tools like Project Zero, Brand Registry, and Transparency. As a result of Amazon's efforts, 99.9% of all products viewed by customers on Amazon have not received a valid counterfeit complaint.</p><p>In June 2020, Amazon launched its Counterfeit Crimes Unit, a global team dedicated to pursuing bad actors and holding them accountable to the fullest extent of the law, including working with law enforcement. Amazon has filed a series of lawsuits against counterfeiters, including a suit against individuals using social media to promote and facilitate the sale of counterfeits, as well as joint lawsuits with Italian luxury fashion house Valentino, cosmetics brand KF Beauty, and family travel accessory brand JL Childress.</p><p>Statement, attributable to Amazon:</p><p>"We do not allow counterfeits in our store and we take aggressive action to hold bad actors that attempt to evade our proactive protections accountable," said Cristina Posa, Associate General Counsel and Director, Amazon Counterfeit Crimes Unit. "We appreciate YETI's close cooperation throughout this investigation."</p><p>Statement, attributable to YETI:</p><p>"YETI works aggressively to protect our consumers, our intellectual property rights, and our brand from the actions of counterfeiters and those who facilitate the importation and sale of counterfeit goods," said Bryan Barksdale, Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary at YETI. "We appreciate Amazon's commitment to this shared objective."</p><p>You can see the court filing here:</p><ul><li>Case: 2:20-cv-01773, United States District Court for the Western District of Washington</li></ul><p>Amazon has an extensive history protecting brands and taking action to hold bad actors accountable:</p><ul><li>Amazon Project Zero launches in 7 new countries</li><li>Amazon Transparency protects more than 10,000 brands</li><li>Amazon Establishes Counterfeit Crimes Unit to Bring Counterfeits to Justice</li><li>IPR Center, Amazon Launch ‘Operation Fulfilled Action' to Stop Counterfeiters</li><li>Amazon Files Lawsuit Against Counterfeiters Using Social Media to Promote Sales</li><li>Amazon Supports Resolution of 3M Case Against Fraudsters</li><li>Amazon Supports Investigation, Prosecution of New York Defendants Charged in Fraud Scheme</li><li>Amazon and KF Beauty File Joint Lawsuit Against Counterfeiters</li><li>Amazon and Valentino File Joint Lawsuit Against New York-Based Counterfeit</li></ul><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>About YETI Holdings, Inc.</p><p>Headquartered in Austin, Texas, YETI is a global designer, retailer, and distributor of innovative outdoor products. From coolers and drinkware to backpacks and bags, YETI products are built to meet the unique and varying needs of diverse outdoor pursuits, whether in the remote wilderness, at the beach, or anywhere life takes our customers. By consistently delivering high-performing, exceptional products, we have built a strong following of brand loyalists throughout the world, ranging from serious outdoor enthusiasts to individuals who simply value products of uncompromising quality and design. We have an unwavering commitment to outdoor and recreation communities, and we are relentless in our pursuit of building superior products for people to confidently enjoy life outdoors and beyond. For more information, please visit www.YETI.com.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201203005914/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon</p>

Amazon Announces New Fulfillment Center in Oklahoma City

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Announces-New-Fulfillment-Center-in-Oklahoma-City/default.aspx

Amazon-Announces-New-Fulfillment-Center-in-Oklahoma-City

12/03/2020 10:02:00

Amazon Announces New Fulfillment Center in Oklahoma City

12/03/2020

2020

New one million square-foot site to create over 500 new, full-time jobs SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 3, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) plans to open a new fulfillment center in Oklahoma City, OK. The new fulfillment center, which is anticipated to launch in 2021, will create over 500 new full-time jobs with industry-leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one. See Our Fulfillment Centers in Action "We're thrilled to announce a new fulfillment center in Oklahoma City as we strive to better serve our customers throughout the state," said Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon's vice president of global customer fulfillment. "Our growth in Oklahoma wouldn't be possible without the amazing local workforce and strong support we've received from local and state leaders." Every day at Amazon, incredible employees come together to deliver magical experiences for customers. In the new one million square-foot fulfillment center Amazon associates will work to pick, pack, and ship bulky or larger-sized customer items such as patio furniture, outdoor equipment, or rugs. "Amazon's new facility is another testament to the nation and the world that Oklahoma is open for business," said Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt. "As governor, it is my priority to foster a climate where businesses can grow, thrive and expand in order to provide jobs for hardworking Oklahomans to support their families. I salute Amazon on its expansion and look forward to its continued growth in our state." On top of Amazon's industry-leading minimum $15 per hour wage, the company offers full-time employees comprehensive benefits including full medical, vision, and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) with 50 percent match starting on day one. Amazon prioritizes the safety and health of its employees and has invested millions of dollars to provide a safe workplace. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families. "We appreciate Amazon's continued investment in Oklahoma City and look forward to the positive impact their presence will have on future job creation and the overall economy of our great city," said Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt. Amazon leverages its scale for good to support local communities. Amazon has also pledged to invest over $700 million to provide upskilling training for 100,000 U.S. employees for in-demand jobs. The programs will help Amazon team members from all backgrounds access training to move into highly skilled roles across the company's corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and transportation network, or pursue career paths outside of Amazon. "Amazon's continued growth in Oklahoma City is a recognition of the strength of our market," said Roy Williams, President and CEO of the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber. "These 500 jobs are particularly important as people who have lost jobs due to the pandemic are looking for long-term stable employment." Amazon in Oklahoma: Since 2010, Amazon has created more than 4,000 jobs in Oklahoma and invested more than $650 million across the state, including infrastructure and compensation to its employees. Amazon's investments have contributed more than $530 million in GDP to the Oklahoma economy and have helped create over 4,100 indirect jobs on top of Amazon's direct hires – from jobs in construction and logistics to professional services. More than 14,000 independent authors and small and medium businesses in Oklahoma are selling to customers in Amazon's store, creating thousands of additional jobs across the state. Additional Resources: See an Amazon Fulfillment Center In Action Amazon Job Creation and Investment U.S. U.S. Investment Map About Amazon: Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/ and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201203005651/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>New one million square-foot site to create over 500 new, full-time jobs</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 3, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) plans to open a new fulfillment center in Oklahoma City, OK. The new fulfillment center, which is anticipated to launch in 2021, will create over 500 new full-time jobs with industry-leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one.</p><p>See Our Fulfillment Centers in Action</p><p>"We're thrilled to announce a new fulfillment center in Oklahoma City as we strive to better serve our customers throughout the state," said Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon's vice president of global customer fulfillment. "Our growth in Oklahoma wouldn't be possible without the amazing local workforce and strong support we've received from local and state leaders."</p><p>Every day at Amazon, incredible employees come together to deliver magical experiences for customers. In the new one million square-foot fulfillment center Amazon associates will work to pick, pack, and ship bulky or larger-sized customer items such as patio furniture, outdoor equipment, or rugs.</p><p>"Amazon's new facility is another testament to the nation and the world that Oklahoma is open for business," said Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt. "As governor, it is my priority to foster a climate where businesses can grow, thrive and expand in order to provide jobs for hardworking Oklahomans to support their families. I salute Amazon on its expansion and look forward to its continued growth in our state."</p><p>On top of Amazon's industry-leading minimum $15 per hour wage, the company offers full-time employees comprehensive benefits including full medical, vision, and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) with 50 percent match starting on day one. Amazon prioritizes the safety and health of its employees and has invested millions of dollars to provide a safe workplace. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families.</p><p>"We appreciate Amazon's continued investment in Oklahoma City and look forward to the positive impact their presence will have on future job creation and the overall economy of our great city," said Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt.</p><p>Amazon leverages its scale for good to support local communities. Amazon has also pledged to invest over $700 million to provide upskilling training for 100,000 U.S. employees for in-demand jobs. The programs will help Amazon team members from all backgrounds access training to move into highly skilled roles across the company's corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and transportation network, or pursue career paths outside of Amazon.</p><p>"Amazon's continued growth in Oklahoma City is a recognition of the strength of our market," said Roy Williams, President and CEO of the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber. "These 500 jobs are particularly important as people who have lost jobs due to the pandemic are looking for long-term stable employment."</p><p>Amazon in Oklahoma:</p><ul><li>Since 2010, Amazon has created more than 4,000 jobs in Oklahoma and invested more than $650 million across the state, including infrastructure and compensation to its employees.</li><li>Amazon's investments have contributed more than $530 million in GDP to the Oklahoma economy and have helped create over 4,100 indirect jobs on top of Amazon's direct hires – from jobs in construction and logistics to professional services.</li><li>More than 14,000 independent authors and small and medium businesses in Oklahoma are selling to customers in Amazon's store, creating thousands of additional jobs across the state.</li></ul><p>Additional Resources:</p><ul><li>See an Amazon Fulfillment Center In Action</li><li>Amazon Job Creation and Investment U.S.</li><li>U.S. Investment Map</li></ul><p>About Amazon: Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/ and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201203005651/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

Siemens Smart Infrastructure Chooses AWS as Its Preferred Cloud Provider for SAP Environments

/news/news-details/2020/Siemens-Smart-Infrastructure-Chooses-AWS-as-Its-Preferred-Cloud-Provider-for-SAP-Environments/default.aspx

Siemens-Smart-Infrastructure-Chooses-AWS-as-Its-Preferred-Cloud-Provider-for-SAP-Environments

12/03/2020 03:01:00

Siemens Smart Infrastructure Chooses AWS as Its Preferred Cloud Provider for SAP Environments

12/03/2020

2020

Siemens Smart Infrastructure becomes first company within Siemens AG to move production-scale, business-critical SAP environments to the cloud SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 3, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Siemens Smart Infrastructure, a business of the Siemens AG group focusing on energy distribution and intelligent buildings, is moving its SAP infrastructure to AWS. The business will migrate over 20 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems,based on SAP HANA, to AWS before the end of 2021. These systems support business-critical processes in areas such as manufacturing, operations, and sales across different business units including Building Products, Electrical Products, Digital Grid, and Distribution Systems. Moving these workloads to AWS will enable Siemens Smart Infrastructure to significantly shorten hardware refresh cycles, increase agility to test and deploy new systems, and provide the foundation for the company's future transformation using SAP S/4HANA technology. This is the first migration of production-scale SAP systems to the cloud across the Siemens AG group, with Siemens Smart Infrastructure forecasting significant cost savings over the course of the next three years. Siemens Smart Infrastructure's migration of SAP to AWS is a core part of the company's strategic plan to accelerate the modernization of their business. Working alongside AWS as their preferred cloud provider for SAP, Siemens Smart Infrastructure will be able to integrate their SAP environments with a wide range of advanced AWS technologies, in areas such as analytics and machine learning, to uncover new business value and drive innovation. All of this was not previously possible for Siemens Smart Infrastructure, as their SAP systems were siloed off from the rest of their business in co-located data centers. As the foundation of their new cloud-based SAP environment, Siemens Smart Infrastructure will utilize a broad range of AWS's Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, including memory-optimized R5 instances for real-time big data analytics workloads, as well as X1 and X1e instances built for high-performance databases, in-memory databases, and other memory-intensive enterprise applications. Siemens Smart Infrastructure and AWS started their successful collaboration five years ago, when Siemens began moving core parts of its digital building technology to the cloud. The company is currently using a number of other advanced AWS services including Amazon Aurora (a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud), AWS Lambda (AWS's serverless compute service), and Amazon Neptune (a fully managed graph database service). "2020 has been a year like no other, yet AWS has been a dedicated and trustworthy partner on our digital transformation journey," said Sébastien Bey, CIO of Siemens Smart Infrastructure. "Our SAP environments are the backbone of our organization; by moving these foundational pieces of the Siemens Smart Infrastructure business to AWS, we are not only reducing costs and upgrading the service we provide to our internal businesses, but also fundamentally changing the way we use technology to transform our business, innovate, and deliver value." "AWS is thrilled to be working alongside a forward-thinking and customer-centric business like Siemens Smart Infrastructure as they connect buildings and cities with their advanced technologies. AWS delivers proven performance, insights, and agility to advance Siemens Smart Infrastructure's mission of helping customers around the world run their infrastructure in the most efficient and sustainable way and ensure our long-term future on this planet," said Carla Stratfold, Vice President of AWS Global Verticals and Strategic Accounts at Amazon Web Services, Inc. "Organizations around the world trust their most essential SAP workloads to AWS because of our unmatched track record, breadth and depth of services, and vibrant partner community that helps them to transform their SAP landscapes." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

<p><em>Siemens Smart Infrastructure becomes first company within Siemens AG to move production-scale, business-critical SAP environments to the cloud</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 3, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Siemens Smart Infrastructure, a business of the Siemens AG group focusing on energy distribution and intelligent buildings, is moving its SAP infrastructure to AWS. The business will migrate over 20 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems,based on SAP HANA, to AWS before the end of 2021. These systems support business-critical processes in areas such as manufacturing, operations, and sales across different business units including Building Products, Electrical Products, Digital Grid, and Distribution Systems. Moving these workloads to AWS will enable Siemens Smart Infrastructure to significantly shorten hardware refresh cycles, increase agility to test and deploy new systems, and provide the foundation for the company's future transformation using SAP S/4HANA technology. This is the first migration of production-scale SAP systems to the cloud across the Siemens AG group, with Siemens Smart Infrastructure forecasting significant cost savings over the course of the next three years.</p><p>Siemens Smart Infrastructure's migration of SAP to AWS is a core part of the company's strategic plan to accelerate the modernization of their business. Working alongside AWS as their preferred cloud provider for SAP, Siemens Smart Infrastructure will be able to integrate their SAP environments with a wide range of advanced AWS technologies, in areas such as analytics and machine learning, to uncover new business value and drive innovation. All of this was not previously possible for Siemens Smart Infrastructure, as their SAP systems were siloed off from the rest of their business in co-located data centers. As the foundation of their new cloud-based SAP environment, Siemens Smart Infrastructure will utilize a broad range of AWS's Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, including memory-optimized R5 instances for real-time big data analytics workloads, as well as X1 and X1e instances built for high-performance databases, in-memory databases, and other memory-intensive enterprise applications.</p><p>Siemens Smart Infrastructure and AWS started their successful collaboration five years ago, when Siemens began moving core parts of its digital building technology to the cloud. The company is currently using a number of other advanced AWS services including Amazon Aurora (a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud), AWS Lambda (AWS's serverless compute service), and Amazon Neptune (a fully managed graph database service).</p><p>"2020 has been a year like no other, yet AWS has been a dedicated and trustworthy partner on our digital transformation journey," said Sébastien Bey, CIO of Siemens Smart Infrastructure. "Our SAP environments are the backbone of our organization; by moving these foundational pieces of the Siemens Smart Infrastructure business to AWS, we are not only reducing costs and upgrading the service we provide to our internal businesses, but also fundamentally changing the way we use technology to transform our business, innovate, and deliver value."</p><p>"AWS is thrilled to be working alongside a forward-thinking and customer-centric business like Siemens Smart Infrastructure as they connect buildings and cities with their advanced technologies. AWS delivers proven performance, insights, and agility to advance Siemens Smart Infrastructure's mission of helping customers around the world run their infrastructure in the most efficient and sustainable way and ensure our long-term future on this planet," said Carla Stratfold, Vice President of AWS Global Verticals and Strategic Accounts at Amazon Web Services, Inc. "Organizations around the world trust their most essential SAP workloads to AWS because of our unmatched track record, breadth and depth of services, and vibrant partner community that helps them to transform their SAP landscapes."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p>

Uber, Rivian, JetBlue, Cabify, and Boom Supersonic Sign The Climate Pledge

/news/news-details/2020/Uber-Rivian-JetBlue-Cabify-and-Boom-Supersonic-Sign-The-Climate-Pledge/default.aspx

Uber-Rivian-JetBlue-Cabify-and-Boom-Supersonic-Sign-The-Climate-Pledge

12/02/2020 09:00:00

Uber, Rivian, JetBlue, Cabify, and Boom Supersonic Sign The Climate Pledge

12/02/2020

2020

18 companies have now joined The Climate Pledge, a commitment co-founded by Amazon and Global Optimism to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement 10 years early New signatories are implementing real, science-based, high-impact changes to their businesses, including deploying renewable energy, investing in sustainable buildings, and mobilizing supply chains to reach net-zero carbon by 2040 SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 2, 2020-- Today, during Web Summit 2020, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Global Optimism announced that Boom Supersonic, Cabify, JetBlue, Rivian, and Uberhave joined The Climate Pledge, a commitment to be net-zero carbon by 2040—a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement's goal of 2050. Signatories to The Climate Pledge agree to: Measure and report greenhouse gas emissions on a regular basis; Implement decarbonization strategies in line with the Paris Agreement through real business changes and innovations, including efficiency improvements, renewable energy, materials reductions, and other carbon-emission elimination strategies; Neutralize any remaining emissions with additional, quantifiable, real, permanent, and socially beneficial offsets to achieve net-zero annual carbon emissions by 2040. "By signing The Climate Pledge, companies around the world are making a bold commitment to help protect our planet from the devastating impacts of climate change," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. "The transportation sector plays a critical role in accelerating our carbon reduction goals, and we welcome Boom, Cabify, JetBlue, Rivian, and Uber as they join us on the journey to net-zero carbon by 2040. The 18 companies who have signed The Climate Pledge so far are demonstrating leadership in the vital transition to a low-carbon economy that will help preserve the environment for future generations." Boom is redefining commercial flight by bringing supersonic travel back to the skies. Boom's historic airliner, Overture, is designed to industry-leading standards of speed, safety, and sustainability. In February 2020, the company announced that the test program for its XB-1 demonstrator will be carbon neutral, through the use of sustainable aviation fuels and high-quality, vetted carbon offsetting. Boom has also committed to making Overture a net-zero carbon aircraft in development, testing, and operation, and is a member of several organizations working to accelerate the adoption and supply of sustainable aviation fuels for the airline industry. In achieving its vision of making the world more accessible, Boom views speed and sustainability as compatible goals. "In building the world's fastest airliner, Boom is taking an all-encompassing approach to sustainability. Having made sustainability a company priority from day one, we have been able to build best practices of environmental protection into our programs since the beginning," said Blake Scholl, Boom founder and CEO. "We are thrilled to join The Climate Pledge and to ensure that speed and sustainability are compatible with one another." Cabify is the first and only urban mobility app in Europe and Latin America to be carbon neutral by offsetting 100% of all the carbon emissions that it generates – from its corporate operations and for every ride booked through the app. Cabify is also closely measuring and reducing emissions for its corporate activity and aiming to electrify its transportation fleet in Spain and Latin America—by 2025 and 2030, respectively—to reduce its carbon emissions. The company is focused on increasing environmental protections and promoting renewable energies by working on large-scale efforts in Chile, Peru and Brazil using solutions like blockchain technology for carbon offsetting. "Efficient urban mobility is key in the fight against climate change," said Juan de Antonio, Cabify founder and CEO. "Cabify wants to be part of the solution, and that's why for the third year in a row we have committed to offsetting the carbon emissions that our riders and operations generate while we continue to support the electrification of the fleets we work with. We're pleased to join The Climate Pledge to continue to be transparent about our sustainability journey." JetBlue is the first airline to join The Climate Pledge, and this reaffirms the company's commitment to taking measurable steps towards reducing its climate impact. In July 2020, JetBlue became the first and only U.S. airline to achieve carbon neutrality for all domestic flights. It now expects to ramp up to over 7 million metric tons of CO2 emissions offset each year—the annual equivalent of removing more than 1.5 million passenger vehicles from the road. JetBlue views carbon offsetting as a bridge as the airline continues to ramp up lower-carbon technologies, such as sustainable aviation fuels, and build more fuel-efficient aircraft and operations. JetBlue began flying regularly out of San Francisco International Airport in July 2020 using a type of a sustainable aviation fuel, which enables up to an 80 percent reduction in CO2 emissions before being blended with traditional jet fuel. "Air travel connects people and cultures, and supports a global economy. Our commitment to sustainability has become even more important as we prepare our business for a new climate reality," said Robin Hayes, JetBlue CEO. "We are proud to join The Climate Pledge and join a community of like-minded organizations dedicated to reaching net zero-carbon by 2040. The climate crisis remains one of the biggest threats facing our industry. Our planet is physically changing, as are the expectations of our customers, crewmembers, and investors. Now is the time to rebuild operations in more sustainable ways, such as adopting sustainable aviation fuel and setting clear strategies to reduce net aviation CO2 emissions." Rivian is launching a range of adventure-oriented vehicles, as well as delivery vans specifically for Amazon last-mile delivery applications. The company's launch products, the R1T and R1S, deliver a unique combination of performance, off-road capability and utility. These vehicles use the company's flexible skateboard platform and will be produced at Rivian's manufacturing plant in Normal, Ill., with customer deliveries to begin in June 2021. "Rivian was formed to help build the kind of future our kids and our kids' kids deserve. Rivian's commitment to sustainable vehicle production in our consumer products and commercial vans is driven by this core objective," said RJ Scaringe, Rivian founder and CEO. "Addressing climate change requires individuals and entire industries to come together to create solutions that shift consumer mindsets and inspire other companies to fundamentally change the way they operate. We're excited to join The Climate Pledge community that will share knowledge, ideas, and best practices on this important mission." Uber has committed to become a fully zero-emission platform by 2040, with 100% of rides taking place in zero-emission vehicles, on public transit, or with micromobility options such as bikes and scooters. Uber had previously set a goal to provide 100% of rides in electric vehicles (EVs) by 2030 in U.S., Canadian, and European cities. Uber has also committed to reach net-zero emissions from its corporate operations by 2030. To reach these goals, Uber is expanding Uber Green to make it easier for riders to choose to travel in hybrids or EVs; dedicating $800 million in resources to help hundreds of thousands of drivers transition to EVs by 2025; investing in our multimodal network to provide sustainable alternatives to personal cars; and being transparent and accountable to the public along the way. "As we announced in September, Uber is taking this moment as an opportunity to drive a green recovery from the pandemic," said Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber CEO. "We invite every company in the world to join The Climate Pledge and take action to reduce their environmental impact. Together we can more aggressively tackle the urgent challenge of climate change." "The Paris Agreement set out a unifying roadmap for all countries and all people to address the climate crisis by taking action," said Christiana Figueres, the UN's former climate change chief and Global Optimism's founding partner. "By joining The Climate Pledge, signatories are not just making a statement of commitment to the future, they also are setting a pathway to significant actions and investments that will create jobs, spur innovation, regenerate the natural environment, and help consumers to buy more sustainable products." Race To Zero is a global campaign supported by The Climate Pledge to rally leadership and support from businesses, cities, regions, and investors for a healthy, resilient, zero carbon recovery. Race to Zero is partnering with Web Summit at this year's virtual conference being held Dec. 2-4 to highlight the importance of companies coming together. In 2019, Amazon and Global Optimism co-founded The Climate Pledge, a commitment to reach the Paris Agreement 10 years early and be net-zero carbon by 2040. Eighteen organizations have now signed The Climate Pledge: Amazon, Best Buy, Boom, Cabify, Henkel, Infosys, JetBlue, McKinstry, Mercedes-Benz, Oak View Group, Real Betis, Reckitt Benckiser (RB), Rivian, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Signify, Uber, and Verizon. These companies are sending an important signal that there will be rapid growth in demand for products and services that help reduce carbon emissions. For more information visit www.theclimatepledge.com.

<p><em>18 companies have now joined The Climate Pledge, a commitment co-founded by Amazon and Global Optimism to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement 10 years early</em></p><p><em>New signatories are implementing real, science-based, high-impact changes to their businesses, including deploying renewable energy, investing in sustainable buildings, and mobilizing supply chains to reach net-zero carbon by 2040</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 2, 2020-- Today, during Web Summit 2020, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Global Optimism announced that Boom Supersonic, Cabify, JetBlue, Rivian, and Uberhave joined The Climate Pledge, a commitment to be net-zero carbon by 2040—a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement's goal of 2050.</p><p>Signatories to The Climate Pledge agree to:</p><ul><li>Measure and report greenhouse gas emissions on a regular basis;</li><li>Implement decarbonization strategies in line with the Paris Agreement through real business changes and innovations, including efficiency improvements, renewable energy, materials reductions, and other carbon-emission elimination strategies;</li><li>Neutralize any remaining emissions with additional, quantifiable, real, permanent, and socially beneficial offsets to achieve net-zero annual carbon emissions by 2040.</li></ul><p>"By signing The Climate Pledge, companies around the world are making a bold commitment to help protect our planet from the devastating impacts of climate change," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. "The transportation sector plays a critical role in accelerating our carbon reduction goals, and we welcome Boom, Cabify, JetBlue, Rivian, and Uber as they join us on the journey to net-zero carbon by 2040. The 18 companies who have signed The Climate Pledge so far are demonstrating leadership in the vital transition to a low-carbon economy that will help preserve the environment for future generations."</p><p>Boom is redefining commercial flight by bringing supersonic travel back to the skies. Boom's historic airliner, Overture, is designed to industry-leading standards of speed, safety, and sustainability. In February 2020, the company announced that the test program for its XB-1 demonstrator will be carbon neutral, through the use of sustainable aviation fuels and high-quality, vetted carbon offsetting. Boom has also committed to making Overture a net-zero carbon aircraft in development, testing, and operation, and is a member of several organizations working to accelerate the adoption and supply of sustainable aviation fuels for the airline industry. In achieving its vision of making the world more accessible, Boom views speed and sustainability as compatible goals.</p><p>"In building the world's fastest airliner, Boom is taking an all-encompassing approach to sustainability. Having made sustainability a company priority from day one, we have been able to build best practices of environmental protection into our programs since the beginning," said Blake Scholl, Boom founder and CEO. "We are thrilled to join The Climate Pledge and to ensure that speed and sustainability are compatible with one another."</p><p>Cabify is the first and only urban mobility app in Europe and Latin America to be carbon neutral by offsetting 100% of all the carbon emissions that it generates – from its corporate operations and for every ride booked through the app. Cabify is also closely measuring and reducing emissions for its corporate activity and aiming to electrify its transportation fleet in Spain and Latin America—by 2025 and 2030, respectively—to reduce its carbon emissions. The company is focused on increasing environmental protections and promoting renewable energies by working on large-scale efforts in Chile, Peru and Brazil using solutions like blockchain technology for carbon offsetting.</p><p>"Efficient urban mobility is key in the fight against climate change," said Juan de Antonio, Cabify founder and CEO. "Cabify wants to be part of the solution, and that's why for the third year in a row we have committed to offsetting the carbon emissions that our riders and operations generate while we continue to support the electrification of the fleets we work with. We're pleased to join The Climate Pledge to continue to be transparent about our sustainability journey."</p><p>JetBlue is the first airline to join The Climate Pledge, and this reaffirms the company's commitment to taking measurable steps towards reducing its climate impact. In July 2020, JetBlue became the first and only U.S. airline to achieve carbon neutrality for all domestic flights. It now expects to ramp up to over 7 million metric tons of CO2 emissions offset each year—the annual equivalent of removing more than 1.5 million passenger vehicles from the road. JetBlue views carbon offsetting as a bridge as the airline continues to ramp up lower-carbon technologies, such as sustainable aviation fuels, and build more fuel-efficient aircraft and operations. JetBlue began flying regularly out of San Francisco International Airport in July 2020 using a type of a sustainable aviation fuel, which enables up to an 80 percent reduction in CO2 emissions before being blended with traditional jet fuel.</p><p>"Air travel connects people and cultures, and supports a global economy. Our commitment to sustainability has become even more important as we prepare our business for a new climate reality," said Robin Hayes, JetBlue CEO. "We are proud to join The Climate Pledge and join a community of like-minded organizations dedicated to reaching net zero-carbon by 2040. The climate crisis remains one of the biggest threats facing our industry. Our planet is physically changing, as are the expectations of our customers, crewmembers, and investors. Now is the time to rebuild operations in more sustainable ways, such as adopting sustainable aviation fuel and setting clear strategies to reduce net aviation CO2 emissions."</p><p>Rivian is launching a range of adventure-oriented vehicles, as well as delivery vans specifically for Amazon last-mile delivery applications. The company's launch products, the R1T and R1S, deliver a unique combination of performance, off-road capability and utility. These vehicles use the company's flexible skateboard platform and will be produced at Rivian's manufacturing plant in Normal, Ill., with customer deliveries to begin in June 2021.</p><p>"Rivian was formed to help build the kind of future our kids and our kids' kids deserve. Rivian's commitment to sustainable vehicle production in our consumer products and commercial vans is driven by this core objective," said RJ Scaringe, Rivian founder and CEO. "Addressing climate change requires individuals and entire industries to come together to create solutions that shift consumer mindsets and inspire other companies to fundamentally change the way they operate. We're excited to join The Climate Pledge community that will share knowledge, ideas, and best practices on this important mission."</p><p>Uber has committed to become a fully zero-emission platform by 2040, with 100% of rides taking place in zero-emission vehicles, on public transit, or with micromobility options such as bikes and scooters. Uber had previously set a goal to provide 100% of rides in electric vehicles (EVs) by 2030 in U.S., Canadian, and European cities. Uber has also committed to reach net-zero emissions from its corporate operations by 2030. To reach these goals, Uber is expanding Uber Green to make it easier for riders to choose to travel in hybrids or EVs; dedicating $800 million in resources to help hundreds of thousands of drivers transition to EVs by 2025; investing in our multimodal network to provide sustainable alternatives to personal cars; and being transparent and accountable to the public along the way.</p><p>"As we announced in September, Uber is taking this moment as an opportunity to drive a green recovery from the pandemic," said Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber CEO. "We invite every company in the world to join The Climate Pledge and take action to reduce their environmental impact. Together we can more aggressively tackle the urgent challenge of climate change."</p><p>"The Paris Agreement set out a unifying roadmap for all countries and all people to address the climate crisis by taking action," said Christiana Figueres, the UN's former climate change chief and Global Optimism's founding partner. "By joining The Climate Pledge, signatories are not just making a statement of commitment to the future, they also are setting a pathway to significant actions and investments that will create jobs, spur innovation, regenerate the natural environment, and help consumers to buy more sustainable products."</p><p>Race To Zero is a global campaign supported by The Climate Pledge to rally leadership and support from businesses, cities, regions, and investors for a healthy, resilient, zero carbon recovery. Race to Zero is partnering with Web Summit at this year's virtual conference being held Dec. 2-4 to highlight the importance of companies coming together.</p><p>In 2019, Amazon and Global Optimism co-founded The Climate Pledge, a commitment to reach the Paris Agreement 10 years early and be net-zero carbon by 2040. Eighteen organizations have now signed The Climate Pledge: Amazon, Best Buy, Boom, Cabify, Henkel, Infosys, JetBlue, McKinstry, Mercedes-Benz, Oak View Group, Real Betis, Reckitt Benckiser (RB), Rivian, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Signify, Uber, and Verizon. These companies are sending an important signal that there will be rapid growth in demand for products and services that help reduce carbon emissions. For more information visit www.theclimatepledge.com.</p>

Amazon Continues Investment in Nevada with Thousands of Jobs to Support Operations

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Continues-Investment-in-Nevada-with-Thousands-of-Jobs-to-Support-Operations/default.aspx

Amazon-Continues-Investment-in-Nevada-with-Thousands-of-Jobs-to-Support-Operations

12/02/2020 08:00:00

Amazon Continues Investment in Nevada with Thousands of Jobs to Support Operations

12/02/2020

2020

Eight new sites include an 855,000 square-foot fulfillment center in North Las Vegas SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 2, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced its continued investment in Nevada with eight new buildings across the state to support customer fulfillment and delivery operations. The sites are expected to create more than 2,000 permanent full- and part-time jobs with a minimum $15 per hour wage and comprehensive benefits starting on day one. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201202005355/en/ Amazon's North Las Vegas Delivery Station opened in September 2020. (Photo: Business Wire) The news comes on the heels of Amazon's announcement to hire more than 100,000 seasonal jobs in the U.S. and Canada to help deliver smiles to customers this holiday season, including more than 1,000 across Nevada. "This is welcome news for the entire state of Nevada," said Governor Steve Sisolak. "Amazon continues to make investments to support local communities and has become a lifeline for those in our state who have experienced job loss during the pandemic. We are grateful for Amazon's decision to expand operations across Nevada, creating thousands of career opportunities for our citizens." JOB CREATION Amazon broke ground in October on an 855,000 square-foot fulfillment center in North Las Vegas, creating 1,500 new full-time jobs when it opens in 2021. The site will be the second fulfillment center in the state using Amazon Robotics to help associates pick, pack and ship smaller items to customers. The new sites also include five delivery stations that power the last mile of Amazon's order fulfillment process, creating hundreds of permanent full-time and part-time jobs. This network of delivery stations will also offer entrepreneurs the opportunity to build their own small business delivering Amazon packages, and independent contractors the flexibility to be their own boss and create their own schedule delivering for Amazon Flex. Amazon's new delivery stations in Nevada include: Henderson – Delivery Station opening in 2021 Las Vegas – Delivery Station opening in 2021 North Las Vegas – Delivery Station opened in September 2020 Reno – Delivery Station opened in October 2020 Reno – "AMXL" Fulfillment Center / Delivery Station opening in 2021. This site supports the fulfillment and delivery of large products, from televisions to couches, powered by drivers employed by Amazon's delivery service partners or national third party carriers. Additionally, Amazon has hired hundreds of employees to support two additional facilities in North Las Vegas, including: Merch by Amazon – opened in September 2020. This service enables brands, independent artists, and small businesses to upload custom content printed on demand on apparel and electronics products when ordered by customers in Amazon's stores. Print on Demand – opened in October 2020. This site supports authors and publishers with Print on Demand, a service through which books are made on-demand when Amazon customers place an order. Print on Demand gives customers more selection without publishers having the upfront cost of printing for inventory. "Amazon is proud to continue investing in the state of Nevada, where we opened our first fulfillment center in Fernley more than 20 years ago," said Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon's Vice President of Global Customer Fulfillment. "We're excited to create more than 2,000 new full- and part-time jobs across the state with highly competitive pay, benefits from day one and training programs for in-demand jobs." Amazon currently operates 11 sites in Nevada that support customer fulfillment and delivery operations, employing more than 10,500 full- and part-time employees across the state. INVESTING IN EMPLOYEES On top of Amazon's minimum $15 per hour wage, the company offers full-time employees comprehensive benefits including full medical, vision, and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) with 50 percent match starting on day one. Amazon also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families. A job at Amazon can be a springboard to an Amazon career or other opportunities. This year, Amazon promoted more than 35,000 employees in its operations network and continues to invest in the long-term career success of employees inside and outside of the company. In 2019, Amazon committed $700 million to providing 100,000 employees with access to upskilling programs through 2025. Amazon's Career Choice program is uniquely designed to upskill employees who are interested in career aspirations beyond Amazon. The program pre-pays 95% of tuition for courses in 20 high-demand fields in the U.S., including Computer Support Specialist, Web Developer, Nurse, Air Craft Mechanic, Commercial Trucker, Paralegal/Legal Assistant, IT Security Assistant, and Network Technician among others. More than 30,000 associates have participated in Career Choice in the U.S., marking an investment of $59 million in tuition since the program started in 2012. KEEPING EMPLOYEES SAFE Amazon prioritizes the safety and health of its employees and has invested millions of dollars to provide a safe workplace. To date, the company has made over 150 significant process changes to ensure the health and safety of teams. Amazon has invested $4 billion since the first half of the year to safely deliver smiles to customers, while also protecting employees. This includes more than $800 million invested in the first half of the year on COVID-19 safety measures, with investments in personal protective equipment, enhanced cleaning of its facilities, process paths that better allow for effective social distancing, and developing its own COVID-19 testing capabilities. Amazon was recently ranked #2 on the Forbes World's Best Employers list. For more information about current job openings in Nevada, visit www.amazondelivers.jobs. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201202005355/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>Eight new sites include an 855,000 square-foot fulfillment center in North Las Vegas</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 2, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced its continued investment in Nevada with eight new buildings across the state to support customer fulfillment and delivery operations. The sites are expected to create more than 2,000 permanent full- and part-time jobs with a minimum $15 per hour wage and comprehensive benefits starting on day one.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201202005355/en/</p><div><p>Amazon's North Las Vegas Delivery Station opened in September 2020. (Photo: Business Wire)</p></div><p>The news comes on the heels of Amazon's announcement to hire more than 100,000 seasonal jobs in the U.S. and Canada to help deliver smiles to customers this holiday season, including more than 1,000 across Nevada.</p><p>"This is welcome news for the entire state of Nevada," said Governor Steve Sisolak. "Amazon continues to make investments to support local communities and has become a lifeline for those in our state who have experienced job loss during the pandemic. We are grateful for Amazon's decision to expand operations across Nevada, creating thousands of career opportunities for our citizens."</p><p>JOB CREATION</p><p>Amazon broke ground in October on an 855,000 square-foot fulfillment center in North Las Vegas, creating 1,500 new full-time jobs when it opens in 2021. The site will be the second fulfillment center in the state using Amazon Robotics to help associates pick, pack and ship smaller items to customers.</p><p>The new sites also include five delivery stations that power the last mile of Amazon's order fulfillment process, creating hundreds of permanent full-time and part-time jobs. This network of delivery stations will also offer entrepreneurs the opportunity to build their own small business delivering Amazon packages, and independent contractors the flexibility to be their own boss and create their own schedule delivering for Amazon Flex. Amazon's new delivery stations in Nevada include:</p><ul><li>Henderson – Delivery Station opening in 2021</li><li>Las Vegas – Delivery Station opening in 2021</li><li>North Las Vegas – Delivery Station opened in September 2020</li><li>Reno – Delivery Station opened in October 2020</li><li>Reno – "AMXL" Fulfillment Center / Delivery Station opening in 2021. This site supports the fulfillment and delivery of large products, from televisions to couches, powered by drivers employed by Amazon's delivery service partners or national third party carriers.</li></ul><p>Additionally, Amazon has hired hundreds of employees to support two additional facilities in North Las Vegas, including:</p><ul><li>Merch by Amazon – opened in September 2020. This service enables brands, independent artists, and small businesses to upload custom content printed on demand on apparel and electronics products when ordered by customers in Amazon's stores.</li><li>Print on Demand – opened in October 2020. This site supports authors and publishers with Print on Demand, a service through which books are made on-demand when Amazon customers place an order. Print on Demand gives customers more selection without publishers having the upfront cost of printing for inventory.</li></ul><p>"Amazon is proud to continue investing in the state of Nevada, where we opened our first fulfillment center in Fernley more than 20 years ago," said Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon's Vice President of Global Customer Fulfillment. "We're excited to create more than 2,000 new full- and part-time jobs across the state with highly competitive pay, benefits from day one and training programs for in-demand jobs."</p><p>Amazon currently operates 11 sites in Nevada that support customer fulfillment and delivery operations, employing more than 10,500 full- and part-time employees across the state.</p><p>INVESTING IN EMPLOYEES</p><p>On top of Amazon's minimum $15 per hour wage, the company offers full-time employees comprehensive benefits including full medical, vision, and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) with 50 percent match starting on day one. Amazon also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families.</p><p>A job at Amazon can be a springboard to an Amazon career or other opportunities. This year, Amazon promoted more than 35,000 employees in its operations network and continues to invest in the long-term career success of employees inside and outside of the company.</p><p>In 2019, Amazon committed $700 million to providing 100,000 employees with access to upskilling programs through 2025. Amazon's Career Choice program is uniquely designed to upskill employees who are interested in career aspirations beyond Amazon. The program pre-pays 95% of tuition for courses in 20 high-demand fields in the U.S., including Computer Support Specialist, Web Developer, Nurse, Air Craft Mechanic, Commercial Trucker, Paralegal/Legal Assistant, IT Security Assistant, and Network Technician among others. More than 30,000 associates have participated in Career Choice in the U.S., marking an investment of $59 million in tuition since the program started in 2012.</p><p>KEEPING EMPLOYEES SAFE</p><p>Amazon prioritizes the safety and health of its employees and has invested millions of dollars to provide a safe workplace. To date, the company has made over 150 significant process changes to ensure the health and safety of teams. Amazon has invested $4 billion since the first half of the year to safely deliver smiles to customers, while also protecting employees. This includes more than $800 million invested in the first half of the year on COVID-19 safety measures, with investments in personal protective equipment, enhanced cleaning of its facilities, process paths that better allow for effective social distancing, and developing its own COVID-19 testing capabilities.</p><p>Amazon was recently ranked #2 on the Forbes World's Best Employers list. For more information about current job openings in Nevada, visit www.amazondelivers.jobs.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201202005355/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

AWS Announces Four Storage Innovations

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-Four-Storage-Innovations/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-Four-Storage-Innovations

12/01/2020 14:00:00

AWS Announces Four Storage Innovations

12/01/2020

2020

Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes deliver the first storage area network (SAN) built for the cloud, with up to 256,000 IOPS, 4,000 MB/second throughput, and 64 TB of capacity Next-generation Amazon EBS Gp3 volumes give customers the ability to provision additional IOPS and throughput performance independent of storage capacity, provide up to 4x peak throughput, and are priced 20% lower per GB than previous generation volumes Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering adds S3 Glacier Archive and Deep Archive access to existing Frequent and Infrequent access tiers to automatically reduce customers' storage costs by up to 95% for objects that are rarely accessed Amazon S3 Replication (multi-destination) provides the ability to replicate data to multiple S3 buckets simultaneously in the same AWS Region or any number of AWS Regions to meet customers' global content distribution, storage compliance, and data-sharing needs SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced four storage innovations that deliver added storage performance, resiliency, and value to customers, including: Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes: Next-generation storage server architecture delivers the first SAN built for the cloud, with up to 256,000 IOPS, 4,000 MB/second throughput, and 64 TB of capacity (a 4x increase across all metrics compared to standard io2 volumes), to meet the performance requirements of the most I/O intensive business critical applications (available in preview). Amazon EBS Gp3 volumes: Next-generation general purpose SSD volumes for Amazon EBS give customers the flexibility to provision additional IOPS and throughput without needing to add additional storage, while also offering higher baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/second of throughput with the ability to provision up to 16,000 IOPS and 1,000 MB/second peak throughput (a 4x increase over Gp2 volumes) at a 20% lower price per GB of storage than existing Gp2 volumes (available today). Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatic data archiving: Two new tiers (Archive Access and Deep Archive Access) help customers further reduce their storage costs by up to 95% for objects rarely accessed by automatically moving unused objects into archive access tiers (available today). Amazon S3 Replication (multi-destination): New capability gives customers the ability to replicate data to multiple S3 buckets in the same or different AWS Regions, in order to better manage content distribution, compliance, and data-sharing needs across Regions (available today). EBS io2 Block Express volumes deliver the first SAN built for the cloudCustomers choose io2 volumes (the latest generation-provisioned IOPS volumes) to run their critical, performance-intensive applications like SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgresSQL, and Oracle databases because it provides 99.999% (five 9s) of durability and 4x more IOPS than general purpose EBS volumes. Some applications require higher IOPS, throughput, or capacity than offered by a single io2 volume. To address the needed performance, customers often stripe multiple io2 volumes together. However, the most demanding applications require more io2 volumes to be striped together than customers want to manage. For these highly demanding applications, many customers have historically used on-premises SANs (a set of disks accessed over the local network). However, SANs have numerous drawbacks. They are expensive due to high upfront acquisition costs, require complex forecasting to ensure sufficient capacity, are complicated and hard to manage, and consume valuable data center space and networking capacity. When a customer exceeds the capacity of a SAN, they have to buy another entire SAN, which is expensive and forces customers to pay for unused capacity. Customers told us they wanted the power of a SAN, but in the cloud, which hasn't existed – until now. EBS Block Express is a completely new storage architecture that gives customers the first SAN built for the cloud. EBS Block Express is designed for the largest, most I/O intensive mission-critical deployments of Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, and SAS Analytics that benefit from high-volume IOPS, high throughput, high durability, high storage capacity, and low latency. With io2 volumes running on Block Express, a single io2 volume can now be provisioned with up to 256,000 IOPS, drive up to 4,000 MB/second of throughput, and offer 64 TB of capacity – a 4x increase over existing io2 volumes across all parameters. Additionally, with io2 Block Express volumes, customers can achieve consistent sub-millisecond latency for their latency-sensitive applications. Customers can also stripe multiple io2 Block Express volumes together to get even better performance than a single volume can provide. Block Express helps io2 volumes achieve this performance by completely reinventing the underlying EBS hardware, software, and networking stacks. By decoupling the compute from the storage at the hardware layer and rewriting the software to take advantage of this decoupling, EBS Block Express enables new levels of performance and reduces time to innovation. By also rewriting the networking stack to take advantage of the high-performance Scalable Reliable Datagrams (SRD) networking protocol, Block Express dramatically reduces latency. These improvements are available to customers with no upfront commitments to use io2 Block Express volumes, and customers can provision and scale capacity without the upfront costs of a SAN. In the coming months, additional SAN features will be added to Block Express volumes. These include multi-attach with I/O fencing to give customers the ability to safely attach multiple instances to a single volume at the same time, Fast Snapshot Restore, and Elastic Volumes to increase EBS volume size, type, and performance. To learn more about io2 volumes powered by Block Express visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ebs EBS Gp3 volumes decouple IOPS from storage capacity, deliver more performance, and are priced 20% lower than previous generation volumesCustomers use EBS volumes to support a broad range of workloads, such as relational and non-relational databases (e.g. Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle), enterprise applications, containerized applications, big data analytics engines, distributed file systems, virtual desktops, dev/test environments, and media workflows. Gp2 volumes have made it easy and cost effective for customers to meet their IOPS and throughput requirements for many of these workloads, but some applications require more IOPS than a single Gp2 volume can deliver. With Gp2 volumes, performance scales up with storage capacity, so customers can get higher IOPS and throughput for their applications by provisioning a larger storage volume size. However, some applications require higher performance, but do not need higher storage capacity (e.g. databases like MySQL and Cassandra). These customers can end up paying for more storage than they need to get the required IOPS performance. Customers who are running these workloads want to meet their performance needs without having to provision and pay for a larger storage volume. Next-generation Gp3 volumes give customers the ability to independently provision IOPS and throughput separately from storage capacity. For workloads where the application needs more performance, customers can modify the Gp3 volumes to provision the IOPS and throughput they need, without having to add more storage capacity. Gp3 volumes deliver sustained baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/second with the ability to provision up to 16,000 IOPS and 1,000 MB/second peak throughput (a 4x increase over Gp2 volumes). In addition to saving customers money by allowing them to scale IOPS independent of storage, Gp3 volumes are also priced 20% lower per GB than existing Gp2 volumes. Customers can easily migrate Gp2 volumes to Gp3 volumes using Elastic Volumes, an existing feature of EBS that allows customers to modify the volume type, IOPS, storage capacity, and throughput of their existing EBS volumes without interrupting their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. Customers can also easily create new Gp3 volumes and scale performance using the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or the AWS SDK. To get started with Gp3 volumes visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering adds two new archive tiers that deliver up to 95% storage cost savingsThe S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class automatically optimizes customers' storage costs for data with unknown or changing access patterns. It is the first and only cloud storage solution to provide dynamic pricing automatically based on the changing access patterns of individual objects in storage. S3 Intelligent-Tiering has been widely adopted by customers with data sets that have varying access patterns (e.g. data lakes) or unknown storage access patterns (e.g. newly-launched applications). S3 Intelligent-Tiering charges for storage in two pricing tiers: one tier for frequent access (for real-time data querying) and a cost-optimized tier for infrequent access (for batch querying). However, many AWS customers have storage that they very rarely access and use S3 Glacier or S3 Glacier Deep Archive to reduce their storage costs for this archived data. Prior to today, customers needed to manually build their own applications to monitor and record access to individual objects, when determining which objects were rarely accessed and needed to be moved to archive. Then, they needed to manually move them. The addition of Archive Access and Deep Archive Access tiers to S3 Intelligent-Tiering further enhances the first and only storage class in the cloud that provides dynamic tiering and pricing. S3 Intelligent-Tiering now provides automatic tiering and dynamic pricing across four different access tiers (Frequent, Infrequent, Archive, and Deep Archive). Customers using S3 Intelligent-Tiering can save up to 95% on storage that is automatically moved from Frequent access to Deep Archive for 180 days or more. Once a customer has activated one or both of the archive access tiers, S3 Intelligent-Tiering will automatically move objects that have not been accessed for 90 days to the Archive access tier, and after 180 days to the Deep Archive access tier. S3 Intelligent-Tiering supports features like S3 Inventory to report on the access tier of objects, and S3 Replication to replicate data to any AWS Region. There are no retrieval fees when using the S3 Intelligent-Tiering and no additional tiering fees when objects are moved between access tiers. S3 Intelligent-Tiering with the new archive access tiers are available today in all AWS Regions. To get started with Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering visit: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/ Amazon S3 Replication extends the ability to replicate data to multiple destinations within the same AWS Region or across different AWS RegionsCustomers use S3 Replication today to create a replica copy of their data within the same AWS Region or across different AWS Regions for compliance requirements, low-latency performance, or data sharing across accounts. Some customers also need to replicate the actual data to multiple destinations (S3 buckets in the same AWS Region or S3 buckets in multiple Regions) to meet data sovereignty requirements, to support collaboration between geographically-distributed teams, or to maintain the same data sets in multiple AWS Regions for resiliency. To accomplish this today, customers must build their own multi-destination replication service by monitoring S3 events to identify any newly-created objects. They then spread out these events into multiple queues, invoke AWS Lambda functions to copy objects to each destination S3 bucket, track the status of each API call, and aggregate the results. Customers also need to monitor and maintain these systems, which create added expense and operational overhead. With S3 Replication (multi-destination), customers no longer need to develop their own solutions for duplicating data across multiple AWS Regions. Customers can now use S3 Replication to replicate data to multiple buckets within the same AWS Region, across multiple AWS Regions, or a combination of both using the same policy-based, managed solution with events and metrics to monitor their data replication. For example, a customer can now easily replicate data to multiple S3 buckets in different AWS Regions – one for primary storage, one for archiving, and one for disaster recovery. Customers can also distribute data sets and updates to all AWS Regions for low-latency performance. With S3 Replication (multi-destination), customers can also specify different storage classes for different destinations to save on storage costs and meet data compliance requirements (e.g. customers can use the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class for data in two AWS Regions and have another copy in S3 Glacier Deep Archive for a low-cost replica). S3 Replication (multi-destination) fully supports existing S3 Replication functionality like Replication Time Control to provide predictable replication time backed by a Service Level Agreement to meet their compliance or business requirements. Customers can also monitor the status of their replication with Amazon CloudWatch metrics, events, and the object-level replication status field. S3 Replication (multi-destination) can be configured using the S3 management console, AWS CloudFormation, or via the AWS CLI or AWS SDK. To get started with S3 Replication (multi-destination) visit: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/features/replication/ "More data will be created in the next three years than was created over the past 30 years," said Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Vice President, Storage, at AWS. "The cloud is a big part of why developers and companies are generating and retaining so much data, and data storage is in need of reinvention. Today's announcements reinvent storage by building a new SAN for the cloud, automatically tiering customers' vast troves of data so they can save money on what's not being accessed often, and making it simple to replicate data and move it around the world as needed to enable customers to manage this new normal more effectively." Teradata is the cloud data analytics platform company, solving the world's most complex data challenges at scale. "When your focus is analyzing the world's data in real-time, having the right balance of price and performance is critical—for our business and our end-customers," said Dan Spurling, SVP Engineering, Teradata. "With the release of Gp3, Teradata AWS customers will experience improved performance and throughput, allowing them to drive increased analytics at scale. With the significant improvements in Gp3 over Gp2, we expect 4x higher throughput with fewer EBS volumes per instance; enabling our customers to receive increased performance and improved instance level availability." Embark is building self-driving truck technology to make roads safer and transportation more efficient. "We use S3 Intelligent-Tiering to store logs from our fleet of self-driving trucks. These logs contain petabytes of data from the sensors on our vehicle such as cameras and LiDARS, while also storing control signals, and system logs that we need to perfectly reconstruct everything that happened on and around our vehicles at any point in time. Keeping all of this data is critical to our business," said Paul Ashbourne, Head of Infrastructure, Embark. "Our teams frequently access recently-collected data for their analyses, but over time, most of this data gets colder and subsets of data are not accessed for months at a time. It's important that we continue to save older data in case we need to analyze it again, but doing so can be costly. S3 Intelligent-Tiering is perfect for us because it automatically optimizes our storage costs based on individual object access patterns. With the two new Archive Access tiers, we save even more when our fleet log data is rarely accessed. All of this happens seamlessly without our engineering team having to build or manage any custom storage monitoring systems. With S3 Intelligent-Tiering, everything just works, and we can focus less time managing our storage and more time on research and development." Zalando is Europe's leading online platform for fashion and lifestyle with over 35 million active customers. "We built a 15 PB data lake on Amazon S3 which has allowed employees to act on and analyze historical sales and web tracking data that they previously wouldn't have had access to," said Max Schultze, Lead Data Engineer, Zalando. "By using S3 Intelligent-Tiering, we were able to save 37% of our yearly storage costs for our data lake, as it automatically moved objects between a Frequent Access and Infrequent Access tier. We are looking forward to the new S3 Intelligent-Tiering Archive Access tiers to save even more on objects that are not accessed for long periods of time." SmugMug+Flickr is the world's largest and most influential photographer-centric platform. "We're new to S3 Replication and have used Amazon S3 since day one. S3 Replication for multiple destinations delivers awesome options for our global data handling," said Andrew Shieh, Director of Engineering/Operations, at SmugMug+Flickr. "We can now leverage S3 Replication in new ways, planning optimized replication strategies using our existing S3 Object tags. S3 Replication support for multiple destinations handles the heavy lifting, so we can spend more of our operational and development time thrilling our customers. Our petabytes of data in S3, fully managed by a few lines of code, are at the heart of our business. These continual improvements to S3 keep SmugMug and Flickr growing together with our partners at AWS." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201006062/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes deliver the first storage area network (SAN) built for the cloud, with up to 256,000 IOPS, 4,000 MB/second throughput, and 64 TB of capacity</em></p><p><em>Next-generation Amazon EBS Gp3 volumes give customers the ability to provision additional IOPS and throughput performance independent of storage capacity, provide up to 4x peak throughput, and are priced 20% lower per GB than previous generation volumes</em></p><p><em>Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering adds S3 Glacier Archive and Deep Archive access to existing Frequent and Infrequent access tiers to automatically reduce customers' storage costs by up to 95% for objects that are rarely accessed</em></p><p><em>Amazon S3 Replication (multi-destination) provides the ability to replicate data to multiple S3 buckets simultaneously in the same AWS Region or any number of AWS Regions to meet customers' global content distribution, storage compliance, and data-sharing needs</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced four storage innovations that deliver added storage performance, resiliency, and value to customers, including:</p><ul><li>Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes: Next-generation storage server architecture delivers the first SAN built for the cloud, with up to 256,000 IOPS, 4,000 MB/second throughput, and 64 TB of capacity (a 4x increase across all metrics compared to standard io2 volumes), to meet the performance requirements of the most I/O intensive business critical applications (available in preview).</li><li>Amazon EBS Gp3 volumes: Next-generation general purpose SSD volumes for Amazon EBS give customers the flexibility to provision additional IOPS and throughput without needing to add additional storage, while also offering higher baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/second of throughput with the ability to provision up to 16,000 IOPS and 1,000 MB/second peak throughput (a 4x increase over Gp2 volumes) at a 20% lower price per GB of storage than existing Gp2 volumes (available today).</li><li>Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatic data archiving: Two new tiers (Archive Access and Deep Archive Access) help customers further reduce their storage costs by up to 95% for objects rarely accessed by automatically moving unused objects into archive access tiers (available today).</li><li>Amazon S3 Replication (multi-destination): New capability gives customers the ability to replicate data to multiple S3 buckets in the same or different AWS Regions, in order to better manage content distribution, compliance, and data-sharing needs across Regions (available today).</li></ul><p><em>EBS io2 Block Express volumes deliver the first SAN built for the cloud</em>Customers choose io2 volumes (the latest generation-provisioned IOPS volumes) to run their critical, performance-intensive applications like SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgresSQL, and Oracle databases because it provides 99.999% (five 9s) of durability and 4x more IOPS than general purpose EBS volumes. Some applications require higher IOPS, throughput, or capacity than offered by a single io2 volume. To address the needed performance, customers often stripe multiple io2 volumes together. However, the most demanding applications require more io2 volumes to be striped together than customers want to manage. For these highly demanding applications, many customers have historically used on-premises SANs (a set of disks accessed over the local network). However, SANs have numerous drawbacks. They are expensive due to high upfront acquisition costs, require complex forecasting to ensure sufficient capacity, are complicated and hard to manage, and consume valuable data center space and networking capacity. When a customer exceeds the capacity of a SAN, they have to buy another entire SAN, which is expensive and forces customers to pay for unused capacity. Customers told us they wanted the power of a SAN, but in the cloud, which hasn't existed – until now.</p><p>EBS Block Express is a completely new storage architecture that gives customers the first SAN built for the cloud. EBS Block Express is designed for the largest, most I/O intensive mission-critical deployments of Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, and SAS Analytics that benefit from high-volume IOPS, high throughput, high durability, high storage capacity, and low latency. With io2 volumes running on Block Express, a single io2 volume can now be provisioned with up to 256,000 IOPS, drive up to 4,000 MB/second of throughput, and offer 64 TB of capacity – a 4x increase over existing io2 volumes across all parameters. Additionally, with io2 Block Express volumes, customers can achieve consistent sub-millisecond latency for their latency-sensitive applications. Customers can also stripe multiple io2 Block Express volumes together to get even better performance than a single volume can provide. Block Express helps io2 volumes achieve this performance by completely reinventing the underlying EBS hardware, software, and networking stacks. By decoupling the compute from the storage at the hardware layer and rewriting the software to take advantage of this decoupling, EBS Block Express enables new levels of performance and reduces time to innovation. By also rewriting the networking stack to take advantage of the high-performance Scalable Reliable Datagrams (SRD) networking protocol, Block Express dramatically reduces latency. These improvements are available to customers with no upfront commitments to use io2 Block Express volumes, and customers can provision and scale capacity without the upfront costs of a SAN.</p><p>In the coming months, additional SAN features will be added to Block Express volumes. These include multi-attach with I/O fencing to give customers the ability to safely attach multiple instances to a single volume at the same time, Fast Snapshot Restore, and Elastic Volumes to increase EBS volume size, type, and performance. To learn more about io2 volumes powered by Block Express visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ebs</p><p><em>EBS Gp3 volumes decouple IOPS from storage capacity, deliver more performance, and are priced 20% lower than previous generation volumes</em>Customers use EBS volumes to support a broad range of workloads, such as relational and non-relational databases (e.g. Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle), enterprise applications, containerized applications, big data analytics engines, distributed file systems, virtual desktops, dev/test environments, and media workflows. Gp2 volumes have made it easy and cost effective for customers to meet their IOPS and throughput requirements for many of these workloads, but some applications require more IOPS than a single Gp2 volume can deliver. With Gp2 volumes, performance scales up with storage capacity, so customers can get higher IOPS and throughput for their applications by provisioning a larger storage volume size. However, some applications require higher performance, but do not need higher storage capacity (e.g. databases like MySQL and Cassandra). These customers can end up paying for more storage than they need to get the required IOPS performance. Customers who are running these workloads want to meet their performance needs without having to provision and pay for a larger storage volume.</p><p>Next-generation Gp3 volumes give customers the ability to independently provision IOPS and throughput separately from storage capacity. For workloads where the application needs more performance, customers can modify the Gp3 volumes to provision the IOPS and throughput they need, without having to add more storage capacity. Gp3 volumes deliver sustained baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/second with the ability to provision up to 16,000 IOPS and 1,000 MB/second peak throughput (a 4x increase over Gp2 volumes). In addition to saving customers money by allowing them to scale IOPS independent of storage, Gp3 volumes are also priced 20% lower per GB than existing Gp2 volumes. Customers can easily migrate Gp2 volumes to Gp3 volumes using Elastic Volumes, an existing feature of EBS that allows customers to modify the volume type, IOPS, storage capacity, and throughput of their existing EBS volumes without interrupting their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. Customers can also easily create new Gp3 volumes and scale performance using the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or the AWS SDK. To get started with Gp3 volumes visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/</p><p><em>Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering adds two new archive tiers that deliver up to 95% storage cost savings</em>The S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class automatically optimizes customers' storage costs for data with unknown or changing access patterns. It is the first and only cloud storage solution to provide dynamic pricing automatically based on the changing access patterns of individual objects in storage. S3 Intelligent-Tiering has been widely adopted by customers with data sets that have varying access patterns (e.g. data lakes) or unknown storage access patterns (e.g. newly-launched applications). S3 Intelligent-Tiering charges for storage in two pricing tiers: one tier for frequent access (for real-time data querying) and a cost-optimized tier for infrequent access (for batch querying). However, many AWS customers have storage that they very rarely access and use S3 Glacier or S3 Glacier Deep Archive to reduce their storage costs for this archived data. Prior to today, customers needed to manually build their own applications to monitor and record access to individual objects, when determining which objects were rarely accessed and needed to be moved to archive. Then, they needed to manually move them.</p><p>The addition of Archive Access and Deep Archive Access tiers to S3 Intelligent-Tiering further enhances the first and only storage class in the cloud that provides dynamic tiering and pricing. S3 Intelligent-Tiering now provides automatic tiering and dynamic pricing across four different access tiers (Frequent, Infrequent, Archive, and Deep Archive). Customers using S3 Intelligent-Tiering can save up to 95% on storage that is automatically moved from Frequent access to Deep Archive for 180 days or more. Once a customer has activated one or both of the archive access tiers, S3 Intelligent-Tiering will automatically move objects that have not been accessed for 90 days to the Archive access tier, and after 180 days to the Deep Archive access tier. S3 Intelligent-Tiering supports features like S3 Inventory to report on the access tier of objects, and S3 Replication to replicate data to any AWS Region. There are no retrieval fees when using the S3 Intelligent-Tiering and no additional tiering fees when objects are moved between access tiers. S3 Intelligent-Tiering with the new archive access tiers are available today in all AWS Regions. To get started with Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering visit: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/</p><p><em>Amazon S3 Replication extends the ability to replicate data to multiple destinations within the same AWS Region or across different AWS Regions</em>Customers use S3 Replication today to create a replica copy of their data within the same AWS Region or across different AWS Regions for compliance requirements, low-latency performance, or data sharing across accounts. Some customers also need to replicate the actual data to multiple destinations (S3 buckets in the same AWS Region or S3 buckets in multiple Regions) to meet data sovereignty requirements, to support collaboration between geographically-distributed teams, or to maintain the same data sets in multiple AWS Regions for resiliency. To accomplish this today, customers must build their own multi-destination replication service by monitoring S3 events to identify any newly-created objects. They then spread out these events into multiple queues, invoke AWS Lambda functions to copy objects to each destination S3 bucket, track the status of each API call, and aggregate the results. Customers also need to monitor and maintain these systems, which create added expense and operational overhead.</p><p>With S3 Replication (multi-destination), customers no longer need to develop their own solutions for duplicating data across multiple AWS Regions. Customers can now use S3 Replication to replicate data to multiple buckets within the same AWS Region, across multiple AWS Regions, or a combination of both using the same policy-based, managed solution with events and metrics to monitor their data replication. For example, a customer can now easily replicate data to multiple S3 buckets in different AWS Regions – one for primary storage, one for archiving, and one for disaster recovery. Customers can also distribute data sets and updates to all AWS Regions for low-latency performance. With S3 Replication (multi-destination), customers can also specify different storage classes for different destinations to save on storage costs and meet data compliance requirements (e.g. customers can use the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class for data in two AWS Regions and have another copy in S3 Glacier Deep Archive for a low-cost replica). S3 Replication (multi-destination) fully supports existing S3 Replication functionality like Replication Time Control to provide predictable replication time backed by a Service Level Agreement to meet their compliance or business requirements. Customers can also monitor the status of their replication with Amazon CloudWatch metrics, events, and the object-level replication status field. S3 Replication (multi-destination) can be configured using the S3 management console, AWS CloudFormation, or via the AWS CLI or AWS SDK. To get started with S3 Replication (multi-destination) visit: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/features/replication/</p><p>"More data will be created in the next three years than was created over the past 30 years," said Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Vice President, Storage, at AWS. "The cloud is a big part of why developers and companies are generating and retaining so much data, and data storage is in need of reinvention. Today's announcements reinvent storage by building a new SAN for the cloud, automatically tiering customers' vast troves of data so they can save money on what's not being accessed often, and making it simple to replicate data and move it around the world as needed to enable customers to manage this new normal more effectively."</p><p>Teradata is the cloud data analytics platform company, solving the world's most complex data challenges at scale. "When your focus is analyzing the world's data in real-time, having the right balance of price and performance is critical—for our business and our end-customers," said Dan Spurling, SVP Engineering, Teradata. "With the release of Gp3, Teradata AWS customers will experience improved performance and throughput, allowing them to drive increased analytics at scale. With the significant improvements in Gp3 over Gp2, we expect 4x higher throughput with fewer EBS volumes per instance; enabling our customers to receive increased performance and improved instance level availability."</p><p>Embark is building self-driving truck technology to make roads safer and transportation more efficient. "We use S3 Intelligent-Tiering to store logs from our fleet of self-driving trucks. These logs contain petabytes of data from the sensors on our vehicle such as cameras and LiDARS, while also storing control signals, and system logs that we need to perfectly reconstruct everything that happened on and around our vehicles at any point in time. Keeping all of this data is critical to our business," said Paul Ashbourne, Head of Infrastructure, Embark. "Our teams frequently access recently-collected data for their analyses, but over time, most of this data gets colder and subsets of data are not accessed for months at a time. It's important that we continue to save older data in case we need to analyze it again, but doing so can be costly. S3 Intelligent-Tiering is perfect for us because it automatically optimizes our storage costs based on individual object access patterns. With the two new Archive Access tiers, we save even more when our fleet log data is rarely accessed. All of this happens seamlessly without our engineering team having to build or manage any custom storage monitoring systems. With S3 Intelligent-Tiering, everything just works, and we can focus less time managing our storage and more time on research and development."</p><p>Zalando is Europe's leading online platform for fashion and lifestyle with over 35 million active customers. "We built a 15 PB data lake on Amazon S3 which has allowed employees to act on and analyze historical sales and web tracking data that they previously wouldn't have had access to," said Max Schultze, Lead Data Engineer, Zalando. "By using S3 Intelligent-Tiering, we were able to save 37% of our yearly storage costs for our data lake, as it automatically moved objects between a Frequent Access and Infrequent Access tier. We are looking forward to the new S3 Intelligent-Tiering Archive Access tiers to save even more on objects that are not accessed for long periods of time."</p><p>SmugMug+Flickr is the world's largest and most influential photographer-centric platform. "We're new to S3 Replication and have used Amazon S3 since day one. S3 Replication for multiple destinations delivers awesome options for our global data handling," said Andrew Shieh, Director of Engineering/Operations, at SmugMug+Flickr. "We can now leverage S3 Replication in new ways, planning optimized replication strategies using our existing S3 Object tags. S3 Replication support for multiple destinations handles the heavy lifting, so we can spend more of our operational and development time thrilling our customers. Our petabytes of data in S3, fully managed by a few lines of code, are at the heart of our business. These continual improvements to S3 keep SmugMug and Flickr growing together with our partners at AWS."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201006062/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

AWS Announces Four New Container Capabilities

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-Four-New-Container-Capabilities/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-Four-New-Container-Capabilities

12/01/2020 14:00:00

AWS Announces Four New Container Capabilities

12/01/2020

2020

Amazon ECS Anywhere enables customers to run Amazon ECS in their own data centers Amazon EKS Anywhere provides customers the ability to run Amazon EKS in their own data centers AWS Proton provides customers with a new service to automate container and serverless application development and deployment Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) Public provides developers an easy and highly-available way to share and deploy container software publicly SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced four new container innovations to help customers develop, deploy, and scale modern applications. Containers provide a standard way for developers to package and run applications quickly and reliably in any environment, while also improving resource utilization and reducing cost. AWS is now making it even easier to provision, deploy, and manage container applications. It is doing this by enabling customers to run Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) in their own data centers, adding a new service for automated container and serverless application development and deployment, and providing a new container registry that gives developers an easy and highly available way to share and deploy container software publicly. Most companies offer customers a single managed Kubernetes container offering. This is limiting because different developers prioritize different needs. For developers who most prioritize using the open source Kubernetes orchestration engine, AWS offers Amazon EKS. For developers who most prioritize the deepest integration with the rest of AWS and the comfort of AWS-style APIs and streamlined configurations for cluster management, scheduling, and monitoring, AWS offers Amazon ECS. And, for those customers who prefer to run containers without having to think about servers or clusters at all (i.e. serverless), AWS offers AWS Fargate. No other provider has either a serverless container offering or this selection of container offerings overall to meet the diverse needs of developers. All three of these services continue to grow at a rapid rate, and often, customers use all three container services at the same time for different workloads. Amazon ECS Anywhere and Amazon EKS Anywhere enable customers to run Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS in their own data centers Today, customers that want to run their applications in containers have to deal with different deployment and management processes for on-premises applications and cloud applications. In these cases, customers have to manually install, operate, and manage container orchestration software on-premises. Because these customers have to use disparate tooling across their AWS and on-premises environments, they also have to stay current with multiple specialized knowledge domains and skillsets. This situation not only leads to operational overhead, but it also slows down the pace of delivering new business capabilities. What customers want instead is a fully-managed solution that works in their own data centers and in AWS with the same monitoring, cluster management, and deployment pipelines they use in Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS today. Amazon ECS Anywhere gives customers the ability to run Amazon ECS in their own data centers using the same cloud-based, fully-managed, and highly-scalable container orchestration service they use in AWS today. Amazon ECS Anywhere provides customers with consistent tooling and APIs for all container-based applications, and the same Amazon ECS experience for cluster management, workload scheduling, and monitoring both in the cloud and in their own data centers. With Amazon ECS Anywhere, customers no longer need to run, update, or maintain their own container orchestrators on-premises, making it easier to move their containers to the cloud and manage their hybrid environment. Amazon ECS Anywhere will be available in the first half of 2021. To learn more, visit https://aws.amazon.com/ecs With Amazon EKS Anywhere, customers can now run Kubernetes in their own data centers and in the cloud using the same consistent Amazon EKS experience. Amazon EKS Anywhere works on any infrastructure (bare metal, VMware vSphere, or cloud virtual machines) and provides customers with consistent Kubernetes management tooling optimized to simplify cluster installation with default configurations for OS, container registry, logging, monitoring, networking, and storage. Amazon EKS Anywhere uses Amazon EKS Distro, the same Kubernetes distribution deployed by Amazon EKS, allowing customers to easily create clusters consistent with Amazon EKS best practices like the latest software updates and extended security patches. Amazon EKS Anywhere eliminates the fragmented collection of vendor support agreements and tools required to install and operate Kubernetes clusters on-premises. Amazon EKS Anywhere will be available in the first half of 2021. To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/eks/eks-anywhere AWS Proton provides developers with a new service to automate container and serverless application development and deployment Container and serverless applications provide obvious operational benefits, but they also change the way customers develop and deploy their code. Today, when developers build traditional applications on Amazon EC2 instances, the applications are often built as a single block of code, and there are well-established tools that help them develop and deploy their code like AWS CloudFormation templates (to provision the infrastructure), AWS CodePipeline (to set up the CI/CD process), and Amazon CloudWatch (to monitor the deployments). In reality, once customers get an application up and running on EC2, the components of the application don't change very much. Typically, the code is maintained in a single release, so keeping it coordinated is relatively easy. By contrast, container and serverless applications are assembled from smaller chunks of code that are often developed and maintained independently and then stitched together to build and scale an application. Each chunk of code has its own separate infrastructure that has to be updated and maintained. Often, these smaller pieces of code are developed and operated by different teams, so those teams have the freedom to update the components at their own pace. This results in changes happening more frequently than with traditional applications. As customers have naturally gravitated to container and serverless application development, they've also found that trying to coordinate all of the changes across their infrastructure provisioning, code deployments, and monitoring tools can be a challenge. Customers lack an integrated solution that ties together all the tasks, including resource provisioning, code deployments, and monitoring. Central infrastructure teams try to provide guidance to the developers, and some even have built their own custom tools to help developers implement best practices, but the intricacies of container and serverless application development and deployment remain a challenge that slows down application development at many organizations. AWS Proton is a new application management service that makes it radically simpler to provision, deploy, and monitor applications when the unit of compute is small and dynamic, like with container and serverless. AWS Proton allows customers to define application components as "stacks" (i.e. the different combinations of chunks of code used in an application). AWS Proton also comes with a set of curated application stacks with built-in AWS best practices (for security, architecture, and tools), allowing infrastructure teams to distribute trusted stacks to development teams quickly and easily. AWS Proton enables infrastructure teams to make the stacks available to development teams for different use cases, and ensures that the stacks stay standardized and up-to-date even as multiple teams deploy stacks simultaneously. AWS Proton gives developers the ability to store and reuse these application stacks, provides an environment to deploy container and serverless applications, monitors the applications in production, and automatically updates the applications with the latest components of the stacks. AWS Proton automates the deployment of infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring for container and serverless applications. With AWS Proton, Infrastructure teams can empower their developers to use serverless and container technologies in a consistent way for their applications without having to worry about manually managing the application's development process. AWS Proton is available in preview today. To get started with AWS Proton, visit aws.amazon.com/proton Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) Public allows developers to share and deploy container software publicly Most developers building container-based applications leverage common software packages (e.g. operating systems, databases, and application components) that are publicly distributed as container images. Developers manage their container images privately within their organization using container registry services like Amazon ECR. Today, Amazon ECR customers download over three billion images each week, enabling developers to deploy containers for use in their own applications. However, when developers want to publish popular software as images publicly (e.g. language libraries, web servers, databases, etc.), they can't download it from Amazon ECR today. Instead, they must download these images from public websites and registries like Docker Hub, which limits the image pull rate under their anonymous and free plans and does not offer availability commitments. This results in inefficient and unreliable software delivery. To work around this dependency, developers are forced to duplicate and manage these common images locally. This makes it difficult to stay in sync with the latest versions of the images, adds operational complexity, and limits the ability to scale applications quickly. AWS customers who run containers from public images in multiple regions (to log events or manage network policies) face additional difficulties in getting images to download quickly and reliably, because they have to replicate their local image copy to each region. To solve this challenge, Amazon ECR has now added a public registry for developers to store, manage, share, and deploy container images for anyone to discover and download. Customers can use Amazon ECR Public to host both their private and public container images, eliminating the need to use public websites and registries. Customers no longer need to operate their own container repositories or worry about scaling the underlying infrastructure and can quickly publish public container images with a single command. These images are geo-replicated for reliable availability around the world and offer faster downloads to quickly serve up images on-demand. Amazon ECR Public provides a highly available service that customers can use to distribute public container images as well as related files like policy configurations for use by any developer. Additionally, a new website called Amazon ECR Public Gallery will allow anyone to browse and search for public container images, view developer-provided details, and see pull commands – all without needing to sign in to AWS. Amazon ECR Public will also notify customers when a new release of a public image becomes available. Amazon ECR Public is available today. To learn more about Amazon ECR Public, visit aws.amazon.com/ecr "Customers want to run their workloads in containers for greater portability, more efficient resource utilization, and lower costs, but even with these significant advantages, customers have asked AWS to make containers easier to manage, deploy, and share," said Deepak Singh, VP of Compute Services, AWS. "The innovations announced today further expand AWS's leading container functionality by giving customers a consistent Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS experience in the cloud and in their own data centers, making it radically simpler to develop and deploy container and serverless applications, and providing a fully managed public container registry to more easily store, manage, and share container images." The Volkswagen Group manufactures 12 of the world's most iconic automotive brands, including Volkswagen passenger cars, Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, and Ducati motorcycles. The group also includes TRATON, a leading manufacturer of light-duty commercial vehicles, trucks, and buses. "We need our Software Development teams to solve business problems without worrying too much about infrastructure architecture and compliance," said Peter Garzarella, Head of Group Software Development, Volkswagen AG. "AWS Proton enables us to provide compliant, easily consumable, and evolvable cloud infrastructure to our teams at the press of a button." BuzzFeed is the world's leading independent digital media company, which leverages data and innovation to reach hundreds of millions of people globally. "Rig, our deployment platform, helps us manage a microservice ecosystem of over 600 apps including HTTP APIs & User Interfaces, queue readers, one-off jobs, and more," said Clément Huygheba​ert, Director of Engineering, BuzzFeed. "It is critical for us to ensure that development teams can quickly get the infrastructure they need while meeting our architectural standards and not having to slow down. We're excited to explore AWS Proton's feature set and see how it can help BuzzFeed provide an even smoother developer experience."​​ SmugMug + Flickr is the ​world's largest and most influential photographer-centric platform. "We constantly spin up new services, and need to keep track of what is running in our infrastructure, including what is still in use and what has to be upgraded," said ​​Shane Meyers, ​​Principal Architect, SmugMug. "Today, our infrastructure team is involved in provisioning infrastructure for all projects and monitoring the services in use. We are looking forward to using AWS Proton, which will free up our developers to move fast while we keep all infrastructure updated to the latest standards." Canonical is the publisher of Ubuntu, the OS for most public cloud workloads as well as IoT, smart devices, self-driving cars, and advanced robots. "With enterprises increasingly adopting open source applications across their cloud infrastructure, they are facing more security issues," said Mark Lewis, VP of Application Services, Canonical. "While discovering vulnerabilities in container images is easier than ever, fixing them requires an ever increasing set of specialized skills and infrastructure. The Canonical LTS Docker image portfolio on Amazon ECR Public provides compliant, secure images for a growing range of applications, with a long term maintenance commitment that enterprises can rely on." Wish is a leading mobile-shopping app that sells a huge variety of affordable products to shoppers around the world. "We run most of our customer-facing apps on Kubernetes clusters in AWS, and use public containers for application builds and standalone add ons," said Tomas Virgl, Tech Lead, Core Infrastructure, Wish. "We pull our container images from Amazon ECR and are delighted with its uptime, as well as breadth of its features such as security scanning, multi-arch support, and ease of use. Amazon ECR Public will now let us leverage the same great features for public container images. It simplifies our registry tooling in hybrid environments and increases our confidence when apps build from a parent public image, or when we pull a public image to run." About Amazon Web Services  For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com

<p><em>Amazon ECS Anywhere enables customers to run Amazon ECS in their own data centers</em></p><p><em>Amazon EKS Anywhere provides customers the ability to run Amazon EKS in their own data centers</em></p><p><em>AWS Proton provides customers with a new service to automate container and serverless application development and deployment</em></p><p><em>Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) Public provides developers an easy and highly-available way to share and deploy container software publicly</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced four new container innovations to help customers develop, deploy, and scale modern applications. Containers provide a standard way for developers to package and run applications quickly and reliably in any environment, while also improving resource utilization and reducing cost. AWS is now making it even easier to provision, deploy, and manage container applications. It is doing this by enabling customers to run Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) in their own data centers, adding a new service for automated container and serverless application development and deployment, and providing a new container registry that gives developers an easy and highly available way to share and deploy container software publicly.</p><p>Most companies offer customers a single managed Kubernetes container offering. This is limiting because different developers prioritize different needs. For developers who most prioritize using the open source Kubernetes orchestration engine, AWS offers Amazon EKS. For developers who most prioritize the deepest integration with the rest of AWS and the comfort of AWS-style APIs and streamlined configurations for cluster management, scheduling, and monitoring, AWS offers Amazon ECS. And, for those customers who prefer to run containers without having to think about servers or clusters at all (i.e. serverless), AWS offers AWS Fargate. No other provider has either a serverless container offering or this selection of container offerings overall to meet the diverse needs of developers. All three of these services continue to grow at a rapid rate, and often, customers use all three container services at the same time for different workloads.</p><p><em>Amazon ECS Anywhere and Amazon EKS Anywhere enable customers to run Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS in their own data centers</em></p><p>Today, customers that want to run their applications in containers have to deal with different deployment and management processes for on-premises applications and cloud applications. In these cases, customers have to manually install, operate, and manage container orchestration software on-premises. Because these customers have to use disparate tooling across their AWS and on-premises environments, they also have to stay current with multiple specialized knowledge domains and skillsets. This situation not only leads to operational overhead, but it also slows down the pace of delivering new business capabilities. What customers want instead is a fully-managed solution that works in their own data centers and in AWS with the same monitoring, cluster management, and deployment pipelines they use in Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS today.</p><ul><li>Amazon ECS Anywhere gives customers the ability to run Amazon ECS in their own data centers using the same cloud-based, fully-managed, and highly-scalable container orchestration service they use in AWS today. Amazon ECS Anywhere provides customers with consistent tooling and APIs for all container-based applications, and the same Amazon ECS experience for cluster management, workload scheduling, and monitoring both in the cloud and in their own data centers. With Amazon ECS Anywhere, customers no longer need to run, update, or maintain their own container orchestrators on-premises, making it easier to move their containers to the cloud and manage their hybrid environment. Amazon ECS Anywhere will be available in the first half of 2021. To learn more, visit https://aws.amazon.com/ecs</li></ul><ul><li>With Amazon EKS Anywhere, customers can now run Kubernetes in their own data centers and in the cloud using the same consistent Amazon EKS experience. Amazon EKS Anywhere works on any infrastructure (bare metal, VMware vSphere, or cloud virtual machines) and provides customers with consistent Kubernetes management tooling optimized to simplify cluster installation with default configurations for OS, container registry, logging, monitoring, networking, and storage. Amazon EKS Anywhere uses Amazon EKS Distro, the same Kubernetes distribution deployed by Amazon EKS, allowing customers to easily create clusters consistent with Amazon EKS best practices like the latest software updates and extended security patches. Amazon EKS Anywhere eliminates the fragmented collection of vendor support agreements and tools required to install and operate Kubernetes clusters on-premises. Amazon EKS Anywhere will be available in the first half of 2021. To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/eks/eks-anywhere</li></ul><p><em>AWS Proton provides developers with a new service to automate container and serverless application development and deployment</em></p><p>Container and serverless applications provide obvious operational benefits, but they also change the way customers develop and deploy their code. Today, when developers build traditional applications on Amazon EC2 instances, the applications are often built as a single block of code, and there are well-established tools that help them develop and deploy their code like AWS CloudFormation templates (to provision the infrastructure), AWS CodePipeline (to set up the CI/CD process), and Amazon CloudWatch (to monitor the deployments). In reality, once customers get an application up and running on EC2, the components of the application don't change very much. Typically, the code is maintained in a single release, so keeping it coordinated is relatively easy. By contrast, container and serverless applications are assembled from smaller chunks of code that are often developed and maintained independently and then stitched together to build and scale an application. Each chunk of code has its own separate infrastructure that has to be updated and maintained. Often, these smaller pieces of code are developed and operated by different teams, so those teams have the freedom to update the components at their own pace. This results in changes happening more frequently than with traditional applications. As customers have naturally gravitated to container and serverless application development, they've also found that trying to coordinate all of the changes across their infrastructure provisioning, code deployments, and monitoring tools can be a challenge. Customers lack an integrated solution that ties together all the tasks, including resource provisioning, code deployments, and monitoring. Central infrastructure teams try to provide guidance to the developers, and some even have built their own custom tools to help developers implement best practices, but the intricacies of container and serverless application development and deployment remain a challenge that slows down application development at many organizations.</p><p>AWS Proton is a new application management service that makes it radically simpler to provision, deploy, and monitor applications when the unit of compute is small and dynamic, like with container and serverless. AWS Proton allows customers to define application components as "stacks" (i.e. the different combinations of chunks of code used in an application). AWS Proton also comes with a set of curated application stacks with built-in AWS best practices (for security, architecture, and tools), allowing infrastructure teams to distribute trusted stacks to development teams quickly and easily. AWS Proton enables infrastructure teams to make the stacks available to development teams for different use cases, and ensures that the stacks stay standardized and up-to-date even as multiple teams deploy stacks simultaneously. AWS Proton gives developers the ability to store and reuse these application stacks, provides an environment to deploy container and serverless applications, monitors the applications in production, and automatically updates the applications with the latest components of the stacks. AWS Proton automates the deployment of infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring for container and serverless applications. With AWS Proton, Infrastructure teams can empower their developers to use serverless and container technologies in a consistent way for their applications without having to worry about manually managing the application's development process. AWS Proton is available in preview today. To get started with AWS Proton, visit aws.amazon.com/proton</p><p><em>Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) Public allows developers to share and deploy container software publicly</em></p><p>Most developers building container-based applications leverage common software packages (e.g. operating systems, databases, and application components) that are publicly distributed as container images. Developers manage their container images privately within their organization using container registry services like Amazon ECR. Today, Amazon ECR customers download over three billion images each week, enabling developers to deploy containers for use in their own applications. However, when developers want to publish popular software as images publicly (e.g. language libraries, web servers, databases, etc.), they can't download it from Amazon ECR today. Instead, they must download these images from public websites and registries like Docker Hub, which limits the image pull rate under their anonymous and free plans and does not offer availability commitments. This results in inefficient and unreliable software delivery. To work around this dependency, developers are forced to duplicate and manage these common images locally. This makes it difficult to stay in sync with the latest versions of the images, adds operational complexity, and limits the ability to scale applications quickly. AWS customers who run containers from public images in multiple regions (to log events or manage network policies) face additional difficulties in getting images to download quickly and reliably, because they have to replicate their local image copy to each region.</p><p>To solve this challenge, Amazon ECR has now added a public registry for developers to store, manage, share, and deploy container images for anyone to discover and download. Customers can use Amazon ECR Public to host both their private and public container images, eliminating the need to use public websites and registries. Customers no longer need to operate their own container repositories or worry about scaling the underlying infrastructure and can quickly publish public container images with a single command. These images are geo-replicated for reliable availability around the world and offer faster downloads to quickly serve up images on-demand. Amazon ECR Public provides a highly available service that customers can use to distribute public container images as well as related files like policy configurations for use by any developer. Additionally, a new website called Amazon ECR Public Gallery will allow anyone to browse and search for public container images, view developer-provided details, and see pull commands – all without needing to sign in to AWS. Amazon ECR Public will also notify customers when a new release of a public image becomes available. Amazon ECR Public is available today. To learn more about Amazon ECR Public, visit aws.amazon.com/ecr</p><p>"Customers want to run their workloads in containers for greater portability, more efficient resource utilization, and lower costs, but even with these significant advantages, customers have asked AWS to make containers easier to manage, deploy, and share," said Deepak Singh, VP of Compute Services, AWS. "The innovations announced today further expand AWS's leading container functionality by giving customers a consistent Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS experience in the cloud and in their own data centers, making it radically simpler to develop and deploy container and serverless applications, and providing a fully managed public container registry to more easily store, manage, and share container images."</p><p>The Volkswagen Group manufactures 12 of the world's most iconic automotive brands, including Volkswagen passenger cars, Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, and Ducati motorcycles. The group also includes TRATON, a leading manufacturer of light-duty commercial vehicles, trucks, and buses. "We need our Software Development teams to solve business problems without worrying too much about infrastructure architecture and compliance," said Peter Garzarella, Head of Group Software Development, Volkswagen AG. "AWS Proton enables us to provide compliant, easily consumable, and evolvable cloud infrastructure to our teams at the press of a button."</p><p>BuzzFeed is the world's leading independent digital media company, which leverages data and innovation to reach hundreds of millions of people globally. "Rig, our deployment platform, helps us manage a microservice ecosystem of over 600 apps including HTTP APIs &amp; User Interfaces, queue readers, one-off jobs, and more," said Clément Huygheba​ert, Director of Engineering, BuzzFeed. "It is critical for us to ensure that development teams can quickly get the infrastructure they need while meeting our architectural standards and not having to slow down. We're excited to explore AWS Proton's feature set and see how it can help BuzzFeed provide an even smoother developer experience."​​</p><p>SmugMug + Flickr is the ​world's largest and most influential photographer-centric platform. "We constantly spin up new services, and need to keep track of what is running in our infrastructure, including what is still in use and what has to be upgraded," said ​​Shane Meyers, ​​Principal Architect, SmugMug. "Today, our infrastructure team is involved in provisioning infrastructure for all projects and monitoring the services in use. We are looking forward to using AWS Proton, which will free up our developers to move fast while we keep all infrastructure updated to the latest standards."</p><p>Canonical is the publisher of Ubuntu, the OS for most public cloud workloads as well as IoT, smart devices, self-driving cars, and advanced robots. "With enterprises increasingly adopting open source applications across their cloud infrastructure, they are facing more security issues," said Mark Lewis, VP of Application Services, Canonical. "While discovering vulnerabilities in container images is easier than ever, fixing them requires an ever increasing set of specialized skills and infrastructure. The Canonical LTS Docker image portfolio on Amazon ECR Public provides compliant, secure images for a growing range of applications, with a long term maintenance commitment that enterprises can rely on."</p><p>Wish is a leading mobile-shopping app that sells a huge variety of affordable products to shoppers around the world. "We run most of our customer-facing apps on Kubernetes clusters in AWS, and use public containers for application builds and standalone add ons," said Tomas Virgl, Tech Lead, Core Infrastructure, Wish. "We pull our container images from Amazon ECR and are delighted with its uptime, as well as breadth of its features such as security scanning, multi-arch support, and ease of use. Amazon ECR Public will now let us leverage the same great features for public container images. It simplifies our registry tooling in hybrid environments and increases our confidence when apps build from a parent public image, or when we pull a public image to run."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services </p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com</p>

AWS Announces Five Industrial Machine Learning Services

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-Five-Industrial-Machine-Learning-Services/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-Five-Industrial-Machine-Learning-Services

12/01/2020 14:00:00

AWS Announces Five Industrial Machine Learning Services

12/01/2020

2020

Amazon Monitron provides customers an end-to-end machine monitoring solution comprised of sensors, gateway, and machine learning service to detect abnormal equipment conditions that may require maintenance Amazon Lookout for Equipment gives customers with existing equipment sensors the ability to use AWS machine learning models to detect abnormal equipment behavior and enable predictive maintenance AWS Panorama Appliance enables customers with existing cameras in their industrial facilities with the ability to use computer vision to improve quality control and workplace safety AWS Panorama Software Development Kit (SDK) allows industrial camera manufacturers to embed computer vision capabilities in new cameras Amazon Lookout for Vision uses AWS-trained computer vision models on images and video streams to find anomalies and flaws in products or processes Axis, ADLINK Technology, BP, Fender, GE Healthcare, and Siemens Mobility among customers and partners using new AWS industrial machine learning services SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced Amazon Monitron, Amazon Lookout for Equipment, the AWS Panorama Appliance, the AWS Panorama SDK, and Amazon Lookout for Vision. Together, these five new machine learning services help industrial and manufacturing customers embed intelligence in their production processes in order to improve operational efficiency, quality control, security, and workplace safety. The services combine sophisticated machine learning, sensor analysis, and computer vision capabilities to address common technical challenges faced by industrial customers, and represent the most comprehensive suite of cloud-to-edge industrial machine learning services available. This is why more than a hundred thousand customers are using AWS for machine learning, and why customers of all sizes and across all industries are using AWS services to make machine learning core to their business strategy. To learn more about AWS's new industrial machine learning services, visit https://aws.amazon.com/industrial/. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201006070/en/ Amazon Monitron provides customers with an end-to-end machine monitoring solution comprised of sensors, gateway, and machine learning service to detect abnormal equipment conditions that may require maintenance (Photo: Business Wire) Companies are increasingly looking to add machine learning capabilities to industrial environments, such as manufacturing facilities, fulfillment centers, and food processing plants. For these customers, data has become the connective tissue that holds their complex industrial systems together. Industrial systems typically have numerous interdependent processes that operate with small tolerances for error, and even minor issues can have major ramifications. Being able to analyze data about the equipment operating in their facilities helps customers address this challenge, and many customers have embraced services like AWS IoT SiteWise as a way to collect data and generate real-time performance metrics from their industrial equipment. As customers have begun to use the cloud to collect and analyze industrial data, they have also asked for new ways to incorporate machine learning to help make sense of the data and further drive operational efficiency. In some cases, customers want to use machine learning to help them realize the promise of predictive maintenance to reduce costs and improve operational efficiency. In other cases, customers running in disconnected or latency-sensitive environments want to use computer vision at the edge to spot product defects and improve workplace safety. With these evolving needs and opportunities, industrial companies have asked AWS to help them leverage the cloud, the industrial edge, and machine learning together to get even more value from the vast amounts of data being generated by their equipment. Amazon Monitron and Amazon Lookout for Equipment enable predictive maintenance powered by machine learning A major challenge facing industrial and manufacturing companies today is the ongoing maintenance of their equipment. Historically, most equipment maintenance is either reactive (after a machine breaks) or preventive (performed at regular intervals to ensure a machine doesn't break). Reactive maintenance can result in significant costs and downtime, while preventive maintenance can be costly, result in over-maintenance, or fail to prevent breakdown if not performed often enough. Predictive maintenance (the ability to foresee when equipment is likely to need maintenance) is a more promising solution. However, in order to make it work, companies have historically needed skilled technicians and data scientists to piece together a complex solution from scratch. This included identifying and procuring the right type of sensors for the use case and connecting them together with an IoT gateway (a device that aggregates and transmits data). Companies then had to test the monitoring system and transfer the data to on-premises infrastructure or the cloud for processing. Only then could the data scientists on staff build machine learning models to analyze the data for patterns and anomalies, or create an alerting system when an outlier was detected. Some companies have invested heavily in installing sensors across their equipment and the necessary infrastructure for data connectivity, storage, analytics, and alerting. But even these companies typically use rudimentary data analytics and simple modeling approaches that are expensive and often ineffective at detecting abnormal conditions compared to advanced machine learning models. Most companies lack the expertise and staff to build and refine the machine learning models that would enable highly accurate predictive maintenance. As a result, few companies have been able to successfully implement predictive maintenance, and those that have done it are looking for ways to further leverage their investment, while also easing the burden of maintaining their homegrown solutions. Here's how the new AWS machine learning services can help: For customers who do not have an existing sensor network, Amazon Monitron offers an end-to-end machine monitoring system comprised of sensors, a gateway, and a machine learning service to detect anomalies and predict when industrial equipment will require maintenance. Amazon Monitron enables customers to remove cost and complexity from building a sophisticated, machine learning-driven predictive maintenance system from scratch, and it also allows them to focus on their core manufacturing, supply chain, and operations functions. Amazon Monitron detects when machines are not operating normally based on abnormal fluctuations in vibration or temperature, and notifies customers when to examine machinery in order to determine if preventative maintenance is needed. The end-to-end system includes IoT sensors to capture vibration and temperature data, a gateway to aggregate and transfer data to AWS, and a machine learning cloud service that can detect abnormal equipment patterns and deliver results in minutes with no machine learning or cloud experience required. With Amazon Monitron, maintenance technicians can start tracking machine health in a matter of hours, without any development work or specialized training. Amazon Monitron can be used on a variety of rotating equipment, such as bearings, motors, pumps, and conveyer belts in industrial and manufacturing settings. Use cases range from monitoring a few critical machines like the cooling fans or water pumps used in data centers, to large scale installations in manufacturing facilities with production and conveyance systems. Amazon Monitron also includes a mobile app for a customer's onsite maintenance technicians to monitor equipment behavior in real time. With the mobile app, a technician can receive alerts of any abnormal equipment conditions across different machines, check up on the health of the machine, and decide if they need to schedule maintenance. To increase the accuracy of the system, technicians can enter feedback on the accuracy of the alerts in the mobile app, and Amazon Monitron learns from that feedback to continually improve over time. Amazon Monitron is now generally available. To learn more about Amazon Monitron, visit https://aws.amazon.com/monitron. For customers that have existing sensors but don't want to build machine learning models, Amazon Lookout for Equipment provides a way to send their sensor data to AWS to build models for them and return predictions to detect abnormal equipment behavior. To get started, customers upload their sensor data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and provide the S3 location to Amazon Lookout for Equipment. Amazon Lookout for Equipment can also pull data from AWS IoT SiteWise, and works seamlessly with other popular machine operations systems like OSIsoft. Amazon Lookout for Equipment analyzes the data, assesses normal or healthy patterns, and then uses the learnings from all of the data on which it is trained to build a model that is customized for the customer's environment. Amazon Lookout for Equipment can then use the machine learning model to analyze incoming sensor data and identify early warning signs for machine failure. This allows customers to do predictive maintenance, saving them money and improving productivity by preventing the crash of an industrial system line. Amazon Lookout for Equipment allows customers to get more value from their existing sensors, and it helps customers make timely decisions that can materially improve the entire industrial process. To learn more about Amazon Lookout for Equipment, visit https://aws.amazon.com/lookout-for-equipment. AWS Panorama uses computer vision to improve industrial operations and workplace safety Many industrial and manufacturing customers want to be able to use computer vision on live video feeds of their facility and equipment to automate monitoring or visual inspection tasks and to make decisions in real time. For example, customers routinely need to inspect high-speed processes to determine if adjustments are needed (e.g. fine milling or laser tooling), to monitor site and yard activity to ensure operating compliance (e.g. ensure pedestrians and forklifts remain in designated work zones), or to assess worker safety within their facilities (e.g. appropriate social distancing or use of PPE). However, the typical monitoring methods used today are manual, error prone, and difficult to scale. Customers could build computer vision models in the cloud to monitor and analyze their live video feeds, but industrial processes typically need to be physically located in remote and isolated places, where connectivity can be slow, expensive, or completely non-existent. This problem is even more difficult for industrial processes that involve manual review like quality checks on manufactured parts or security feeds. For example, if a quality issue emerges on a high throughput production line, customers want to know immediately because the costs of letting the problem persist is steep. This type of video feed could be automatically processed in the cloud using computer vision, but video feeds are high bandwidth and can be slow to upload. As a result, customers are required to monitor video feeds in real time, which is hard to do, error prone, and expensive. While there is a desire to use smart cameras that have enough processing power to run these models, getting low latency performance with good accuracy from these cameras can be challenging. Most customers end up running unsophisticated models that can't be programmed to run custom code that integrates into the industrial machines. Here's how AWS can now help: The AWS Panorama Appliance provides a new hardware appliance that allows organizations to add computer vision to existing on-premises cameras that customers may already have deployed. Customers start by connecting the AWS Panorama Appliance to their network, and the device automatically identifies camera streams and starts interacting with the existing industrial cameras. The AWS Panorama Appliance is integrated with AWS machine learning services and IoT services that can be used to build custom machine learning models or ingest video for more refined analysis. The AWS Panorama Appliance extends AWS machine learning to the edge to help customers make predictions locally in sites without connectivity. Each AWS Panorama Appliance can run computer vision models on multiple camera streams in parallel, making possible use cases like quality control, part identification, and workplace safety. The AWS Panorama Appliance works with AWS and third party pre-trained computer vision models for retail, manufacturing, construction, and other industries. Also, customer-developed computer vision models developed in Amazon SageMaker can be deployed on the AWS Panorama Appliance. The AWS Panorama Software Development Kit (SDK) enables hardware vendors to build new cameras that can run meaningful computer vision models at the edge. Cameras that are built with the AWS Panorama SDK run computer vision models for use cases like detecting damaged parts on a fast-moving conveyor belt or spotting when machinery is outside of a designated work zone. These cameras can use chips designed for computer vision from NVIDIA and Ambarella. By using the AWS Panorama SDK, manufacturers can build cameras with computer vision models that can process higher quality video with better resolution for spotting issues. They can also build more sophisticated models on low-cost devices that can be powered over Ethernet and placed around a site. Customers can train their own models in Amazon SageMaker and deploy them on cameras built with the AWS Panorama SDK with a single click. Customers can also add Lambda functions to cameras built with the AWS Panorama SDK to be alerted to potential issues via text or email. AWS also offers pre-built models for tasks like PPE detection and social distancing, and can deploy these models in minutes without doing any machine learning work or special optimizations. To learn more about AWS Panorama, as well as supporting vendors and partners, visit https://aws.amazon.com/panorama. Amazon Lookout for Vision offers automated fast and accurate visual anomaly detection for images and video at a low cost One use case where AWS customers are excited to deploy computer vision with their cameras is for quality control. Industrial companies must maintain constant diligence to maintain quality control. In the manufacturing industry alone, production line shutdowns due to overlooked errors result in millions of dollars of cost overruns and lost revenue every year. The visual inspection of industrial processes typically requires human inspection, which can be tedious and inconsistent. Computer vision brings the speed and accuracy needed to identify defects consistently, but implementation can be complex and require teams of data scientists to build, deploy, and manage the machine learning models. Because of these barriers, machine learning-powered visual anomaly systems remain out of reach for the vast majority of companies. Here's how AWS can now help these companies: Amazon Lookout for Vision offers customers a high accuracy, low-cost anomaly detection solution that uses machine learning to process thousands of images an hour to spot defects and anomalies. Customers send camera images to Amazon Lookout for Vision in batch or in real-time to identify anomalies, such as a crack in a machine part, a dent in a panel, an irregular shape, or an incorrect color on a product. Amazon Lookout for Vision then reports the images that differ from the baseline so that appropriate action can be taken. Amazon Lookout for Vision is sophisticated enough to handle variances in camera angle, pose, and lighting arising from changes in work environments. As a result, customers can accurately and consistently assess machine parts or manufactured products by providing as few as 30 images of the baseline "good" state. Amazon Lookout for Vision also runs on Amazon Panorama appliances. Customers can run Amazon Lookout for Vision in AWS starting today, and beginning next year, customers will be able to run Amazon Lookout for Vision on AWS Panorama Appliances and other AWS Panorama devices so customers will be able to use Amazon Lookout for Vision in locations where Internet connectivity is limited or non-existent. To learn more about Amazon Lookout for Vision, visit https://aws.amazon.com/lookout-for-vision. "Industrial and manufacturing customers are constantly under pressure from their shareholders, customers, governments, and competitors to reduce costs, improve quality, and maintain compliance. These organizations would like to use the cloud and machine learning to help them automate processes and augment human capabilities across their operations, but building these systems can be error prone, complex, time consuming, and expensive," said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Amazon Machine Learning for AWS. "We're excited to bring customers five new machine learning services purpose-built for industrial use that are easy to install, deploy, and get up and running quickly and that connect the cloud to the edge to help deliver the smart factories of the future for our industrial customers." Fender Musical Instruments Corporation is an iconic brand and the world's foremost manufacturer of guitars, basses, amplifiers, and related equipment. "Over the past year we worked with AWS to help develop the critical but sometimes overlooked part of running a successful manufacturing business, knowing your equipment condition. For manufacturers worldwide, maintaining equipment uptime is the only way to remain competitive in a global market. Unplanned downtime is costly both in loss of production and labor due to the fire-fighting nature of breakdowns," said Bill Holmes, Global Director of Facilities at Fender. "Amazon Monitron can give both large industry manufacturers as well as small ‘mom and pop shops' the ability to predict equipment failures, giving us the opportunity to preemptively schedule equipment repairs." RS Components is a leading player in the industrial components and predictive maintenance space. "We are constantly trying to innovate how we serve the maintenance needs of our customers. With the emergence of IoT, we have seen our customers looking to bring real-time condition monitoring capabilities into the factory environment to reduce reactive maintenance and improve asset reliability," said Richard Jeffers, Technical Director at RS Components. "We are excited to be working with AWS to bring Amazon Monitron to our customers because it allows them to deploy a cost effective, easy to use, continuously improving condition monitoring solution and enable predictive maintenance across a broader set of equipment in their asset base. Although we stock over 500,000 products from 2,500 different suppliers, this is the first end-to-end wireless vibration and temperature condition monitoring solution in our portfolio. We plan to make Amazon Monitron available to our customers via our e-commerce platform, and leverage it to deliver condition-based monitoring and reliability services through RS Monition, our data led, reliability services business. Working with AWS will enable us to support our customers' efforts to adopt IoT and machine learning as emerging technologies and accelerate their Industry 4.0 strategies." GS EPS is a South Korean Industrial Conglomerate. "We have been generating data across our assets for over a decade now but have only been using physics and rules based methods to gain insights into our data," said Kang Bum Lee, Executive Vice President of GS EPS. "Amazon Lookout for Equipment is enabling our plant operation teams to build models on our equipment with no ML expertise required. We are leading the transformation of our organization into a data-driven work culture with AWS and Amazon Lookout for Equipment." Doosan Infracore is a leading global manufacturer of heavy duty equipment and engines. "Leveraging AI is critical in advancing Doosan's next generation equipment, so we are working with AWS to develop use cases where automated and scalable machine learning could be leveraged," said Mr. Jae Yeon Cho, Vice President of Doosan Infracore. "Based on this, we are excited to continue to work with AWS to leverage Amazon Lookout for Equipment in our next generation IoT platform." OSIsoft is a manufacturer of application software for real-time data management, called the PI System. "Today, there are more than 2 billion sensor-based data streams inside OSIsoft PI Systems, and thousands of customers relying on the PI System daily to run their operations. These customers are constantly looking for methods to easily serve up insights for improving their competitiveness. OSIsoft products can be integrated with AWS services to help customers unlock additional value from their data. Amazon Lookout for Equipment expands the scope of services and insights available to customers by delivering automated machine learning built specifically for equipment monitoring," said Michael Graves, Director of Strategic Alliances at OSIsoft. "Every month, millions of trucks enter Amazon facilities so creating technology that automates trailer loading, unloading, and parking is incredibly important," said Steve Armato, VP Middle Mile Production Technology at Amazon.com. "Amazon's Middle Mile Products & Technology (MMPT) has begun using AWS Panorama to recognize license plates on these vehicles and automatically expedite entry and exit for drivers. This enables safe and fast visits to Amazon sites, ensuring faster package delivery for our customers." BP is a global energy company, providing customers with fuel for transport, energy for heat and light, lubricants to keep engines moving, and the petrochemicals products used to make everyday items as diverse as paints, clothes, and packaging. The organization has 18,000 service stations and more than 74,000 employees worldwide. "Our engineering teams here at bpx are working very closely with AWS to build an IoT and cloud platform that will enable us to continuously improve the efficiency of our operations," said Grant Matthews, Chief Technology Officer at BP America. "One of the areas we have explored as part of this effort is the use of computer vision to help us further improve security and worker safety. We want to leverage computer vision to automate the entry and exit of trucks to our facility and verify that they have fulfilled the correct order. Additionally, we see possibilities for computer vision to keep our workers safe in a number of ways, from monitoring social distancing, to setting up dynamic exclusion zones, and detecting oil leaks. AWS Panorama offers an innovative approach to delivering all of these solutions on a single hardware platform with an intuitive user experience. Our teams are excited to work with AWS on this new technology and expect it to help us address many new use cases." Siemens Mobility offers intelligent and efficient mobility solutions for urban, interurban, and freight transportation."Siemens Mobility has been a leader for seamless, sustainable, and secure transport solutions for more than 160 years. The Siemens ITS Digital Lab is the innovation team in charge of bringing the latest digital advances to the traffic industry and uniquely positioned to provide data analytics and AI solutions to public agencies," said Laura Sanchez, Innovation Manager, Siemens Mobility ITS Digital Lab. "As cities face new challenges, municipalities have turned to us to innovate on their behalf. Cities would like to understand how to effectively manage their assets and improve congestion and direct traffic. We want to use AWS Panorama to bring computer vision to existing security cameras to monitor traffic and intelligently allocate curbside space, help cities optimize parking and traffic, and improve quality of life for their constituents." ADLINK Technology offers hardware/software platforms enabling customers to implement edge AI solutions for real-time delivery of actionable data in industrial markets such as manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, energy, and communications. "The integration of AWS Panorama on ADLINK's industrial vision systems makes for truly plug-and-play computer vision at the edge," said Elizabeth Campbell, CEO at ADLINK USA. "In 2021, we will be making AWS Panorama-certified ADLINK NEON cameras powered by NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier available to customers to drive high-quality computer vision powered outcomes much, much faster. This allows ADLINK to deliver ML digital experiments and time to value for our customers more rapidly across logistics, manufacturing, energy, and utilities use cases." INDUS.AI is the world's most advanced construction intelligence solution that enables real estate investors, owners, developers, and general contractors to have real-time visibility and actionable insights into all activities, productivity, and risks at their construction sites. INDUS.AI seeks to make construction sites and projects safer, more efficient, and completely transparent. "Construction zones are dynamic environments. At any given time you've got hundreds of deliveries and subcontractors sharing the site with heavy equipment and it's changing every day. INDUS.AI is focused on delivering construction intelligence for general contractors," said Matt Man, CEO of INDUS.AI. "Computer vision is an especially valuable tool for this because of its ability to handle multiple tasks at once. We are looking forward to delivering real-time insights on job-site management and safety in a SaaS-like experience for AWS Panorama customers." Dafgards is a household name in Sweden, manufacturing a broad assortment of foods. One of their most successful brands is Billys Pan Pizza, a microwaveable pizza baked and packed at a speed of 2 pizzas per second. "To uphold our brand and deliver the freshest and tastiest customer experience, we want to ensure that all our pizzas are adequately covered in cheese and with the correct toppings. Previously, we installed a machine vision system to detect proper coverage of cheese across a pizza's surface. While this system served well for our original inspection requirement, it was unable to detect defects on new product types that include multiple toppings," said Fredrik Dafgård, Head of Operational Excellence and Industrial IoT at Dafgards. "Amazon Lookout for Vision automates and scales inspection of diverse product types such as a cheese pizza with vegetables. We successfully expanded our quality assurance for new product types with minimal impact to operations." GE Healthcare is a leading global medical technology and digital solutions innovator that develops, manufactures, and distributes diagnostic imaging agents, radiopharmaceuticals, medical diagnostic equipment, including CT and MRI machines, and intelligent devices supported by its Edison intelligence platform. "Today, we use human inspection to verify the quality of our medical equipment. To uphold our brand and deliver best-in-class products trusted by healthcare professionals, we're excited about the possibility of using Amazon Lookout for Vision to programmatically improve the speed, consistency, and accuracy of detecting product defects across our factories in Japan and potentially in other plants globally in the near future," said Kozaburo Fujimoto, Operating Officer, General Manager, Manufacturing Division, Plant Manager at GE Healthcare Japan. Nukon, a SAGE Group company, is a digital transformation consultancy and delivery company that delivers custom-designed solutions which combine strategy, analysis, and technology to give visibility into key business processes so they can be optimized. "We are excited about how Amazon Lookout for Vision will help us detect product defects in real-time within the manufacturing facility for our sister company, SAGE Automation, in line with their stringent quality control program. We are excited to now apply this technology to other manufacturers and integrate it into their quality systems," said Rafael Amaral, Chief Technology Officer at Nukon. About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201006070/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>Amazon Monitron provides customers an end-to-end machine monitoring solution comprised of sensors, gateway, and machine learning service to detect abnormal equipment conditions that may require maintenance</em></p><p><em>Amazon Lookout for Equipment</em> <em>gives customers with existing equipment sensors the ability to use AWS machine learning models to detect abnormal equipment behavior and enable predictive maintenance</em></p><p><em>AWS Panorama Appliance enables customers with existing cameras in their industrial facilities with the ability to use computer vision to improve quality control and workplace safety</em></p><p><em>AWS Panorama Software Development Kit (SDK) allows industrial camera manufacturers to embed computer vision capabilities in new cameras</em></p><p><em>Amazon Lookout for Vision</em> <em>uses AWS-trained computer vision models on</em> <em>images and video streams to find anomalies and flaws in products or processes</em></p><p><em>Axis, ADLINK Technology, BP, Fender, GE Healthcare, and Siemens Mobility among customers and partners using new AWS industrial machine learning services</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced Amazon Monitron, Amazon Lookout for Equipment, the AWS Panorama Appliance, the AWS Panorama SDK, and Amazon Lookout for Vision. Together, these five new machine learning services help industrial and manufacturing customers embed intelligence in their production processes in order to improve operational efficiency, quality control, security, and workplace safety. The services combine sophisticated machine learning, sensor analysis, and computer vision capabilities to address common technical challenges faced by industrial customers, and represent the most comprehensive suite of cloud-to-edge industrial machine learning services available. This is why more than a hundred thousand customers are using AWS for machine learning, and why customers of all sizes and across all industries are using AWS services to make machine learning core to their business strategy. To learn more about AWS's new industrial machine learning services, visit https://aws.amazon.com/industrial/.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201006070/en/</p><div><p>Amazon Monitron provides customers with an end-to-end machine monitoring solution comprised of sensors, gateway, and machine learning service to detect abnormal equipment conditions that may require maintenance (Photo: Business Wire)</p></div><p>Companies are increasingly looking to add machine learning capabilities to industrial environments, such as manufacturing facilities, fulfillment centers, and food processing plants. For these customers, data has become the connective tissue that holds their complex industrial systems together. Industrial systems typically have numerous interdependent processes that operate with small tolerances for error, and even minor issues can have major ramifications. Being able to analyze data about the equipment operating in their facilities helps customers address this challenge, and many customers have embraced services like AWS IoT SiteWise as a way to collect data and generate real-time performance metrics from their industrial equipment. As customers have begun to use the cloud to collect and analyze industrial data, they have also asked for new ways to incorporate machine learning to help make sense of the data and further drive operational efficiency. In some cases, customers want to use machine learning to help them realize the promise of predictive maintenance to reduce costs and improve operational efficiency. In other cases, customers running in disconnected or latency-sensitive environments want to use computer vision at the edge to spot product defects and improve workplace safety. With these evolving needs and opportunities, industrial companies have asked AWS to help them leverage the cloud, the industrial edge, and machine learning together to get even more value from the vast amounts of data being generated by their equipment.</p><p><em>Amazon Monitron and Amazon Lookout for Equipment enable predictive maintenance powered by machine learning</em></p><p>A major challenge facing industrial and manufacturing companies today is the ongoing maintenance of their equipment. Historically, most equipment maintenance is either reactive (after a machine breaks) or preventive (performed at regular intervals to ensure a machine doesn't break). Reactive maintenance can result in significant costs and downtime, while preventive maintenance can be costly, result in over-maintenance, or fail to prevent breakdown if not performed often enough. Predictive maintenance (the ability to foresee when equipment is likely to need maintenance) is a more promising solution. However, in order to make it work, companies have historically needed skilled technicians and data scientists to piece together a complex solution from scratch. This included identifying and procuring the right type of sensors for the use case and connecting them together with an IoT gateway (a device that aggregates and transmits data). Companies then had to test the monitoring system and transfer the data to on-premises infrastructure or the cloud for processing. Only then could the data scientists on staff build machine learning models to analyze the data for patterns and anomalies, or create an alerting system when an outlier was detected. Some companies have invested heavily in installing sensors across their equipment and the necessary infrastructure for data connectivity, storage, analytics, and alerting. But even these companies typically use rudimentary data analytics and simple modeling approaches that are expensive and often ineffective at detecting abnormal conditions compared to advanced machine learning models. Most companies lack the expertise and staff to build and refine the machine learning models that would enable highly accurate predictive maintenance. As a result, few companies have been able to successfully implement predictive maintenance, and those that have done it are looking for ways to further leverage their investment, while also easing the burden of maintaining their homegrown solutions. Here's how the new AWS machine learning services can help:</p><ul><li>For customers who do not have an existing sensor network, Amazon Monitron offers an end-to-end machine monitoring system comprised of sensors, a gateway, and a machine learning service to detect anomalies and predict when industrial equipment will require maintenance. Amazon Monitron enables customers to remove cost and complexity from building a sophisticated, machine learning-driven predictive maintenance system from scratch, and it also allows them to focus on their core manufacturing, supply chain, and operations functions. Amazon Monitron detects when machines are not operating normally based on abnormal fluctuations in vibration or temperature, and notifies customers when to examine machinery in order to determine if preventative maintenance is needed. The end-to-end system includes IoT sensors to capture vibration and temperature data, a gateway to aggregate and transfer data to AWS, and a machine learning cloud service that can detect abnormal equipment patterns and deliver results in minutes with no machine learning or cloud experience required. With Amazon Monitron, maintenance technicians can start tracking machine health in a matter of hours, without any development work or specialized training. Amazon Monitron can be used on a variety of rotating equipment, such as bearings, motors, pumps, and conveyer belts in industrial and manufacturing settings. Use cases range from monitoring a few critical machines like the cooling fans or water pumps used in data centers, to large scale installations in manufacturing facilities with production and conveyance systems. Amazon Monitron also includes a mobile app for a customer's onsite maintenance technicians to monitor equipment behavior in real time. With the mobile app, a technician can receive alerts of any abnormal equipment conditions across different machines, check up on the health of the machine, and decide if they need to schedule maintenance. To increase the accuracy of the system, technicians can enter feedback on the accuracy of the alerts in the mobile app, and Amazon Monitron learns from that feedback to continually improve over time. Amazon Monitron is now generally available. To learn more about Amazon Monitron, visit https://aws.amazon.com/monitron.</li><li>For customers that have existing sensors but don't want to build machine learning models, Amazon Lookout for Equipment provides a way to send their sensor data to AWS to build models for them and return predictions to detect abnormal equipment behavior. To get started, customers upload their sensor data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and provide the S3 location to Amazon Lookout for Equipment. Amazon Lookout for Equipment can also pull data from AWS IoT SiteWise, and works seamlessly with other popular machine operations systems like OSIsoft. Amazon Lookout for Equipment analyzes the data, assesses normal or healthy patterns, and then uses the learnings from all of the data on which it is trained to build a model that is customized for the customer's environment. Amazon Lookout for Equipment can then use the machine learning model to analyze incoming sensor data and identify early warning signs for machine failure. This allows customers to do predictive maintenance, saving them money and improving productivity by preventing the crash of an industrial system line. Amazon Lookout for Equipment allows customers to get more value from their existing sensors, and it helps customers make timely decisions that can materially improve the entire industrial process. To learn more about Amazon Lookout for Equipment, visit https://aws.amazon.com/lookout-for-equipment.</li></ul><p><em>AWS Panorama uses computer vision to improve industrial operations and workplace safety</em></p><p>Many industrial and manufacturing customers want to be able to use computer vision on live video feeds of their facility and equipment to automate monitoring or visual inspection tasks and to make decisions in real time. For example, customers routinely need to inspect high-speed processes to determine if adjustments are needed (e.g. fine milling or laser tooling), to monitor site and yard activity to ensure operating compliance (e.g. ensure pedestrians and forklifts remain in designated work zones), or to assess worker safety within their facilities (e.g. appropriate social distancing or use of PPE). However, the typical monitoring methods used today are manual, error prone, and difficult to scale. Customers could build computer vision models in the cloud to monitor and analyze their live video feeds, but industrial processes typically need to be physically located in remote and isolated places, where connectivity can be slow, expensive, or completely non-existent. This problem is even more difficult for industrial processes that involve manual review like quality checks on manufactured parts or security feeds. For example, if a quality issue emerges on a high throughput production line, customers want to know immediately because the costs of letting the problem persist is steep. This type of video feed could be automatically processed in the cloud using computer vision, but video feeds are high bandwidth and can be slow to upload. As a result, customers are required to monitor video feeds in real time, which is hard to do, error prone, and expensive. While there is a desire to use smart cameras that have enough processing power to run these models, getting low latency performance with good accuracy from these cameras can be challenging. Most customers end up running unsophisticated models that can't be programmed to run custom code that integrates into the industrial machines. Here's how AWS can now help:</p><ul><li>The AWS Panorama Appliance provides a new hardware appliance that allows organizations to add computer vision to existing on-premises cameras that customers may already have deployed. Customers start by connecting the AWS Panorama Appliance to their network, and the device automatically identifies camera streams and starts interacting with the existing industrial cameras. The AWS Panorama Appliance is integrated with AWS machine learning services and IoT services that can be used to build custom machine learning models or ingest video for more refined analysis. The AWS Panorama Appliance extends AWS machine learning to the edge to help customers make predictions locally in sites without connectivity. Each AWS Panorama Appliance can run computer vision models on multiple camera streams in parallel, making possible use cases like quality control, part identification, and workplace safety. The AWS Panorama Appliance works with AWS and third party pre-trained computer vision models for retail, manufacturing, construction, and other industries. Also, customer-developed computer vision models developed in Amazon SageMaker can be deployed on the AWS Panorama Appliance.</li><li>The AWS Panorama Software Development Kit (SDK) enables hardware vendors to build new cameras that can run meaningful computer vision models at the edge. Cameras that are built with the AWS Panorama SDK run computer vision models for use cases like detecting damaged parts on a fast-moving conveyor belt or spotting when machinery is outside of a designated work zone. These cameras can use chips designed for computer vision from NVIDIA and Ambarella. By using the AWS Panorama SDK, manufacturers can build cameras with computer vision models that can process higher quality video with better resolution for spotting issues. They can also build more sophisticated models on low-cost devices that can be powered over Ethernet and placed around a site. Customers can train their own models in Amazon SageMaker and deploy them on cameras built with the AWS Panorama SDK with a single click. Customers can also add Lambda functions to cameras built with the AWS Panorama SDK to be alerted to potential issues via text or email. AWS also offers pre-built models for tasks like PPE detection and social distancing, and can deploy these models in minutes without doing any machine learning work or special optimizations.</li></ul><p>To learn more about AWS Panorama, as well as supporting vendors and partners, visit https://aws.amazon.com/panorama.</p><p><em>Amazon Lookout for Vision offers automated fast and accurate visual anomaly detection for images and video at a low cost</em></p><p>One use case where AWS customers are excited to deploy computer vision with their cameras is for quality control. Industrial companies must maintain constant diligence to maintain quality control. In the manufacturing industry alone, production line shutdowns due to overlooked errors result in millions of dollars of cost overruns and lost revenue every year. The visual inspection of industrial processes typically requires human inspection, which can be tedious and inconsistent. Computer vision brings the speed and accuracy needed to identify defects consistently, but implementation can be complex and require teams of data scientists to build, deploy, and manage the machine learning models. Because of these barriers, machine learning-powered visual anomaly systems remain out of reach for the vast majority of companies. Here's how AWS can now help these companies:</p><ul><li>Amazon Lookout for Vision offers customers a high accuracy, low-cost anomaly detection solution that uses machine learning to process thousands of images an hour to spot defects and anomalies. Customers send camera images to Amazon Lookout for Vision in batch or in real-time to identify anomalies, such as a crack in a machine part, a dent in a panel, an irregular shape, or an incorrect color on a product. Amazon Lookout for Vision then reports the images that differ from the baseline so that appropriate action can be taken. Amazon Lookout for Vision is sophisticated enough to handle variances in camera angle, pose, and lighting arising from changes in work environments. As a result, customers can accurately and consistently assess machine parts or manufactured products by providing as few as 30 images of the baseline "good" state. Amazon Lookout for Vision also runs on Amazon Panorama appliances. Customers can run Amazon Lookout for Vision in AWS starting today, and beginning next year, customers will be able to run Amazon Lookout for Vision on AWS Panorama Appliances and other AWS Panorama devices so customers will be able to use Amazon Lookout for Vision in locations where Internet connectivity is limited or non-existent. To learn more about Amazon Lookout for Vision, visit https://aws.amazon.com/lookout-for-vision.</li></ul><p>"Industrial and manufacturing customers are constantly under pressure from their shareholders, customers, governments, and competitors to reduce costs, improve quality, and maintain compliance. These organizations would like to use the cloud and machine learning to help them automate processes and augment human capabilities across their operations, but building these systems can be error prone, complex, time consuming, and expensive," said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Amazon Machine Learning for AWS. "We're excited to bring customers five new machine learning services purpose-built for industrial use that are easy to install, deploy, and get up and running quickly and that connect the cloud to the edge to help deliver the smart factories of the future for our industrial customers."</p><p>Fender Musical Instruments Corporation is an iconic brand and the world's foremost manufacturer of guitars, basses, amplifiers, and related equipment. "Over the past year we worked with AWS to help develop the critical but sometimes overlooked part of running a successful manufacturing business, knowing your equipment condition. For manufacturers worldwide, maintaining equipment uptime is the only way to remain competitive in a global market. Unplanned downtime is costly both in loss of production and labor due to the fire-fighting nature of breakdowns," said Bill Holmes, Global Director of Facilities at Fender. "Amazon Monitron can give both large industry manufacturers as well as small ‘mom and pop shops' the ability to predict equipment failures, giving us the opportunity to preemptively schedule equipment repairs."</p><p>RS Components is a leading player in the industrial components and predictive maintenance space. "We are constantly trying to innovate how we serve the maintenance needs of our customers. With the emergence of IoT, we have seen our customers looking to bring real-time condition monitoring capabilities into the factory environment to reduce reactive maintenance and improve asset reliability," said Richard Jeffers, Technical Director at RS Components. "We are excited to be working with AWS to bring Amazon Monitron to our customers because it allows them to deploy a cost effective, easy to use, continuously improving condition monitoring solution and enable predictive maintenance across a broader set of equipment in their asset base. Although we stock over 500,000 products from 2,500 different suppliers, this is the first end-to-end wireless vibration and temperature condition monitoring solution in our portfolio. We plan to make Amazon Monitron available to our customers via our e-commerce platform, and leverage it to deliver condition-based monitoring and reliability services through RS Monition, our data led, reliability services business. Working with AWS will enable us to support our customers' efforts to adopt IoT and machine learning as emerging technologies and accelerate their Industry 4.0 strategies."</p><p>GS EPS is a South Korean Industrial Conglomerate. "We have been generating data across our assets for over a decade now but have only been using physics and rules based methods to gain insights into our data," said Kang Bum Lee, Executive Vice President of GS EPS. "Amazon Lookout for Equipment is enabling our plant operation teams to build models on our equipment with no ML expertise required. We are leading the transformation of our organization into a data-driven work culture with AWS and Amazon Lookout for Equipment."</p><p>Doosan Infracore is a leading global manufacturer of heavy duty equipment and engines. "Leveraging AI is critical in advancing Doosan's next generation equipment, so we are working with AWS to develop use cases where automated and scalable machine learning could be leveraged," said Mr. Jae Yeon Cho, Vice President of Doosan Infracore. "Based on this, we are excited to continue to work with AWS to leverage Amazon Lookout for Equipment in our next generation IoT platform."</p><p>OSIsoft is a manufacturer of application software for real-time data management, called the PI System. "Today, there are more than 2 billion sensor-based data streams inside OSIsoft PI Systems, and thousands of customers relying on the PI System daily to run their operations. These customers are constantly looking for methods to easily serve up insights for improving their competitiveness. OSIsoft products can be integrated with AWS services to help customers unlock additional value from their data. Amazon Lookout for Equipment expands the scope of services and insights available to customers by delivering automated machine learning built specifically for equipment monitoring," said Michael Graves, Director of Strategic Alliances at OSIsoft.</p><p>"Every month, millions of trucks enter Amazon facilities so creating technology that automates trailer loading, unloading, and parking is incredibly important," said Steve Armato, VP Middle Mile Production Technology at Amazon.com. "Amazon's Middle Mile Products &amp; Technology (MMPT) has begun using AWS Panorama to recognize license plates on these vehicles and automatically expedite entry and exit for drivers. This enables safe and fast visits to Amazon sites, ensuring faster package delivery for our customers."</p><p>BP is a global energy company, providing customers with fuel for transport, energy for heat and light, lubricants to keep engines moving, and the petrochemicals products used to make everyday items as diverse as paints, clothes, and packaging. The organization has 18,000 service stations and more than 74,000 employees worldwide. "Our engineering teams here at bpx are working very closely with AWS to build an IoT and cloud platform that will enable us to continuously improve the efficiency of our operations," said Grant Matthews, Chief Technology Officer at BP America. "One of the areas we have explored as part of this effort is the use of computer vision to help us further improve security and worker safety. We want to leverage computer vision to automate the entry and exit of trucks to our facility and verify that they have fulfilled the correct order. Additionally, we see possibilities for computer vision to keep our workers safe in a number of ways, from monitoring social distancing, to setting up dynamic exclusion zones, and detecting oil leaks. AWS Panorama offers an innovative approach to delivering all of these solutions on a single hardware platform with an intuitive user experience. Our teams are excited to work with AWS on this new technology and expect it to help us address many new use cases."</p><p>Siemens Mobility offers intelligent and efficient mobility solutions for urban, interurban, and freight transportation."Siemens Mobility has been a leader for seamless, sustainable, and secure transport solutions for more than 160 years. The Siemens ITS Digital Lab is the innovation team in charge of bringing the latest digital advances to the traffic industry and uniquely positioned to provide data analytics and AI solutions to public agencies," said Laura Sanchez, Innovation Manager, Siemens Mobility ITS Digital Lab. "As cities face new challenges, municipalities have turned to us to innovate on their behalf. Cities would like to understand how to effectively manage their assets and improve congestion and direct traffic. We want to use AWS Panorama to bring computer vision to existing security cameras to monitor traffic and intelligently allocate curbside space, help cities optimize parking and traffic, and improve quality of life for their constituents."</p><p>ADLINK Technology offers hardware/software platforms enabling customers to implement edge AI solutions for real-time delivery of actionable data in industrial markets such as manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, energy, and communications. "The integration of AWS Panorama on ADLINK's industrial vision systems makes for truly plug-and-play computer vision at the edge," said Elizabeth Campbell, CEO at ADLINK USA. "In 2021, we will be making AWS Panorama-certified ADLINK NEON cameras powered by NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier available to customers to drive high-quality computer vision powered outcomes much, much faster. This allows ADLINK to deliver ML digital experiments and time to value for our customers more rapidly across logistics, manufacturing, energy, and utilities use cases."</p><p>INDUS.AI is the world's most advanced construction intelligence solution that enables real estate investors, owners, developers, and general contractors to have real-time visibility and actionable insights into all activities, productivity, and risks at their construction sites. INDUS.AI seeks to make construction sites and projects safer, more efficient, and completely transparent. "Construction zones are dynamic environments. At any given time you've got hundreds of deliveries and subcontractors sharing the site with heavy equipment and it's changing every day. INDUS.AI is focused on delivering construction intelligence for general contractors," said Matt Man, CEO of INDUS.AI. "Computer vision is an especially valuable tool for this because of its ability to handle multiple tasks at once. We are looking forward to delivering real-time insights on job-site management and safety in a SaaS-like experience for AWS Panorama customers."</p><p>Dafgards is a household name in Sweden, manufacturing a broad assortment of foods. One of their most successful brands is Billys Pan Pizza, a microwaveable pizza baked and packed at a speed of 2 pizzas per second. "To uphold our brand and deliver the freshest and tastiest customer experience, we want to ensure that all our pizzas are adequately covered in cheese and with the correct toppings. Previously, we installed a machine vision system to detect proper coverage of cheese across a pizza's surface. While this system served well for our original inspection requirement, it was unable to detect defects on new product types that include multiple toppings," said Fredrik Dafgård, Head of Operational Excellence and Industrial IoT at Dafgards. "Amazon Lookout for Vision automates and scales inspection of diverse product types such as a cheese pizza with vegetables. We successfully expanded our quality assurance for new product types with minimal impact to operations."</p><p>GE Healthcare is a leading global medical technology and digital solutions innovator that develops, manufactures, and distributes diagnostic imaging agents, radiopharmaceuticals, medical diagnostic equipment, including CT and MRI machines, and intelligent devices supported by its Edison intelligence platform. "Today, we use human inspection to verify the quality of our medical equipment. To uphold our brand and deliver best-in-class products trusted by healthcare professionals, we're excited about the possibility of using Amazon Lookout for Vision to programmatically improve the speed, consistency, and accuracy of detecting product defects across our factories in Japan and potentially in other plants globally in the near future," said Kozaburo Fujimoto, Operating Officer, General Manager, Manufacturing Division, Plant Manager at GE Healthcare Japan.</p><p>Nukon, a SAGE Group company, is a digital transformation consultancy and delivery company that delivers custom-designed solutions which combine strategy, analysis, and technology to give visibility into key business processes so they can be optimized. "We are excited about how Amazon Lookout for Vision will help us detect product defects in real-time within the manufacturing facility for our sister company, SAGE Automation, in line with their stringent quality control program. We are excited to now apply this technology to other manufacturers and integrate it into their quality systems," said Rafael Amaral, Chief Technology Officer at Nukon.</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201006070/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

AWS Announces the Next Version of Amazon Aurora Serverless, a New Capability that Makes it Easier to Migrate from SQL Server to Amazon Aurora, and an Open Source Project to Help More Organizations Leave SQL Server for PostgreSQL

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-the-Next-Version-of-Amazon-Aurora-Serverless-a-New-Capability-that-Makes-it-Easier-to-Migrate-from-SQL-Server-to-Amazon-Aurora-and-an-Open-Source-Project-to-Help-More-Organizations-Leave-SQL-Server-for-PostgreSQL/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-the-Next-Version-of-Amazon-Aurora-Serverless-a-New-Capability-that-Makes-it-Easier-to-Migrate-from-SQL-Server-to-Amazon-Aurora-and-an-Open-Source-Project-to-Help-More-Organizations-Leave-SQL-Server-for-PostgreSQL

12/01/2020 14:00:00

AWS Announces the Next Version of Amazon Aurora Serverless, a New Capability that Makes it Easier to Migrate from SQL Server to Amazon Aurora, and an Open Source Project to Help More Organizations Leave SQL Server for PostgreSQL

12/01/2020

2020

Aurora Serverless v2 scales to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second, delivering up to 90% cost savings compared to provisioning for peak capacity Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL gives customers the ability to run SQL Server applications directly on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with little to no code changes, saving customers from the punitive business practices common with old-guard database vendors Coming in 2021 under the permissive Apache 2.0 license in GitHub, open source Babelfish for PostgreSQL will extend the benefits of the Babelfish for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL translation layer to even more organizations Intuit, Venmo, and Zendesk among customers using the new Amazon Aurora capabilities SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the next version of Aurora Serverless, as well as a new capability that makes it easier for customers to migrate from SQL Server to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, and a new open source project that helps even more organizations migrate off legacy databases to open source alternatives. For customers that don't want to deal with the work associated with self-managing database capacity, Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 scales to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second, delivering up to 90% cost savings compared to provisioning for peak capacity. AWS also announced Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL, a new capability for Amazon Aurora that allows customers to run SQL Server applications directly on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with little to no code changes. Finally, AWS shared its plans to open source Babelfish for PostgreSQL under the permissive Apache 2.0 license and make it available on GitHub. Together these innovations make Amazon Aurora even more attractive for a wide range of workloads, and bring the benefits of Amazon Aurora and PostgreSQL to more organizations. To get started, visit https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/ Old-guard, legacy databases that have been developed and used for many decades typically require a well-trained and funded support staff to run and manage them. These commercial databases offer high performance and advanced availability features, but are expensive, complex to manage, and have high lock-in. Moreover, customers that are self-managing commercial databases are often at the mercy of old-guard database vendors and the brazen tricks they play, such as imposing arbitrary and punitive licensing terms. Today, more than a hundred thousand customers are choosing to run their database workloads on Amazon Aurora because it delivers the performance and availability of the highest-grade commercial databases at one tenth of the cost, making it the fastest-growing service in AWS history. In total, more than 350,000 databases have been migrated to AWS using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS). Today's announcements build upon this momentum by delivering the next generation of Amazon Aurora Serverless, as well as a capability to run SQL Server workloads on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, and an open source project that makes it even easier for more organizations to migrate from SQL Server to PostgreSQL. Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 scales database workloads to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second, saving customers up to 90% compared to provisioning for peak capacityCustomers often face a dilemma when managing database capacity. If they over-provision capacity, they end up spending more money than necessary, but if they under-provision capacity, they risk application downtime. Since its launch in 2018, Amazon Aurora Serverless has been used by tens of thousands of customers as a cost-effective database option for applications that have infrequent, intermittent, or unpredictable traffic (e.g. test and development workloads). V1 of Amazon Aurora Serverless scales database capacity within five to 50 seconds by doubling capacity each time it is needed; and because it is serverless, customers don't have to worry about managing database capacity. However, in order to run more production workloads in Aurora Serverless, customers need capacity to scale instantly and in more precise increments, and also want to take advantage of the full range of capabilities in Amazon Aurora, including using multiple AWS Availability Zones (AZs) for high availability, Global Database for low latency, Read Replicas for high performance, Backtrack for high resiliency, and Parallel Query for faster querying. Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 provides the ability to scale database workloads to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second. Instead of doubling capacity every time a workload needs to scale, Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 adjusts capacity in fine-grained increments to provide just the right amount of database resources for an application's needs. With Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, customers only pay for the capacity they consume, which can save them up to 90% of their database costs when compared to the cost of provisioning for peak capacity. Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 also provides the full breadth of Amazon Aurora's capabilities, including Multi-AZ support for high availability, Global Database for low latency, Read Replicas for high performance, Backtrack for high resiliency, and Parallel Query for faster querying. Amazon Aurora Serverless is now ideal for a much broader set of applications. For example, Amazon Aurora Serverless can now support enterprises that have hundreds of thousands of applications and want to manage database capacity across the entire fleet, or for Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors that have a multi-tenant environment with hundreds or thousands of databases that each support a different customer. Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 is available in preview today for the MySQL 5.7-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora. To learn more, visit https://aws.amazon.com/aurora/serverless Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL gives organizations the ability to run SQL Server applications directly on Amazon Aurora with little to no code changesAutodesk, Best Western Hotels & Resorts, Dow Jones, Honda, Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, Samsung Electronics, Reddit, Venmo, and Verizon Communications are some of the customers who have successfully migrated over 350,000 databases to AWS using AWS DMS to migrate their data with minimal downtime and AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) to migrate their database schema. However, once the initial database migration is complete, customers also have the onerous task of migrating their application logic. Migrating application logic requires manual coding, is time consuming, and is often tied to proprietary database commands from the old-guard database providers. As Microsoft has gotten increasingly more aggressive and manipulative with its licensing practices, customers have asked AWS to make it easier to migrate their SQL Server applications to Amazon Aurora. Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL is a new capability that makes it possible to run SQL Server applications directly on PostgreSQL with little to no code changes. Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL provides a new translation layer for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL that enables Amazon Aurora to understand commands from applications written for Microsoft SQL Server. Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL understands T-SQL (Microsoft SQL Server's proprietary SQL dialect), so customers don't have to rewrite all of their application's database requests. Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL also understands SQL Server's network protocol, so customers can continue using their existing SQL Server database drivers. After customers have migrated their data using AWS DMS, they simply update their application configuration to point to Amazon Aurora instead of SQL Server and start testing their application running on Amazon Aurora instead of SQL Server. Once customers have tested the application, they no longer need SQL Server, and can stop paying for their expensive, constrained licenses. Because Amazon Aurora can use Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL to understand SQL Server's and PostgreSQL's languages, customers can write application functionality using PostgreSQL and have that functionality run side-by-side with their legacy SQL Server code. To learn more, visit https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/babelfish/ New open source project Babelfish for PostgreSQL helps even more organizations move away from SQL Server to PostgreSQLComing in 2021, Babelfish for PostgreSQL will make the source code for Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL available to anyone who wants to add additional features. Babelfish for PostgreSQL will use the permissive Apache 2.0 license, so organizations can use it for any purpose, distribute it, modify it, and distribute modified versions of the software under the terms of the license. All of the work and planning for Babelfish will happen on GitHub, so organizations will have complete transparency about the features AWS is working on next. To learn more, visit https://babelfish-for-postgresql.github.io/babelfish-for-postgresql/ "Customers have told us that they're frustrated and fed up with the brazen tactics of the old-guard database vendors, when what they want to do is focus on growing their businesses. These customers want to move to open source, built-for-the-cloud databases for their simplicity and cost-effectiveness, without compromising on availability, reliability, and security," said Shawn Bice, Vice President, Databases, AWS. "With today's announcement of the next generation of Amazon Aurora Serverless and Babelfish, we are making it even easier for customers to leave the constraints of old-guard databases behind, enjoy the immense cost advantages of open source database engines, and choose the right database for the right job." Intuit is a mission-driven, global financial platform company and proud maker of TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint. "Millions of consumers and small businesses depend on Intuit's applications, such as TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint, to manage their finances. Since its launch, Amazon Aurora has provided us with the scalability and reliability we need for mission-critical systems," said Anshu Verma, Chief Architect for QuickBooks Online, Intuit. "We've enjoyed working super closely with the AWS database team to make it easier for us to manage database capacity across our Aurora deployments and optimize costs. This launch of Aurora Serverless v2 is just as much of a win for our customers as for Intuit." Venmo has been the app for fast, safe, social payments between friends since 2009, and is owned by PayPal, a global leader in digital payments. "At Venmo, we use Amazon Aurora to process tens of millions of transactions per day, but the volume of transactions fluctuates depending on the day and time of year," said Nick Ciubotariu, Chief Technology Officer, Venmo. "Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 could help us ensure we don't over or under-provision Amazon Aurora, enabling us to continue providing a great user experience for our customers while only paying for just the database capacity we need at any given time." Zendesk builds software for better customer relationships and empowers organizations to improve customer engagement and better understand their customers. "At Zendesk, we rely on Amazon Aurora to support over 150,000 different customers and their data," said Kalyan Wunnava, Director of Engineering, Zendesk. "We are looking forward to Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, which has the potential to significantly simplify management of our fleet of Amazon Aurora instances, while continuing to provide the level of high performance our customers expect." WirelessCar is the world-leading provider of digital automotive services that enable the development of software-defined, electrical, and self-driving cars that will take us to the future of safe, smart and sustainable mobility. "We are embracing serverless architectures on AWS to be able to focus our efforts on customer value and business processes instead of worrying about the management of compute infrastructure," said Niklas Florén, Senior Vice President, CTO & COO, WirelessCar. "We are eager to extend these serverless architectures to our relational databases through Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 and operate database workloads worry-free while using all the rich functionality offered by Amazon Aurora." Acquia, a SaaS provider of web content management solutions, relies on Amazon Aurora to support many of its relational database workloads. "Thanks to Amazon Aurora, Acquia has improved throughput by 30%, eliminated database downtime, and considerably reduced our infrastructure and operational maintenance overhead," said Jake Farrell, Senior Director of Engineering, Acquia. "We are extremely excited about the new version of Amazon Aurora Serverless. The ability to instantly scale Amazon Aurora just the right amount to meet fluctuating capacity demand is very exciting and has the potential to help us provide an even better user experience to our customers while further simplifying operations and optimizing costs." About Amazon Web ServicesFor 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About AmazonAmazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201006057/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon

<p><em>Aurora Serverless v2 scales to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second, delivering up to 90% cost savings compared to provisioning for peak capacity</em></p><p><em>Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL gives customers the ability to run SQL Server applications directly on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with little to no code changes, saving customers from the punitive business practices common with old-guard database vendors</em></p><p><em>Coming in 2021 under the permissive Apache 2.0 license in GitHub, open source Babelfish for PostgreSQL will extend the benefits of the Babelfish for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL translation layer to even more organizations</em></p><p><em>Intuit, Venmo, and Zendesk among customers using the new Amazon Aurora capabilities</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the next version of Aurora Serverless, as well as a new capability that makes it easier for customers to migrate from SQL Server to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, and a new open source project that helps even more organizations migrate off legacy databases to open source alternatives. For customers that don't want to deal with the work associated with self-managing database capacity, Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 scales to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second, delivering up to 90% cost savings compared to provisioning for peak capacity. AWS also announced Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL, a new capability for Amazon Aurora that allows customers to run SQL Server applications directly on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with little to no code changes. Finally, AWS shared its plans to open source Babelfish for PostgreSQL under the permissive Apache 2.0 license and make it available on GitHub. Together these innovations make Amazon Aurora even more attractive for a wide range of workloads, and bring the benefits of Amazon Aurora and PostgreSQL to more organizations. To get started, visit https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/</p><p>Old-guard, legacy databases that have been developed and used for many decades typically require a well-trained and funded support staff to run and manage them. These commercial databases offer high performance and advanced availability features, but are expensive, complex to manage, and have high lock-in. Moreover, customers that are self-managing commercial databases are often at the mercy of old-guard database vendors and the brazen tricks they play, such as imposing arbitrary and punitive licensing terms. Today, more than a hundred thousand customers are choosing to run their database workloads on Amazon Aurora because it delivers the performance and availability of the highest-grade commercial databases at one tenth of the cost, making it the fastest-growing service in AWS history. In total, more than 350,000 databases have been migrated to AWS using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS). Today's announcements build upon this momentum by delivering the next generation of Amazon Aurora Serverless, as well as a capability to run SQL Server workloads on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, and an open source project that makes it even easier for more organizations to migrate from SQL Server to PostgreSQL.</p><p><em>Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 scales database workloads to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second, saving customers up to 90% compared to provisioning for peak capacity</em>Customers often face a dilemma when managing database capacity. If they over-provision capacity, they end up spending more money than necessary, but if they under-provision capacity, they risk application downtime. Since its launch in 2018, Amazon Aurora Serverless has been used by tens of thousands of customers as a cost-effective database option for applications that have infrequent, intermittent, or unpredictable traffic (e.g. test and development workloads). V1 of Amazon Aurora Serverless scales database capacity within five to 50 seconds by doubling capacity each time it is needed; and because it is serverless, customers don't have to worry about managing database capacity. However, in order to run more production workloads in Aurora Serverless, customers need capacity to scale instantly and in more precise increments, and also want to take advantage of the full range of capabilities in Amazon Aurora, including using multiple AWS Availability Zones (AZs) for high availability, Global Database for low latency, Read Replicas for high performance, Backtrack for high resiliency, and Parallel Query for faster querying.</p><p>Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 provides the ability to scale database workloads to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second. Instead of doubling capacity every time a workload needs to scale, Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 adjusts capacity in fine-grained increments to provide just the right amount of database resources for an application's needs. With Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, customers only pay for the capacity they consume, which can save them up to 90% of their database costs when compared to the cost of provisioning for peak capacity. Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 also provides the full breadth of Amazon Aurora's capabilities, including Multi-AZ support for high availability, Global Database for low latency, Read Replicas for high performance, Backtrack for high resiliency, and Parallel Query for faster querying. Amazon Aurora Serverless is now ideal for a much broader set of applications. For example, Amazon Aurora Serverless can now support enterprises that have hundreds of thousands of applications and want to manage database capacity across the entire fleet, or for Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors that have a multi-tenant environment with hundreds or thousands of databases that each support a different customer. Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 is available in preview today for the MySQL 5.7-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora. To learn more, visit https://aws.amazon.com/aurora/serverless</p><p><em>Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL gives organizations the ability to run SQL Server applications directly on Amazon Aurora with little to no code changes</em>Autodesk, Best Western Hotels &amp; Resorts, Dow Jones, Honda, Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, Samsung Electronics, Reddit, Venmo, and Verizon Communications are some of the customers who have successfully migrated over 350,000 databases to AWS using AWS DMS to migrate their data with minimal downtime and AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) to migrate their database schema. However, once the initial database migration is complete, customers also have the onerous task of migrating their application logic. Migrating application logic requires manual coding, is time consuming, and is often tied to proprietary database commands from the old-guard database providers. As Microsoft has gotten increasingly more aggressive and manipulative with its licensing practices, customers have asked AWS to make it easier to migrate their SQL Server applications to Amazon Aurora.</p><p>Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL is a new capability that makes it possible to run SQL Server applications directly on PostgreSQL with little to no code changes. Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL provides a new translation layer for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL that enables Amazon Aurora to understand commands from applications written for Microsoft SQL Server. Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL understands T-SQL (Microsoft SQL Server's proprietary SQL dialect), so customers don't have to rewrite all of their application's database requests. Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL also understands SQL Server's network protocol, so customers can continue using their existing SQL Server database drivers. After customers have migrated their data using AWS DMS, they simply update their application configuration to point to Amazon Aurora instead of SQL Server and start testing their application running on Amazon Aurora instead of SQL Server. Once customers have tested the application, they no longer need SQL Server, and can stop paying for their expensive, constrained licenses. Because Amazon Aurora can use Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL to understand SQL Server's and PostgreSQL's languages, customers can write application functionality using PostgreSQL and have that functionality run side-by-side with their legacy SQL Server code. To learn more, visit https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/babelfish/</p><p><em>New open source project Babelfish for PostgreSQL helps even more organizations move away from SQL Server to PostgreSQL</em>Coming in 2021, Babelfish for PostgreSQL will make the source code for Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL available to anyone who wants to add additional features. Babelfish for PostgreSQL will use the permissive Apache 2.0 license, so organizations can use it for any purpose, distribute it, modify it, and distribute modified versions of the software under the terms of the license. All of the work and planning for Babelfish will happen on GitHub, so organizations will have complete transparency about the features AWS is working on next. To learn more, visit https://babelfish-for-postgresql.github.io/babelfish-for-postgresql/</p><p>"Customers have told us that they're frustrated and fed up with the brazen tactics of the old-guard database vendors, when what they want to do is focus on growing their businesses. These customers want to move to open source, built-for-the-cloud databases for their simplicity and cost-effectiveness, without compromising on availability, reliability, and security," said Shawn Bice, Vice President, Databases, AWS. "With today's announcement of the next generation of Amazon Aurora Serverless and Babelfish, we are making it even easier for customers to leave the constraints of old-guard databases behind, enjoy the immense cost advantages of open source database engines, and choose the right database for the right job."</p><p>Intuit is a mission-driven, global financial platform company and proud maker of TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint. "Millions of consumers and small businesses depend on Intuit's applications, such as TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint, to manage their finances. Since its launch, Amazon Aurora has provided us with the scalability and reliability we need for mission-critical systems," said Anshu Verma, Chief Architect for QuickBooks Online, Intuit. "We've enjoyed working super closely with the AWS database team to make it easier for us to manage database capacity across our Aurora deployments and optimize costs. This launch of Aurora Serverless v2 is just as much of a win for our customers as for Intuit."</p><p>Venmo has been the app for fast, safe, social payments between friends since 2009, and is owned by PayPal, a global leader in digital payments. "At Venmo, we use Amazon Aurora to process tens of millions of transactions per day, but the volume of transactions fluctuates depending on the day and time of year," said Nick Ciubotariu, Chief Technology Officer, Venmo. "Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 could help us ensure we don't over or under-provision Amazon Aurora, enabling us to continue providing a great user experience for our customers while only paying for just the database capacity we need at any given time."</p><p>Zendesk builds software for better customer relationships and empowers organizations to improve customer engagement and better understand their customers. "At Zendesk, we rely on Amazon Aurora to support over 150,000 different customers and their data," said Kalyan Wunnava, Director of Engineering, Zendesk. "We are looking forward to Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, which has the potential to significantly simplify management of our fleet of Amazon Aurora instances, while continuing to provide the level of high performance our customers expect."</p><p>WirelessCar is the world-leading provider of digital automotive services that enable the development of software-defined, electrical, and self-driving cars that will take us to the future of safe, smart and sustainable mobility. "We are embracing serverless architectures on AWS to be able to focus our efforts on customer value and business processes instead of worrying about the management of compute infrastructure," said Niklas Florén, Senior Vice President, CTO &amp; COO, WirelessCar. "We are eager to extend these serverless architectures to our relational databases through Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 and operate database workloads worry-free while using all the rich functionality offered by Amazon Aurora."</p><p>Acquia, a SaaS provider of web content management solutions, relies on Amazon Aurora to support many of its relational database workloads. "Thanks to Amazon Aurora, Acquia has improved throughput by 30%, eliminated database downtime, and considerably reduced our infrastructure and operational maintenance overhead," said Jake Farrell, Senior Director of Engineering, Acquia. "We are extremely excited about the new version of Amazon Aurora Serverless. The ability to instantly scale Amazon Aurora just the right amount to meet fluctuating capacity demand is very exciting and has the potential to help us provide an even better user experience to our customers while further simplifying operations and optimizing costs."</p><p>About Amazon Web ServicesFor 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About AmazonAmazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201006057/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon</p>

AWS Announces Amazon DevOps Guru

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-Amazon-DevOps-Guru/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-Amazon-DevOps-Guru

12/01/2020 14:00:00

AWS Announces Amazon DevOps Guru

12/01/2020

2020

New machine learning powered operations service provides tailored recommendations to improve application availability Atlassian, PagerDuty, and SmugMug among the customers and partners using Amazon DevOps Guru SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced Amazon DevOps Guru, a fully-managed operations service that uses machine learning to make it easier for developers to improve application availability by automatically detecting operational issues and recommending specific actions for remediation. Amazon DevOps Guru applies machine learning informed by years of Amazon.com and AWS operational excellence to automatically collect and analyze data like application metrics, logs, events, and traces for identifying behaviors that deviate from normal operating patterns (e.g. under-provisioned compute capacity, database I/O over-utilization, memory leaks, etc.). When Amazon DevOps Guru identifies anomalous application behavior (e.g. increased latency, error rates, resource constraints, etc.) that could cause potential outages or service disruptions, it alerts developers with issue details (e.g. resources involved, issue timeline, related events, etc.) via Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and partner integrations like Atlassian Opsgenie and PagerDuty to help them quickly understand the potential impact and likely causes of the issue with specific recommendations for remediation. Developers can use remediation suggestions from Amazon DevOps Guru to reduce time to resolution when issues arise and improve application availability and reliability with no manual setup or machine learning expertise required. There are no upfront costs or commitments with Amazon DevOps Guru, and customers pay only for the data Amazon DevOps Guru analyzes. To get started with Amazon DevOps Guru, visit https://aws.amazon.com/devops-guru As more organizations move to cloud-based application deployment and microservice architectures to globally scale their businesses and operations without the limitations of on-premises deployments, applications have become increasingly distributed to meet customer needs, and developers need more automated practices to maintain application availability and reduce the time and effort spent detecting, debugging, and resolving operational issues. Application downtime events caused by faulty code or config changes, unbalanced container clusters, or resource exhaustion (e.g. CPU, memory, disk, etc.) inevitably lead to bad customer experiences and lost revenue. Companies invest considerable money and developer time to deploy multiple monitoring tools, often managed separately, and then have to develop and maintain custom alerts for common issues like spikes in load balancer errors or drops in application request rates. Setting thresholds to identify and alert when application resources are behaving abnormally is difficult to get right, involves manual setup, and requires thresholds that must be continually updated as application usage changes (e.g. an unusually large number of requests during holiday shopping season). If a threshold is set too high, developers don't see alarms until operational performance is severely impacted. When a threshold is set too low, developers get too many false positives, which ultimately get ignored. Even if developers get alerted to a potential operational issue, the process of identifying the root cause can still prove difficult. Using existing tools, developers often have difficulty triangulating the root cause of an operational issue from graphs and alarms, and even when they are able to find the root cause, they are often left without a means to fix it. Each troubleshooting attempt is a cold start where teams must spend hours or days to identify problems, and this leads to time consuming, tedious work that slows down the time to resolve an operational failure and can prolong application disruptions. Amazon DevOps Guru's machine learning models leverage over 20 years of operational expertise in building, scaling, and maintaining highly available applications for Amazon.com. This gives Amazon DevOps Guru the ability to automatically detect operational issues (e.g. missing or misconfigured alarms, early warning of resource exhaustion, config changes that could lead to outages, etc.), provide context on resources involved and related events, and recommend remediation actions – with no machine learning experience required. With just a few clicks in the Amazon DevOps Guru console, historical application and infrastructure metrics like latency, error rates, and request rates for all resources are automatically ingested and analyzed to establish normal operating bounds, and Amazon DevOps Guru then uses a pre-trained machine learning model to identify deviations from the established baseline. When Amazon DevOps Guru analyzes system and application data to automatically detect anomalies, it also groups this data into operational insights that include anomalous metrics, visualizations of application behavior over time, and recommendations on actions for remediation. Amazon DevOps Guru also correlates and groups related application and infrastructure metrics (e.g. web application latency spikes, running out of disk space, bad code deployments, memory leaks etc.) to reduce redundant alarms and help focus users on high-severity issues. Customers can see configuration change histories and deployment events, along with system and user activity, to generate a prioritized list of likely causes for an operational issue in the Amazon DevOps Guru console. To help customers resolve issues quickly, Amazon DevOps Guru provides intelligent recommendations with remediation steps and integrates with AWS Systems Manager for runbook and collaboration tooling, giving customers the ability to more effectively maintain applications and manage infrastructure for their deployments. Together with Amazon CodeGuru – a developer tool powered by machine learning that provides intelligent recommendations for improving code quality and identifying an application's most expensive lines of code – Amazon DevOps Guru provides customers the automated benefits of machine learning for their operational data so that developers can more easily improve application availability and reliability. "Customers have asked us to continue adding services around areas where we can apply our own expertise on how to improve application availability and learn from the years of operational experience that we have acquired running Amazon.com," said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President, Amazon Machine Learning, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "With Amazon DevOps Guru, we have taken our experience and built specialized machine learning models that help customers detect, troubleshoot, and prevent operational issues while providing intelligent recommendations when issues do arise. This enables teams to immediately benefit from operational best practices Amazon has learned from running Amazon.com, saving customers the time and effort that would otherwise be spent configuring and managing multiple monitoring systems." With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can enable Amazon DevOps Guru to begin analyzing account and application activity within minutes to provide operational insights. Amazon DevOps Guru gives customers a single-console experience to visualize their operational data by summarizing relevant data across multiple sources (e.g. AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Config, AWS CloudFormation, AWS X-Ray) and reduces the need to switch between multiple tools. Customers can also view correlated operational events and contextual data for operational insights within the Amazon DevOps Guru console and receive alerts via Amazon SNS. Additionally, Amazon DevOps Guru supports API endpoints through the AWS SDK, making it easy for partners and customers to integrate Amazon DevOps Guru into their existing solutions for ticketing, paging, and automatic notification of engineers for high-severity issues. PagerDuty and Atlassian are among the partners that have integrated Amazon DevOps Guru into their operations monitoring and incident management platforms, and customers who use their solutions can now benefit from operational insights provided by Amazon DevOps Guru. Amazon DevOps Guru is available is available in preview today in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Japan), and Europe (Ireland) with availability in additional regions in the coming months. Teams at more than 170,000 companies rely on Atlassian products to make teamwork easier, and help them organize, discuss, and complete their work. "Atlassian is proud to partner with AWS on the launch of Amazon DevOps Guru and help empower teams to deploy code and operate services with confidence," said Emel Dogrusoz, Head of Product, Opsgenie. "With our new Opsgenie and Jira Service Management integration, the right teams can be immediately notified the instant Amazon DevOps Guru predicts a potential issue, or determines an incident has occurred. Amazon DevOps Guru provides a new dimension of insight, and Atlassian ensures the fastest response." PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE:PD) is a leader in digital operations management. "PagerDuty was built to drive the move to a DevOps culture by automating the entire incident response lifecycle with resolution," said Jonathan Rende, SVP of Product at PagerDuty. "We're excited to continue this commitment to DevOps with our latest integration with Amazon DevOps Guru. Leveraging Amazon's decades of operational excellence and Amazon DevOps Guru's machine learning capabilities, PagerDuty provides even more real-time signal-to-action capabilities to our joint customers. Through PagerDuty's ingestion of Amazon DevOps Guru's Amazon SNS, AWS customers can take real-time action on operational issues before they become customer-impacting outages." Thomson Reuters is one of the world's most trusted providers of answers, helping professionals make confident decisions and run better businesses. "Customer experience is vital to us. Dealing with multiple sources of alerts for availability, performance, and change requests can be a challenge when trying to prevent and mitigate incidents impacting our customers," said Steve Thoennes, Director of Infrastructure Hosting Portfolio at Thomson Reuters. "We are excited to use Amazon DevOps Guru and leverage its machine learning insights to provide clear paths for action, allowing us to mitigate issues quickly and avoid customer impacting events. The integration with PagerDuty is a bonus, as we can have recommendations delivered to the right people timely and efficiently." SmugMug is a paid image sharing service, image hosting service, and online video platform on which users can upload photos and videos. The company facilitates the sale of digital and print media for amateur and professional photographers. "My team follows an ops-for-life motto, and we are always on the lookout for ways to automate our manual activities," said Andrew Shieh, Operations Director at SmugMug. "With Amazon DevOps Guru, we hope to realize that goal and let AIOps take over many of our day-to-day tasks and make our workday composed of a single George-Jetson-style Easy Button, so my team can focus on IT innovation. We are now not only meeting the needs of the business but able to exceed them since we have more time to focus on what matters most – delivering value for our organization and our customers." NextRoll helps marketplaces and marketing platforms grow revenue by empowering them to build and enhance their marketing solutions. "We run thousands of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, and we are looking for ways to reduce my team's time spent on resolving operational issues," said Valentino Volonghi, CTO at NextRoll. "We are excited to use Amazon DevOps Guru and leverage its machine learning-powered insights to help us identify, correlate, and remediate operational issues with recommendations. This will help my team save hours and reduce our mean time to recovery." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are just some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201006063/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>New machine learning powered operations service provides tailored recommendations to improve application availability</em></p><p><em>Atlassian, PagerDuty, and SmugMug among the customers and partners using Amazon DevOps Guru</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced Amazon DevOps Guru, a fully-managed operations service that uses machine learning to make it easier for developers to improve application availability by automatically detecting operational issues and recommending specific actions for remediation. Amazon DevOps Guru applies machine learning informed by years of Amazon.com and AWS operational excellence to automatically collect and analyze data like application metrics, logs, events, and traces for identifying behaviors that deviate from normal operating patterns (e.g. under-provisioned compute capacity, database I/O over-utilization, memory leaks, etc.). When Amazon DevOps Guru identifies anomalous application behavior (e.g. increased latency, error rates, resource constraints, etc.) that could cause potential outages or service disruptions, it alerts developers with issue details (e.g. resources involved, issue timeline, related events, etc.) via Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and partner integrations like Atlassian Opsgenie and PagerDuty to help them quickly understand the potential impact and likely causes of the issue with specific recommendations for remediation. Developers can use remediation suggestions from Amazon DevOps Guru to reduce time to resolution when issues arise and improve application availability and reliability with no manual setup or machine learning expertise required. There are no upfront costs or commitments with Amazon DevOps Guru, and customers pay only for the data Amazon DevOps Guru analyzes. To get started with Amazon DevOps Guru, visit https://aws.amazon.com/devops-guru</p><p>As more organizations move to cloud-based application deployment and microservice architectures to globally scale their businesses and operations without the limitations of on-premises deployments, applications have become increasingly distributed to meet customer needs, and developers need more automated practices to maintain application availability and reduce the time and effort spent detecting, debugging, and resolving operational issues. Application downtime events caused by faulty code or config changes, unbalanced container clusters, or resource exhaustion (e.g. CPU, memory, disk, etc.) inevitably lead to bad customer experiences and lost revenue. Companies invest considerable money and developer time to deploy multiple monitoring tools, often managed separately, and then have to develop and maintain custom alerts for common issues like spikes in load balancer errors or drops in application request rates. Setting thresholds to identify and alert when application resources are behaving abnormally is difficult to get right, involves manual setup, and requires thresholds that must be continually updated as application usage changes (e.g. an unusually large number of requests during holiday shopping season). If a threshold is set too high, developers don't see alarms until operational performance is severely impacted. When a threshold is set too low, developers get too many false positives, which ultimately get ignored. Even if developers get alerted to a potential operational issue, the process of identifying the root cause can still prove difficult. Using existing tools, developers often have difficulty triangulating the root cause of an operational issue from graphs and alarms, and even when they are able to find the root cause, they are often left without a means to fix it. Each troubleshooting attempt is a cold start where teams must spend hours or days to identify problems, and this leads to time consuming, tedious work that slows down the time to resolve an operational failure and can prolong application disruptions.</p><p>Amazon DevOps Guru's machine learning models leverage over 20 years of operational expertise in building, scaling, and maintaining highly available applications for Amazon.com. This gives Amazon DevOps Guru the ability to automatically detect operational issues (e.g. missing or misconfigured alarms, early warning of resource exhaustion, config changes that could lead to outages, etc.), provide context on resources involved and related events, and recommend remediation actions – with no machine learning experience required. With just a few clicks in the Amazon DevOps Guru console, historical application and infrastructure metrics like latency, error rates, and request rates for all resources are automatically ingested and analyzed to establish normal operating bounds, and Amazon DevOps Guru then uses a pre-trained machine learning model to identify deviations from the established baseline. When Amazon DevOps Guru analyzes system and application data to automatically detect anomalies, it also groups this data into operational insights that include anomalous metrics, visualizations of application behavior over time, and recommendations on actions for remediation. Amazon DevOps Guru also correlates and groups related application and infrastructure metrics (e.g. web application latency spikes, running out of disk space, bad code deployments, memory leaks etc.) to reduce redundant alarms and help focus users on high-severity issues. Customers can see configuration change histories and deployment events, along with system and user activity, to generate a prioritized list of likely causes for an operational issue in the Amazon DevOps Guru console. To help customers resolve issues quickly, Amazon DevOps Guru provides intelligent recommendations with remediation steps and integrates with AWS Systems Manager for runbook and collaboration tooling, giving customers the ability to more effectively maintain applications and manage infrastructure for their deployments. Together with Amazon CodeGuru – a developer tool powered by machine learning that provides intelligent recommendations for improving code quality and identifying an application's most expensive lines of code – Amazon DevOps Guru provides customers the automated benefits of machine learning for their operational data so that developers can more easily improve application availability and reliability.</p><p>"Customers have asked us to continue adding services around areas where we can apply our own expertise on how to improve application availability and learn from the years of operational experience that we have acquired running Amazon.com," said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President, Amazon Machine Learning, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "With Amazon DevOps Guru, we have taken our experience and built specialized machine learning models that help customers detect, troubleshoot, and prevent operational issues while providing intelligent recommendations when issues do arise. This enables teams to immediately benefit from operational best practices Amazon has learned from running Amazon.com, saving customers the time and effort that would otherwise be spent configuring and managing multiple monitoring systems."</p><p>With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can enable Amazon DevOps Guru to begin analyzing account and application activity within minutes to provide operational insights. Amazon DevOps Guru gives customers a single-console experience to visualize their operational data by summarizing relevant data across multiple sources (e.g. AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Config, AWS CloudFormation, AWS X-Ray) and reduces the need to switch between multiple tools. Customers can also view correlated operational events and contextual data for operational insights within the Amazon DevOps Guru console and receive alerts via Amazon SNS. Additionally, Amazon DevOps Guru supports API endpoints through the AWS SDK, making it easy for partners and customers to integrate Amazon DevOps Guru into their existing solutions for ticketing, paging, and automatic notification of engineers for high-severity issues. PagerDuty and Atlassian are among the partners that have integrated Amazon DevOps Guru into their operations monitoring and incident management platforms, and customers who use their solutions can now benefit from operational insights provided by Amazon DevOps Guru. Amazon DevOps Guru is available is available in preview today in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Japan), and Europe (Ireland) with availability in additional regions in the coming months.</p><p>Teams at more than 170,000 companies rely on Atlassian products to make teamwork easier, and help them organize, discuss, and complete their work. "Atlassian is proud to partner with AWS on the launch of Amazon DevOps Guru and help empower teams to deploy code and operate services with confidence," said Emel Dogrusoz, Head of Product, Opsgenie. "With our new Opsgenie and Jira Service Management integration, the right teams can be immediately notified the instant Amazon DevOps Guru predicts a potential issue, or determines an incident has occurred. Amazon DevOps Guru provides a new dimension of insight, and Atlassian ensures the fastest response."</p><p>PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE:PD) is a leader in digital operations management. "PagerDuty was built to drive the move to a DevOps culture by automating the entire incident response lifecycle with resolution," said Jonathan Rende, SVP of Product at PagerDuty. "We're excited to continue this commitment to DevOps with our latest integration with Amazon DevOps Guru. Leveraging Amazon's decades of operational excellence and Amazon DevOps Guru's machine learning capabilities, PagerDuty provides even more real-time signal-to-action capabilities to our joint customers. Through PagerDuty's ingestion of Amazon DevOps Guru's Amazon SNS, AWS customers can take real-time action on operational issues before they become customer-impacting outages."</p><p>Thomson Reuters is one of the world's most trusted providers of answers, helping professionals make confident decisions and run better businesses. "Customer experience is vital to us. Dealing with multiple sources of alerts for availability, performance, and change requests can be a challenge when trying to prevent and mitigate incidents impacting our customers," said Steve Thoennes, Director of Infrastructure Hosting Portfolio at Thomson Reuters. "We are excited to use Amazon DevOps Guru and leverage its machine learning insights to provide clear paths for action, allowing us to mitigate issues quickly and avoid customer impacting events. The integration with PagerDuty is a bonus, as we can have recommendations delivered to the right people timely and efficiently."</p><p>SmugMug is a paid image sharing service, image hosting service, and online video platform on which users can upload photos and videos. The company facilitates the sale of digital and print media for amateur and professional photographers. "My team follows an ops-for-life motto, and we are always on the lookout for ways to automate our manual activities," said Andrew Shieh, Operations Director at SmugMug. "With Amazon DevOps Guru, we hope to realize that goal and let AIOps take over many of our day-to-day tasks and make our workday composed of a single George-Jetson-style Easy Button, so my team can focus on IT innovation. We are now not only meeting the needs of the business but able to exceed them since we have more time to focus on what matters most – delivering value for our organization and our customers."</p><p>NextRoll helps marketplaces and marketing platforms grow revenue by empowering them to build and enhance their marketing solutions. "We run thousands of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, and we are looking for ways to reduce my team's time spent on resolving operational issues," said Valentino Volonghi, CTO at NextRoll. "We are excited to use Amazon DevOps Guru and leverage its machine learning-powered insights to help us identify, correlate, and remediate operational issues with recommendations. This will help my team save hours and reduce our mean time to recovery."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are just some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201006063/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

AWS Announces Five New Capabilities for Amazon Connect, Helping Customer Service Representatives Offer More Personalized, Efficient, and Effective Experiences for Customers—All Powered by AWS's Industry-Leading Machine Learning Technology

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-Five-New-Capabilities-for-Amazon-Connect-Helping-Customer-Service-Representatives-Offer-More-Personalized-Efficient-and-Effective-Experiences-for-CustomersAll-Powered-by-AWSs-Industry-Leading-Machine-Learning-Technology/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-Five-New-Capabilities-for-Amazon-Connect-Helping-Customer-Service-Representatives-Offer-More-Personalized-Efficient-and-Effective-Experiences-for-CustomersAll-Powered-by-AWSs-Industry-Leading-Machine-Learning-Technology

12/01/2020 14:00:00

AWS Announces Five New Capabilities for Amazon Connect, Helping Customer Service Representatives Offer More Personalized, Efficient, and Effective Experiences for Customers—All Powered by AWS's Industry-Leading Machine Learning Technology

12/01/2020

2020

Amazon Connect Wisdom provides contact center agents with the information they need to solve issues in real-time Amazon Connect Customer Profiles gives agents a unified profile of each customer they can use to provide more personalized service Real-Time Contact Lens for Amazon Connect offers a new capability for contact center managers to impact customer interactions during a call Amazon Connect Tasks automates, tracks, and manages tasks for contact center agents, improving agent productivity by up to 30% Amazon Connect Voice ID delivers real-time caller authentication using machine learning-powered voice analysis Best Western, John Hancock, and Fujitsu are among customers using the new Amazon Connect capabilities SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced five new capabilities for AWS's rapidly-growing contact center service, Amazon Connect, that significantly improve contact center agent productivity and end-user customer experiences. Amazon Connect is easy to use, quick to deploy, and highly scalable (up to tens of thousands of agents) to help companies of any size deliver superior customer service at a lower cost. Thousands of companies like John Hancock, Capital One, Intuit, Best Western, Fujitsu, Origin Energy, GE Appliances, Square, Mutual of Omaha, National Australia Bank, New York Times, and Dow Jones use Amazon Connect to dramatically improve service and support experiences for their customers. The capabilities announced today give agents the right information at the right time, provide more personalized service, help managers impact customer interactions during calls, make it faster to authenticate customers more securely, and make customer follow-up tasks easier to manage. These capabilities are powered by AWS's machine learning technology, require no technical expertise to use, and are available as features within Amazon Connect. To get started with Amazon Connect, visit https://aws.amazon.com/connect/ Contact center agents are on the frontline of customer service, but legacy contact center solutions fail to help them deliver truly excellent customer experiences. Today's solutions are expensive, hard to set up, and don't scale well. Companies often have to invest in complex, proprietary hardware and software systems that take months or years to deploy, require specialized skills to configure, and can't scale up and down as call volumes fluctuate. Even when organizations manage to set up legacy on-premises or homegrown systems, they often require complex coding to make basic changes, so they quickly become outdated and are hard to maintain. These are challenges and opportunities that Amazon understands well in its own business. Amazon built the world's most scalable, functional, and cost-effective call center service to manage the dramatic growth and scale of Amazon's retail business. Over the years, customers have asked AWS if it would build an external call center service using the DNA of Amazon's own service. Amazon Connect does this by generalizing Amazon's call center software into a service that reinvents the contact center customer experience from the ground up on the cloud and with embedded machine learning. With Amazon Connect, organizations get a contact center that can be configured and set up in minutes, requires no infrastructure to deploy or manage, is easy to use, scales up and down as call volumes change, and is much more cost effective because companies only pay for the time agents are actually interacting with customers. The five new Amazon Connect capabilities launching today deliver on AWS customers' key asks – improving their agents' productivity and providing even better customer experiences. Agent assistance (available in preview): Amazon Connect Wisdom gives agents the information they need to solve issues in real time. In order to serve customers with the best possible experience, agents need a wide range of product and service information at their fingertips. Unfortunately, this information is often scattered in various databases and silos inside of the company or within third-party software. As a result, agents lose a lot of time trying to access the information they need to help customers in the moment. Wisdom ingests and organizes knowledge content that agents need (e.g. FAQs, help articles, PDFs, etc.) from both homegrown databases and third-party knowledge repositories, with pre-built connectors to Salesforce and ServiceNow. Wisdom uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to detect customer issues during the call and subsequently recommends relevant content stored in the knowledge repositories. For example, Wisdom can detect when a customer says "arrived broken." After hearing that prompt, Wisdom will automatically display instructions within the Amazon Connect agent application for exchanging an item, including specific answers and links to relevant content. Additionally, agents can use machine learning-powered search to get an answer to a question or phrase as a customer is speaking. For example, an agent could type "how long after an item is purchased can it be exchanged," and Wisdom will search all of the data stores and return a precise answer with links that allow the agent to dive deeper. Wisdom empowers agents with the right information, at the right time, so that they can more quickly and effectively resolve customer issues. Customer profiles (available today): Amazon Connect Customer Profiles ensures agents have a more unified profile of each customer so they can provide more personalized service during a call. Content about customer activity and experiences, like product and service information, is often spread across various databases and user interfaces in homegrown applications and third-party services. In some cases, agents need to toggle between as many as 10 different applications to find customer information like contact details, purchase history, and ticket status. By having more of a customer's relevant information—as well as a more holistic picture of their status—in one place, customer service agents can provide more thoughtful guidance and service to end-users. When a customer calls, Customer Profiles scans and matches the customer records across multiple applications for unique identifiers like phone numbers or account IDs. Customer Profiles combines contact history information from Amazon Connect (e.g. number of holds, transcripts, customer sentiment, etc.) with customer information from Customer Relationship Management (CRM), e-commerce, and order management applications into a unified customer profile that is displayed in the Amazon Connect agent application at the moment a call or chat starts. For example, a customer service agent at a hotel who receives a call from a customer complaining about a bad night's stay would also be able to see that the same customer asked the hotel to provide a quote for their company's three-day executive offsite, and this broader perspective might change how the agent approaches the call (e.g. they might offer the customer an executive suite for their upcoming stay). AWS customers can connect to other homegrown applications using Amazon Connect's Software Development Kit (SDK) and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). AWS customers can also use pre-built connectors to third-party applications like Marketo, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk directly from the Amazon Connect console. Real-time analytics (available today): Real-TimeContact Lens for Amazon Connect provides a new capability to impact customer interactions during a call.Contact Lens for Amazon Connect (announced last year at re:Invent) helps customers analyze contacts by providing a call transcript that shows what the agent and caller said, performing sentiment analysis with a positive or negative score, and detecting key words, phrases, or other analysis criteria like silence or people talking over one another. Since Contact Lens' launch, AWS customers have enjoyed the ability to easily analyze completed calls, but they also want the ability to impact customer interactions during live calls to prevent negative experiences. Real-Time Contact Lens makes it easy for contact center managers to do exactly this. Contact center managers can create rules to flag customer issues using keywords (e.g. "not happy," "poor product quality," "cancel," etc.) or sentiment analysis (e.g. negative sentiment, voices being raised, etc.). Managers receive real-time alerts when their specified conditions are met so they can provide guidance or have the agent transfer the call. When a call is transferred, the agent can pass the real-time transcript with conversational details like sentiment to the next agent or manager, so a customer doesn't need to repeat themselves when the manager gets up to speed. Real-Time Contact Lens gives managers the ability to know when customer interactions are going poorly, and it gives them the ability to impact the call before harm is done to the brand. Task automation and management (available today): Amazon Connect Tasks automates, tracks, and manages tasks for contact center agents, improving agent productivity by up to 30%. Today, nearly half of an agent's time is spent on follow-up service tasks in external applications like CRMs and their own business-specific solutions. For example, a contact center agent for an insurance company who is following up on a new claim needs to collect customer documents over email, create a case ticket in a claims-processing application, schedule an appointment with an adjuster, and notify the customer of status updates on the claim. Agents often rely on memory or hand-written notes to keep track of these tasks and follow-up items, which not only reduces productivity, but also creates a risk that customer-impacting tasks are missed entirely. Amazon Connect Tasks helps companies improve agent efficiency, automate repetitive work, and lower costs. Tasks provides companies with pre-built connectors to CRM applications (e.g. Salesforce and Zendesk) and APIs to integrate with homegrown applications. With Tasks, managers can assign and prioritize tasks to agents based on agent availability and skill set, and the tasks are displayed to agents in the same Amazon Connect interface that they use to view their call and chat interactions. When assigned a task, agents see a notification along with the description of the task and links to any applications that the agents might need to complete the task. Agents can also create tasks on their own to track their own follow-up work (e.g. updating a customer profile). Managers can also create workflows to automate tasks that don't require agent interaction (e.g. notifying a customer that their claim has been processed), so that agents can spend more time interacting with customers. Caller authentication (available in preview): Amazon Connect Voice ID provides real-time caller authentication using machine learning-powered voice analysis. Prior to today, contact centers had to use knowledge-based authentication processes, where callers had to answer multiple questions based on personal details like social security number, date of birth, and mother's maiden name, which is time-consuming and can be exploited for fraud. Voice ID provides real-time caller authentication without disrupting natural conversation. With Voice ID, callers are given the option to authenticate themselves by using their voice, offering them an additional layer of security against fraud and saving them from the hassle of having to answer multiple questions to verify their identity. When a caller opts in, Voice ID analyzes the caller's speech attributes (e.g. rhythm, pitch, or tone) during the first few seconds of the call, and then creates a digital voiceprint for the caller. When the caller calls in again, Voice ID compares the caller's voiceprint to the claimed identity and authenticates a caller based on a Voice ID confidence score. This all happens in the first few seconds of a call, when an agent gets on the call and asks the caller to state their identity and reason for calling. If the caller doesn't meet the confidence score threshold set by the organization, an agent can verify their identity through additional screening like knowledge-based or transfer the call to a fraud specialist. With real-time caller authentication, Amazon Connect Voice ID makes contact centers more secure, provides a better customer experience, and improves the productivity of agents. "Amazon Connect is one of the fastest growing services in the history of AWS, and has clearly struck a chord with customers," said Pasquale DeMaio, General Manager, Amazon Connect, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "Amazon Connect is the most flexible, scalable, cost-effective, and inventive call center service, in part because it was built from the ground up on the cloud with machine learning deeply embedded to automatically manage features like Interactive Voice Response (IVR), chatbots, call analytics, and sentiment analysis. Today's five new Connect features build on this foundation to make it even easier for customer service agents to have the information they need to provide faster and more holistic customer experiences, optimize agents' time based on what matters most, and enable customer service managers to take action in real time to avoid contacts that will do harm to their brand." Best Western Hotels & Resorts has over 4,500 hotels worldwide. "At Best Western® Hotels & Resorts we strive to lead the hospitality industry in superior customer care, and that extends to the experience our customers have when they call our contact center," said Troy Tracy, Best Western Hotels & Resorts' Sr. Manager of Network and Contact Center Engineering. "Amazon Connect equips our agents with more information about the caller, allowing them to deliver personalized experiences for our guests. With Amazon Connect's new machine learning-powered capabilities we are able to help callers more efficiently and effectively, providing the high standard of customer service that we are known for around the globe. We are excited to use Amazon Connect Profiles, Wisdom, Tasks, Voice ID, and Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, and believe they will deliver added-value for our guests." John Hancock is dedicated to providing innovative life insurance, investment, retirement, and advice to help customers reach their goals. "At John Hancock, we care a lot about our customers' retirement goals. We handle tens of thousands of calls per week and our agents spend a ton of time searching through our wikis, repositories, and homegrown knowledge management systems for answers to critical financial questions," said Michael McCrillis, Director of Enterprise IT at John Hancock. "Amazon Connect Wisdom will let our agents use ML-powered search across all of our existing knowledge repositories to find the right answers for customers. We are also excited that Wisdom automatically provides real-time answers to customer questions, quotes, and product specifications right within Amazon Connect during the call. Wisdom will help our agents solve customer inquiries faster, and could help significantly reduce Average Handle Time, thus creating a more seamless and positive customer experience." Traeger Grills has been the outdoor cooking choice of food enthusiasts. "At Traeger, our mission is to help create a more flavorful world. Our customers are passionate about their grills. We handle tens of thousands of contact center contacts every month where people have questions on everything from grill care to WiFi connectivity. Our Traeger Techs used to spend a ton of time navigating multiple systems to find customer data," said Lizzy Mitchell, Head of Customer Experience Analytics at Traeger Grills. "Amazon Connect Customer Profiles seamlessly aggregates information from our e-commerce/marketing systems, Salesforce Service Cloud, Google/Adobe Analytics, and Qualtrics. Now, when agents are connected to our customers, Amazon Connect automatically surfaces a unified customer profile that shows who is calling, their contact history, purchase history, and grill type. Our agents no longer have to toggle between applications to find information that helps provide a world-class customer experience. Since implementing Amazon Connect Customer Profiles, we've seen a ~25% reduction in handle time and a ~10% increase in CSAT." The Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services promotes child safety and offers prevention services to strengthen families. It also connects children with stable, loving homes in times of need. "Our Child Protection Hotline agents are vital to helping the most populous U.S. county, with more than 10 million people, navigate difficult domestic challenges such as child abuse reports, investigations, and foster care. Contact Lens for Amazon Connect makes our life a lot easier because we're able to look at patterns, trends, and predictions that help guide our work," said Carlos Torres, Division Chief for Los Angeles County's Child Protection Hotline. "We are excited at the prospect of enabling the real-time capabilities of Contact Lens for Amazon Connect so that caller analytics and real-time alerts will – at a future time – be delivered live in our Amazon Connect supervisor dashboard so that we can help our agents navigate these difficult situations, without requiring supervisors to be there in-person, or listening to every call." Perspecta brings a diverse set of capabilities to our U.S. government customers in defense, intelligence, civilian, health care, and state and local markets. "From mission services to digital transformation to enterprise operations, everything we do supports one imperative: solving some of the country's most complex challenges. The Amazon Connect contact center solution provides a robust backbone that supports our customers' missions. We use Contact Lens for Amazon Connect to analyze post-call metrics, sentiment, and trends to understand our customer better and provide superior, proactive service," said Mike Kirkland, senior vice president of offerings at Perspecta. "We're excited for Contact Lens for Amazon Connect's new real-time capabilities, which will allow us to detect customer experience issues during live calls so supervisors can jump in to provide immediate support, and improve the first call resolution rate by 25%, while reducing overall volume and costs by 5%." AnswerConnect is a virtual receptionist answering service, providing businesses with cost-effective customer support and callers with a real voice in every call. "Amazon Connect provides our virtual receptionists, businesses, and their customers with reliable support, 24/7. And now that extends beyond just answering calls. Our virtual receptionists spend up to two hours per day outside of telephone interactions on other contact center work, including everything from responding to open tickets to filling out forms. Typically, this would require interacting with multiple vendors and applications to do something as simple as sending an email," said Abilash Amarasekaran, Cloud Engineer for FULL Creative (the parent company of AnswerConnect). "With Amazon Connect Tasks, we can prioritize and assign work items to agents based on urgency. Also, Amazon Connect Tasks automates laborious tasks that don't require agent work such as notifying a customer of a form submission or updating a ticket. For a contact center with over 900 agents, we spend an enormous amount of time on these operational tasks. Amazon Connect Tasks saves our virtual receptionists vital hours and improves productivity by 15%." Fujitsu is an innovative, global information technology and services provider that helps organizations across multiple industries thrive in the modern digital world by driving new value from cutting-edge digital technologies. "At Fujitsu, our IT services exist to keep our customers' businesses running, and Amazon Connect empowers 5,300 of our contact center agents to better serve customers. Outside the 300,000 interactions our agents handle each month, they have to spend hours each day on additional tasks such as resolving open emails and tickets. This is a manual, time consuming process that often leaves important tasks incomplete," said Alex Sanchez, Head of Global GDC Networks for Fujitsu. "Amazon Connect Tasks will allow our agents to prioritize, assign, and track all tasks. Through connectors to external applications such as Salesforce, Amazon Lex chatbots, and Amazon Pinpoint, we can automate tasks like follow-ups to customers. With Amazon Connect Tasks we expect our agent productivity to improve 30% and expect to refine our customer experience even further with other Amazon Connect innovations." Accolade is a personalized health and benefits solution that serves employers across the country. "Amazon Connect has been a critical driver behind the modernization efforts to improve our customer experience. By using Amazon Connect Voice ID to streamline caller authentication, we want to make voice interactions more secure and help customers resolve their issues quickly without having to answer multiple security questions," said Stephen Murphy, the Senior Director Cloud Engineering at Accolade. "Amazon Connect Voice ID is compelling because customers can enroll or verify their stated identity without having to say any specific words or phrases. Our contact center team is looking forward to using this new secure authentication feature of Amazon Connect." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201006059/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>Amazon Connect Wisdom provides contact center agents with the information they need to solve issues in real-time</em></p><p><em>Amazon Connect Customer Profiles gives agents a unified profile of each customer they can use to provide more personalized service</em></p><p><em>Real-Time Contact Lens for Amazon Connect offers a new capability for contact center managers to impact customer interactions during a call</em></p><p><em>Amazon Connect Tasks automates, tracks, and manages tasks for contact center agents, improving agent productivity by up to 30%</em></p><p><em>Amazon Connect Voice ID delivers real-time caller authentication using machine learning-powered voice analysis</em></p><p><em>Best Western, John Hancock, and Fujitsu are among customers using the new Amazon Connect capabilities</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced five new capabilities for AWS's rapidly-growing contact center service, Amazon Connect, that significantly improve contact center agent productivity and end-user customer experiences. Amazon Connect is easy to use, quick to deploy, and highly scalable (up to tens of thousands of agents) to help companies of any size deliver superior customer service at a lower cost. Thousands of companies like John Hancock, Capital One, Intuit, Best Western, Fujitsu, Origin Energy, GE Appliances, Square, Mutual of Omaha, National Australia Bank, New York Times, and Dow Jones use Amazon Connect to dramatically improve service and support experiences for their customers. The capabilities announced today give agents the right information at the right time, provide more personalized service, help managers impact customer interactions during calls, make it faster to authenticate customers more securely, and make customer follow-up tasks easier to manage. These capabilities are powered by AWS's machine learning technology, require no technical expertise to use, and are available as features within Amazon Connect. To get started with Amazon Connect, visit https://aws.amazon.com/connect/</p><p>Contact center agents are on the frontline of customer service, but legacy contact center solutions fail to help them deliver truly excellent customer experiences. Today's solutions are expensive, hard to set up, and don't scale well. Companies often have to invest in complex, proprietary hardware and software systems that take months or years to deploy, require specialized skills to configure, and can't scale up and down as call volumes fluctuate. Even when organizations manage to set up legacy on-premises or homegrown systems, they often require complex coding to make basic changes, so they quickly become outdated and are hard to maintain. These are challenges and opportunities that Amazon understands well in its own business. Amazon built the world's most scalable, functional, and cost-effective call center service to manage the dramatic growth and scale of Amazon's retail business. Over the years, customers have asked AWS if it would build an external call center service using the DNA of Amazon's own service. Amazon Connect does this by generalizing Amazon's call center software into a service that reinvents the contact center customer experience from the ground up on the cloud and with embedded machine learning. With Amazon Connect, organizations get a contact center that can be configured and set up in minutes, requires no infrastructure to deploy or manage, is easy to use, scales up and down as call volumes change, and is much more cost effective because companies only pay for the time agents are actually interacting with customers.</p><p>The five new Amazon Connect capabilities launching today deliver on AWS customers' key asks – improving their agents' productivity and providing even better customer experiences.</p><ul><li>Agent assistance (available in preview): Amazon Connect Wisdom gives agents the information they need to solve issues in real time. In order to serve customers with the best possible experience, agents need a wide range of product and service information at their fingertips. Unfortunately, this information is often scattered in various databases and silos inside of the company or within third-party software. As a result, agents lose a lot of time trying to access the information they need to help customers in the moment. Wisdom ingests and organizes knowledge content that agents need (e.g. FAQs, help articles, PDFs, etc.) from both homegrown databases and third-party knowledge repositories, with pre-built connectors to Salesforce and ServiceNow. Wisdom uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to detect customer issues during the call and subsequently recommends relevant content stored in the knowledge repositories. For example, Wisdom can detect when a customer says <em>"arrived broken."</em> After hearing that prompt, Wisdom will automatically display instructions within the Amazon Connect agent application for exchanging an item, including specific answers and links to relevant content. Additionally, agents can use machine learning-powered search to get an answer to a question or phrase as a customer is speaking. For example, an agent could type "<em>how long after an item is purchased can it be exchanged,</em>" and Wisdom will search all of the data stores and return a precise answer with links that allow the agent to dive deeper. Wisdom empowers agents with the right information, at the right time, so that they can more quickly and effectively resolve customer issues.</li><li>Customer profiles (available today): Amazon Connect Customer Profiles ensures agents have a more unified profile of each customer so they can provide more personalized service during a call. Content about customer activity and experiences, like product and service information, is often spread across various databases and user interfaces in homegrown applications and third-party services. In some cases, agents need to toggle between as many as 10 different applications to find customer information like contact details, purchase history, and ticket status. By having more of a customer's relevant information—as well as a more holistic picture of their status—in one place, customer service agents can provide more thoughtful guidance and service to end-users. When a customer calls, Customer Profiles scans and matches the customer records across multiple applications for unique identifiers like phone numbers or account IDs. Customer Profiles combines contact history information from Amazon Connect (e.g. number of holds, transcripts, customer sentiment, etc.) with customer information from Customer Relationship Management (CRM), e-commerce, and order management applications into a unified customer profile that is displayed in the Amazon Connect agent application at the moment a call or chat starts. For example, a customer service agent at a hotel who receives a call from a customer complaining about a bad night's stay would also be able to see that the same customer asked the hotel to provide a quote for their company's three-day executive offsite, and this broader perspective might change how the agent approaches the call (e.g. they might offer the customer an executive suite for their upcoming stay). AWS customers can connect to other homegrown applications using Amazon Connect's Software Development Kit (SDK) and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). AWS customers can also use pre-built connectors to third-party applications like Marketo, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk directly from the Amazon Connect console.</li><li>Real-time analytics (available today): Real-TimeContact Lens for Amazon Connect provides a new capability to impact customer interactions during a call.Contact Lens for Amazon Connect (announced last year at re:Invent) helps customers analyze contacts by providing a call transcript that shows what the agent and caller said, performing sentiment analysis with a positive or negative score, and detecting key words, phrases, or other analysis criteria like silence or people talking over one another. Since Contact Lens' launch, AWS customers have enjoyed the ability to easily analyze completed calls, but they also want the ability to impact customer interactions during live calls to prevent negative experiences. Real-Time Contact Lens makes it easy for contact center managers to do exactly this. Contact center managers can create rules to flag customer issues using keywords (e.g. "not happy," "poor product quality," "cancel," etc.) or sentiment analysis (e.g. negative sentiment, voices being raised, etc.). Managers receive real-time alerts when their specified conditions are met so they can provide guidance or have the agent transfer the call. When a call is transferred, the agent can pass the real-time transcript with conversational details like sentiment to the next agent or manager, so a customer doesn't need to repeat themselves when the manager gets up to speed. Real-Time Contact Lens gives managers the ability to know when customer interactions are going poorly, and it gives them the ability to impact the call before harm is done to the brand.</li><li>Task automation and management (available today): Amazon Connect Tasks automates, tracks, and manages tasks for contact center agents, improving agent productivity by up to 30%. Today, nearly half of an agent's time is spent on follow-up service tasks in external applications like CRMs and their own business-specific solutions. For example, a contact center agent for an insurance company who is following up on a new claim needs to collect customer documents over email, create a case ticket in a claims-processing application, schedule an appointment with an adjuster, and notify the customer of status updates on the claim. Agents often rely on memory or hand-written notes to keep track of these tasks and follow-up items, which not only reduces productivity, but also creates a risk that customer-impacting tasks are missed entirely. Amazon Connect Tasks helps companies improve agent efficiency, automate repetitive work, and lower costs. Tasks provides companies with pre-built connectors to CRM applications (e.g. Salesforce and Zendesk) and APIs to integrate with homegrown applications. With Tasks, managers can assign and prioritize tasks to agents based on agent availability and skill set, and the tasks are displayed to agents in the same Amazon Connect interface that they use to view their call and chat interactions. When assigned a task, agents see a notification along with the description of the task and links to any applications that the agents might need to complete the task. Agents can also create tasks on their own to track their own follow-up work (e.g. updating a customer profile). Managers can also create workflows to automate tasks that don't require agent interaction (e.g. notifying a customer that their claim has been processed), so that agents can spend more time interacting with customers.</li><li>Caller authentication (available in preview): Amazon Connect Voice ID provides real-time caller authentication using machine learning-powered voice analysis. Prior to today, contact centers had to use knowledge-based authentication processes, where callers had to answer multiple questions based on personal details like social security number, date of birth, and mother's maiden name, which is time-consuming and can be exploited for fraud. Voice ID provides real-time caller authentication without disrupting natural conversation. With Voice ID, callers are given the option to authenticate themselves by using their voice, offering them an additional layer of security against fraud and saving them from the hassle of having to answer multiple questions to verify their identity. When a caller opts in, Voice ID analyzes the caller's speech attributes (e.g. rhythm, pitch, or tone) during the first few seconds of the call, and then creates a digital voiceprint for the caller. When the caller calls in again, Voice ID compares the caller's voiceprint to the claimed identity and authenticates a caller based on a Voice ID confidence score. This all happens in the first few seconds of a call, when an agent gets on the call and asks the caller to state their identity and reason for calling. If the caller doesn't meet the confidence score threshold set by the organization, an agent can verify their identity through additional screening like knowledge-based or transfer the call to a fraud specialist. With real-time caller authentication, Amazon Connect Voice ID makes contact centers more secure, provides a better customer experience, and improves the productivity of agents.</li></ul><p>"Amazon Connect is one of the fastest growing services in the history of AWS, and has clearly struck a chord with customers," said Pasquale DeMaio, General Manager, Amazon Connect, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "Amazon Connect is the most flexible, scalable, cost-effective, and inventive call center service, in part because it was built from the ground up on the cloud with machine learning deeply embedded to automatically manage features like Interactive Voice Response (IVR), chatbots, call analytics, and sentiment analysis. Today's five new Connect features build on this foundation to make it even easier for customer service agents to have the information they need to provide faster and more holistic customer experiences, optimize agents' time based on what matters most, and enable customer service managers to take action in real time to avoid contacts that will do harm to their brand."</p><p>Best Western Hotels &amp; Resorts has over 4,500 hotels worldwide. "At Best Western® Hotels &amp; Resorts we strive to lead the hospitality industry in superior customer care, and that extends to the experience our customers have when they call our contact center," said Troy Tracy, Best Western Hotels &amp; Resorts' Sr. Manager of Network and Contact Center Engineering. "Amazon Connect equips our agents with more information about the caller, allowing them to deliver personalized experiences for our guests. With Amazon Connect's new machine learning-powered capabilities we are able to help callers more efficiently and effectively, providing the high standard of customer service that we are known for around the globe. We are excited to use Amazon Connect Profiles, Wisdom, Tasks, Voice ID, and Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, and believe they will deliver added-value for our guests."</p><p>John Hancock is dedicated to providing innovative life insurance, investment, retirement, and advice to help customers reach their goals. "At John Hancock, we care a lot about our customers' retirement goals. We handle tens of thousands of calls per week and our agents spend a ton of time searching through our wikis, repositories, and homegrown knowledge management systems for answers to critical financial questions," said Michael McCrillis, Director of Enterprise IT at John Hancock. "Amazon Connect Wisdom will let our agents use ML-powered search across all of our existing knowledge repositories to find the right answers for customers. We are also excited that Wisdom automatically provides real-time answers to customer questions, quotes, and product specifications right within Amazon Connect during the call. Wisdom will help our agents solve customer inquiries faster, and could help significantly reduce Average Handle Time, thus creating a more seamless and positive customer experience."</p><p>Traeger Grills has been the outdoor cooking choice of food enthusiasts. "At Traeger, our mission is to help create a more flavorful world. Our customers are passionate about their grills. We handle tens of thousands of contact center contacts every month where people have questions on everything from grill care to WiFi connectivity. Our Traeger Techs used to spend a ton of time navigating multiple systems to find customer data," said Lizzy Mitchell, Head of Customer Experience Analytics at Traeger Grills. "Amazon Connect Customer Profiles seamlessly aggregates information from our e-commerce/marketing systems, Salesforce Service Cloud, Google/Adobe Analytics, and Qualtrics. Now, when agents are connected to our customers, Amazon Connect automatically surfaces a unified customer profile that shows who is calling, their contact history, purchase history, and grill type. Our agents no longer have to toggle between applications to find information that helps provide a world-class customer experience. Since implementing Amazon Connect Customer Profiles, we've seen a ~25% reduction in handle time and a ~10% increase in CSAT."</p><p>The Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services promotes child safety and offers prevention services to strengthen families. It also connects children with stable, loving homes in times of need. "Our Child Protection Hotline agents are vital to helping the most populous U.S. county, with more than 10 million people, navigate difficult domestic challenges such as child abuse reports, investigations, and foster care. Contact Lens for Amazon Connect makes our life a lot easier because we're able to look at patterns, trends, and predictions that help guide our work," said Carlos Torres, Division Chief for Los Angeles County's Child Protection Hotline. "We are excited at the prospect of enabling the real-time capabilities of Contact Lens for Amazon Connect so that caller analytics and real-time alerts will – at a future time – be delivered live in our Amazon Connect supervisor dashboard so that we can help our agents navigate these difficult situations, without requiring supervisors to be there in-person, or listening to every call."</p><p>Perspecta brings a diverse set of capabilities to our U.S. government customers in defense, intelligence, civilian, health care, and state and local markets. "From mission services to digital transformation to enterprise operations, everything we do supports one imperative: solving some of the country's most complex challenges. The Amazon Connect contact center solution provides a robust backbone that supports our customers' missions. We use Contact Lens for Amazon Connect to analyze post-call metrics, sentiment, and trends to understand our customer better and provide superior, proactive service," said Mike Kirkland, senior vice president of offerings at Perspecta. "We're excited for Contact Lens for Amazon Connect's new real-time capabilities, which will allow us to detect customer experience issues during live calls so supervisors can jump in to provide immediate support, and improve the first call resolution rate by 25%, while reducing overall volume and costs by 5%."</p><p>AnswerConnect is a virtual receptionist answering service, providing businesses with cost-effective customer support and callers with a real voice in every call. "Amazon Connect provides our virtual receptionists, businesses, and their customers with reliable support, 24/7. And now that extends beyond just answering calls. Our virtual receptionists spend up to two hours per day outside of telephone interactions on other contact center work, including everything from responding to open tickets to filling out forms. Typically, this would require interacting with multiple vendors and applications to do something as simple as sending an email," said Abilash Amarasekaran, Cloud Engineer for FULL Creative (the parent company of AnswerConnect). "With Amazon Connect Tasks, we can prioritize and assign work items to agents based on urgency. Also, Amazon Connect Tasks automates laborious tasks that don't require agent work such as notifying a customer of a form submission or updating a ticket. For a contact center with over 900 agents, we spend an enormous amount of time on these operational tasks. Amazon Connect Tasks saves our virtual receptionists vital hours and improves productivity by 15%."</p><p>Fujitsu is an innovative, global information technology and services provider that helps organizations across multiple industries thrive in the modern digital world by driving new value from cutting-edge digital technologies. "At Fujitsu, our IT services exist to keep our customers' businesses running, and Amazon Connect empowers 5,300 of our contact center agents to better serve customers. Outside the 300,000 interactions our agents handle each month, they have to spend hours each day on additional tasks such as resolving open emails and tickets. This is a manual, time consuming process that often leaves important tasks incomplete," said Alex Sanchez, Head of Global GDC Networks for Fujitsu. "Amazon Connect Tasks will allow our agents to prioritize, assign, and track all tasks. Through connectors to external applications such as Salesforce, Amazon Lex chatbots, and Amazon Pinpoint, we can automate tasks like follow-ups to customers. With Amazon Connect Tasks we expect our agent productivity to improve 30% and expect to refine our customer experience even further with other Amazon Connect innovations."</p><p>Accolade is a personalized health and benefits solution that serves employers across the country. "Amazon Connect has been a critical driver behind the modernization efforts to improve our customer experience. By using Amazon Connect Voice ID to streamline caller authentication, we want to make voice interactions more secure and help customers resolve their issues quickly without having to answer multiple security questions," said Stephen Murphy, the Senior Director Cloud Engineering at Accolade. "Amazon Connect Voice ID is compelling because customers can enroll or verify their stated identity without having to say any specific words or phrases. Our contact center team is looking forward to using this new secure authentication feature of Amazon Connect."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201006059/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

AWS Announces Three New Analytics Capabilities

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-Three-New-Analytics-Capabilities/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-Three-New-Analytics-Capabilities

12/01/2020 14:00:00

AWS Announces Three New Analytics Capabilities

12/01/2020

2020

AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift provides an innovative new hardware-accelerated cache that delivers up to 10x better query performance than any other cloud data warehouse AWS Glue Elastic Views lets developers easily build materialized views that automatically combine and replicate data across multiple data stores Amazon QuickSight Q is a machine learning-powered capability for Amazon QuickSight that lets users type questions about their business data in natural language and receive highly accurate answers in seconds Capital One, Best Western Hotels & Resorts, NTT DOCOMO, Audible, and Panasonic Avionics among customers using new analytics capabilities SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced three new analytics capabilities that dramatically improve the performance of Amazon Redshift data warehouses, make it significantly easier for customers to move and combine data across data stores, and make it much simpler for end-users to get more value from their business data using machine learning. AQUA for Amazon Redshift accelerates querying with an innovative new hardware-accelerated cache that brings the compute to the storage and delivers up to 10x better query performance than any other cloud data warehouse, with general availability coming in January 2021. AWS Glue Elastic Views helps developers build applications that use data from multiple data stores with materialized views that automatically combine and replicate data across storage, data warehouses, and databases. Amazon QuickSight Q delivers a machine learning-powered capability for Amazon QuickSight that gives users the ability to use natural language expressions to ask business questions in the Amazon QuickSight Q search bar and receive highly accurate answers in seconds. More data is created every hour today than in an entire year just 20 years ago. In fact, the amount of data created over the next three years will be more than the amount of data created over the past 30 years. The same old tools simply won't work in this new world of data. AWS customers use a wide variety of analytics tools for different use cases, including Amazon Athena for serverless querying, Amazon Elasticsearch Service for searching and visualizing log data, Amazon Kinesis for processing real-time data streams, Amazon Redshift for data warehousing, and Amazon EMR for running Apache Spark, Hive, Presto, and other big data frameworks. These services offer AWS customers the right tool for their needs. The new analytics capabilities announced today build on this foundation and provide faster, more cost-effective, and more accessible data analysis across all of a customer's data stores. To learn more, visit https://aws.amazon.com/big-data/datalakes-and-analytics/ "With the capabilities we're announcing today, we're delivering an order-of-magnitude performance improvement for Amazon Redshift, new flexible ways to more easily move data between data stores, and the ability for customers to ask natural language questions in their business dashboards and receive answers in seconds," said Rahul Pathak, VP, Analytics, AWS. "These capabilities will meaningfully change the speed and ease of use with which customers can get value from their data at any scale." AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift brings compute to the storage layer, delivering up to 10x faster query performance than any other cloud data warehouse Since its launch in 2012 as the first data warehouse built for the cloud at a cost of 1/10th that of traditional data warehouses, Amazon Redshift has become the most popular cloud data warehouse. Earlier this year, AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Redshift RA3 instances, which allow customers to scale compute and storage separately and deliver up to 3x better performance than any other cloud data warehouse. However, even with the advantages offered by RA3 instances, the rapid growth of data that customers need to process in their data warehouses has led to a difficult balancing act between performance and cost-effective scaling. The prevailing approach to data warehousing has been to build out an architecture whereby large amounts of centralized storage are moved to waiting compute nodes to process the data. The challenge with this approach is that there is a lot of data movement between the shared data and compute nodes. As data volumes continue to grow at a rapid clip, this data movement saturates available networking bandwidth and slows down performance. In addition to the networking bottleneck, CPUs are not able to keep up with the faster growth in storage capabilities (SSD storage throughput has grown 6x faster than the ability of CPUs to process data from memory), which either creates a new CPU bottleneck of its own or forces more customers to over-provision compute to get their work done more quickly. AQUA for Amazon Redshift is a distributed and hardware-accelerated cache for Amazon Redshift; an innovation that improves performance for analytics at the new scale of data. AQUA brings compute to the storage layer, so data does not have to move back and forth between the two. This enables Amazon Redshift to run up to ten times faster than any other cloud data warehouse. The AQUA cache scales out and processes data in parallel across many nodes. Each node possesses a hardware module composed of AWS-designed analytics processors that dramatically accelerate data compression, encryption, and data processing tasks like scans, aggregates, and filtering. AQUA also gives customers the added benefit of being able to do compute on their raw storage, which saves time that would otherwise be spent moving data around. With this new architecture, and the order-of-magnitude better performance it brings, Redshift customers will have more up-to-date dashboards, save development time, and their systems will be easier to maintain. AQUA's preview is now open to all customers, and AQUA will be generally available in January 2021. AQUA is available on Redshift RA3 instances at no additional cost, and customers can take advantage of the AQUA performance improvements without any code changes. To get started with AQUA, visit https://pages.awscloud.com/AQUA_Preview.html AWS Glue Elastic Views lets developers easily build materialized views that automatically combine and replicate data across multiple data stores Most companies are building or have already built data lakes, where they can aggregate all of the data from various silos with the right security and access controls, to make it easier to do analytics and machine learning. But for latency and operational reasons, most companies are also likely to have increasing amounts of data in purpose-built data stores outside of their data lakes. As the data in these data lakes and purpose-built data stores continue to grow, companies need an easier way to move data around. AWS Glue Elastic Views provides developers with a new capability to easily build materialized views (also called virtual tables) that automatically combine and replicate data across multiple data stores. AWS Glue is a serverless data preparation service that makes it easy to run extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs for analytics and machine learning. With AWS Glue Elastic Views customers can use SQL to create a materialized view of the data they want to combine from different data stores, and AWS Glue Elastic Views copies the data to create the materialized view from the different sources. For example, a customer might create a materialized view that pulls restaurant location information from Amazon Aurora and combines it with customer reviews stored in Amazon DynamoDB to build a search engine for restaurant reviews by location on Amazon Elasticsearch Service. AWS Glue Elastic Viewscopies data from each source database to a target database, and automatically keeps the data in the target database up to date. Elastic Views continually monitors the source database for changes, and updates the target database within seconds. If there is a change to the data model in one of the source databases, Elastic Views proactively alerts the developers, so they can update their materialized view to adapt to the change. Customers can also use Elastic Views to copy operational data from an operational database to their data lake to run analytics in near real-time. AWS Glue Elastic Views automatically scales capacity to accommodate workloads as they ramp up or down, ensuring that the materialized views in the target databases are kept up to date. AWS Glue Elastic Views is available in preview today. To learn more, visit http://aws.amazon.com/glue/features/elastic-views Amazon QuickSight Q is a machine learning-powered capability for Amazon QuickSight that lets users type natural language questions about their business data and receive highly accurate answers in seconds Amazon QuickSight is a scalable, serverless, embeddable machine learning-powered business intelligence (BI) service built for the cloud. Amazon QuickSight provides all the benefits of a modern, interactive, self-service BI solution with capabilities that make it easy to embed dashboards in applications and cost-effectively scale to support thousands of customers. Amazon QuickSight's ‘Auto-Narratives' feature provides customers with an automatically generated summary in plain language that interprets and describes what the data in a BI dashboard means, so all users have a shared understanding of the data. Customers like these human-readable narratives because it enables them to quickly interpret the data in a shared dashboard and focus on the insights that matter most. Customers have also been interested in asking business questions of their data in plain language and receiving answers in near real-time. While some BI tools and vendors have attempted to solve this challenge with Natural Language Query (NLQ), the existing approaches require that customers first spend months in advance preparing and building a model, and even then, they still have no way of asking questions that require new calculations that are not pre-defined in the data model. For example, the question, "What is our year-over-year growth rate?" requires that ‘growth rate' be pre-defined as a calculation in the model. With today's BI tools, users need to work with their BI teams to update the model to account for any new calculation or data, which can take days or weeks of effort. Amazon QuickSight Q gives users the ability to ask any question of all their data in natural language and receive an answer in seconds. To ask a question, users simply type it into the Amazon QuickSight Q search bar. As users begin typing their questions, Amazon QuickSight Q provides auto-complete suggestions with key phrases and business terms, and automatically performs spell-check and acronym and synonym matching, so users do not have to worry about typos or remembering the exact business terms for the data. Amazon QuickSight Q uses deep learning and machine learning (natural language processing, schema understanding, and semantic parsing for SQL code generation) to generate a data model that automatically understands the meaning of and relationships between business data, so users receive highly accurate answers to their business questions and do not have to wait days or weeks for a data model to be built. Because Amazon QuickSight Q eliminates the need for BI teams to build a data model, users are also not limited to asking only a specific set of questions. Furthermore, users can get more complete and accurate answers because the query is applied to all of the data, not just the datasets in a pre-determined model. Amazon QuickSight Q comes pre-trained on data from various domains and industries like sales, marketing, operations, retail, human resources, pharmaceuticals, insurance, energy, and more, so it is optimized to also understand complex business language. For example, sales users can ask "how are my sales tracking against quota," or retail users can ask "what are the top products sold week-over-week by region?" Amazon QuickSight Q continually improves its accuracy over time by learning from user interactions. If Amazon QuickSight Q does not understand a phrase in a question, users are prompted to select from a drop-down menu of suggested options in the search bar and Amazon QuickSight Q remembers the phrase for the next interaction. To learn more about Amazon QuickSight Q, visit https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/q Tokyo-based NTT DOCOMO is the largest mobile service provider in Japan, serving more than 80 million customers. "Since migrating to Amazon Redshift in 2014, Amazon Redshift has been the center of our analytics environment and has allowed us to scale to over ten petabytes of uncompressed data with a 10x performance improvement over our prior on-premises system," said Ken Ohta, General Manager of Service Innovation Department, NTT DOCOMO. "As customer demand for data and data volumes grow, continuous innovation from Amazon Redshift has helped us with the flexibility and ease of use needed to scale our systems. We are excited about the launch of AQUA for Amazon Redshift as we continue to increase the performance and scale of our Amazon Redshift data warehouse." Intercom is a fast-growing startup with a $1.3 billion valuation and over $240 million in funding. "Strong customer relationships are more important than ever, but the scale and nature of online business can make it hard to create personal connections. That's why we created the world's first Conversational Relationship Platform to help businesses build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences. To make this work well, and understand our business as it explodes, we rely on an enormous amount of data—70 terabytes and growing," said Paul Vickers, Data Engineering Manager, Intercom. "Our Amazon Redshift cloud data warehouse has made it easy to scale and stay on budget. We're excited about the new AQUA capabilities in Amazon Redshift which will accelerate our queries and reduce our analysts' time to insights. We know with AWS we can focus on our growth, without worrying about how technology will support it." Accenture is a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital, cloud and security. "At Accenture we are committed to providing services and solutions that help customers around the world use data for real-time decision making. However, as data and the demand for insight grows at an incredible pace, it can be challenging to define, prioritize, and process the data," said A.K. Radhakrishnan, North American Data & AI AWS Lead, Accenture. "AQUA for Amazon Redshift provides an innovative new way to approach data warehousing with up to 10x faster query performance. This makes it easier for us to support the goal of a data-driven enterprise." ZS Associates is a professional services firm that works side-by-side with companies to help develop and deliver products that drive customer value and company results. "AWS has always been at the forefront of innovation and is known for bringing best-in-class solutions to help its customers. Using AWS's next-gen technologies and ZS's deep technical as well as domain expertise, we have deployed several large scale data and analytics platforms on Amazon Redshift for customers," said Nishesh Aggarwal, Enterprise Architecture Lead, ZS Associates. "With the introduction of RA3 instances for Amazon Redshift we were able to significantly improve the performance of analytical workloads while solving the data storage issue at the same time. We are really excited to explore AQUA for Amazon Redshift as it promises to further improve the performance of our most complex workloads by around 10x with no additional effort." Sisense is an independent analytics platform that enables more than 2,000 customers worldwide to simplify complex data, and build and embed analytic apps. "The strong collaboration between Sisense and Amazon Redshift results in an improved cloud analytics experience for our many joint customers," said Guy Levy-Yurista, Chief Strategy Officer, Sisense. "With AQUA, we're expecting performance boosts of up to 10x, allowing customers to optimize their Redshift data clusters. These in turn will empower our customers to quickly turn data into insights and infuse intelligence throughout their business." Audible is the leading producer and provider of original spoken-word entertainment and audiobooks, enriching the lives of millions of listeners every day. "At Audible, customers can search and discover original spoken-word entertainment and audiobooks across multiple categories. To power this experience, we need to quickly analyze data from a number of databases to deliver personalized results," said Shailesh Vyas, Principal Software Development Engineer, Audible. "We look forward to trying AWS Glue Elastic Views as a serverless solution to create materialized views from data across multiple different databases in our environment. With AWS Glue Elastic Views, our developers should be able to move faster and focus more on innovating on behalf of our customers versus managing complex data integration pipelines." Best Western Hotels & Resorts, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, is a privately held hotel brand with a global network of approximately 4,700 hotels in over 100countriesand territories worldwide. Best Western offers 18 hotel brands to suit the needs of developers and guests in every market. "Amazon QuickSight's pay-per-use pricing and serverless architecture enabled Best Western's lean analytics team to be agile and deliver increased value to the business, faster, and at less than half the cost of our previous analytics architecture," said Joseph Landucci, Senior Manager, Database and Enterprise Analytics, Best Western Hotels & Resorts. "With Amazon QuickSight Q, we look forward to enabling our business partners to self-serve their questions while reducing the operational overhead on our team for ad hoc requests. This will allow our partners to get answers to their critical business questions quickly by simply typing their questions in plain language." Founded in 1994, Capital One is a leading information-based technology company that is on a mission to help its customers succeed by bringing ingenuity, simplicity, and humanity to banking. "With Amazon QuickSight, we have been able to quickly roll out new machine learning-powered BI dashboards at scale and without any server setup or onerous capacity planning," said Peter Tyson, Senior Data Engineer, Capital One. "Now, with the launch of Amazon QuickSight Q we look forward to making it easy for our users to quickly get answers to their ad-hoc business questions that aren't even part of the BI dashboards." Panasonic Avionics Corporation is the world's leading supplier of in-flight entertainment and communication systems. "Our cloud-based solution collects large amounts of anonymized data that help us optimize the experience for both our airline partners and their passengers," says Anand Desikan, Director of Cloud Operations at Panasonic Avionics Corporation. "We started using Amazon QuickSight to report on in-flight Wi-Fi performance, and with its rich APIs, pay-per-session pricing, and ability to scale, we quickly rolled out Amazon QuickSight dashboards to hundreds of users. The constant evolution of the platform has been impressive: machine learning-powered anomaly detection, Amazon SageMaker integration, embedding, theming, and cross-visual filtering, and now with Amazon QuickSight Q, our users can consume insights by simply typing their business questions in the search bar and Amazon QuickSight Q interprets the business context, provides synonyms, and shows them an answer with no complex interpretation needed." Vyaire Medical, Inc., a global company dedicated to respiratory care, enables, improves, and extends lives with an unyielding focus on improving patient outcomes and increasing value for customers. "In less than two months we were able to pivot our old BI reporting tool into Amazon QuickSight," said Gopal Ramamurthi, Sr. Director Analytics & Enterprise Data Management, Vyaire. "We gained so much in terms of ease of management, especially while scaling the tool to support the increase in number of BI users. Now with the launch of Amazon QuickSight Q, we are looking forward to making it easier for our executive leadership team, sales users in the field, and supervisors in the manufacturing plant to ask their data questions in plain English when the answers are unavailable in the dashboards, providing faster insights that help in making our sales and manufacturing processes even more efficient." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201006065/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift provides an innovative new hardware-accelerated cache that delivers up to 10x better query performance than any other cloud data warehouse</em></p><p><em>AWS Glue Elastic Views lets developers easily build materialized views that automatically combine and replicate data across multiple data stores</em></p><p><em>Amazon QuickSight Q is a machine learning-powered capability for Amazon QuickSight that lets users type questions about their business data in natural language and receive highly accurate answers in seconds</em></p><p><em>Capital One, Best Western Hotels &amp; Resorts, NTT DOCOMO, Audible, and Panasonic Avionics among customers using new analytics capabilities</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced three new analytics capabilities that dramatically improve the performance of Amazon Redshift data warehouses, make it significantly easier for customers to move and combine data across data stores, and make it much simpler for end-users to get more value from their business data using machine learning.</p><ul><li>AQUA for Amazon Redshift accelerates querying with an innovative new hardware-accelerated cache that brings the compute to the storage and delivers up to 10x better query performance than any other cloud data warehouse, with general availability coming in January 2021.</li><li>AWS Glue Elastic Views helps developers build applications that use data from multiple data stores with materialized views that automatically combine and replicate data across storage, data warehouses, and databases.</li><li>Amazon QuickSight Q delivers a machine learning-powered capability for Amazon QuickSight that gives users the ability to use natural language expressions to ask business questions in the Amazon QuickSight Q search bar and receive highly accurate answers in seconds.</li></ul><p>More data is created every hour today than in an entire year just 20 years ago. In fact, the amount of data created over the next three years will be more than the amount of data created over the past 30 years. The same old tools simply won't work in this new world of data. AWS customers use a wide variety of analytics tools for different use cases, including Amazon Athena for serverless querying, Amazon Elasticsearch Service for searching and visualizing log data, Amazon Kinesis for processing real-time data streams, Amazon Redshift for data warehousing, and Amazon EMR for running Apache Spark, Hive, Presto, and other big data frameworks. These services offer AWS customers the right tool for their needs. The new analytics capabilities announced today build on this foundation and provide faster, more cost-effective, and more accessible data analysis across all of a customer's data stores. To learn more, visit https://aws.amazon.com/big-data/datalakes-and-analytics/</p><p>"With the capabilities we're announcing today, we're delivering an order-of-magnitude performance improvement for Amazon Redshift, new flexible ways to more easily move data between data stores, and the ability for customers to ask natural language questions in their business dashboards and receive answers in seconds," said Rahul Pathak, VP, Analytics, AWS. "These capabilities will meaningfully change the speed and ease of use with which customers can get value from their data at any scale."</p><p><em>AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift brings compute to the storage layer, delivering up to 10x faster query performance than any other cloud data warehouse</em></p><p>Since its launch in 2012 as the first data warehouse built for the cloud at a cost of 1/10th that of traditional data warehouses, Amazon Redshift has become the most popular cloud data warehouse. Earlier this year, AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Redshift RA3 instances, which allow customers to scale compute and storage separately and deliver up to 3x better performance than any other cloud data warehouse. However, even with the advantages offered by RA3 instances, the rapid growth of data that customers need to process in their data warehouses has led to a difficult balancing act between performance and cost-effective scaling. The prevailing approach to data warehousing has been to build out an architecture whereby large amounts of centralized storage are moved to waiting compute nodes to process the data. The challenge with this approach is that there is a lot of data movement between the shared data and compute nodes. As data volumes continue to grow at a rapid clip, this data movement saturates available networking bandwidth and slows down performance. In addition to the networking bottleneck, CPUs are not able to keep up with the faster growth in storage capabilities (SSD storage throughput has grown 6x faster than the ability of CPUs to process data from memory), which either creates a new CPU bottleneck of its own or forces more customers to over-provision compute to get their work done more quickly.</p><p>AQUA for Amazon Redshift is a distributed and hardware-accelerated cache for Amazon Redshift; an innovation that improves performance for analytics at the new scale of data. AQUA brings compute to the storage layer, so data does not have to move back and forth between the two. This enables Amazon Redshift to run up to ten times faster than any other cloud data warehouse. The AQUA cache scales out and processes data in parallel across many nodes. Each node possesses a hardware module composed of AWS-designed analytics processors that dramatically accelerate data compression, encryption, and data processing tasks like scans, aggregates, and filtering. AQUA also gives customers the added benefit of being able to do compute on their raw storage, which saves time that would otherwise be spent moving data around. With this new architecture, and the order-of-magnitude better performance it brings, Redshift customers will have more up-to-date dashboards, save development time, and their systems will be easier to maintain. AQUA's preview is now open to all customers, and AQUA will be generally available in January 2021. AQUA is available on Redshift RA3 instances at no additional cost, and customers can take advantage of the AQUA performance improvements without any code changes. To get started with AQUA, visit https://pages.awscloud.com/AQUA_Preview.html</p><p><em>AWS Glue Elastic Views lets developers easily build materialized views that automatically combine and replicate data across multiple data stores</em></p><p>Most companies are building or have already built data lakes, where they can aggregate all of the data from various silos with the right security and access controls, to make it easier to do analytics and machine learning. But for latency and operational reasons, most companies are also likely to have increasing amounts of data in purpose-built data stores outside of their data lakes. As the data in these data lakes and purpose-built data stores continue to grow, companies need an easier way to move data around.</p><p>AWS Glue Elastic Views provides developers with a new capability to easily build materialized views (also called virtual tables) that automatically combine and replicate data across multiple data stores. AWS Glue is a serverless data preparation service that makes it easy to run extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs for analytics and machine learning. With AWS Glue Elastic Views customers can use SQL to create a materialized view of the data they want to combine from different data stores, and AWS Glue Elastic Views copies the data to create the materialized view from the different sources. For example, a customer might create a materialized view that pulls restaurant location information from Amazon Aurora and combines it with customer reviews stored in Amazon DynamoDB to build a search engine for restaurant reviews by location on Amazon Elasticsearch Service. AWS Glue Elastic Viewscopies data from each source database to a target database, and automatically keeps the data in the target database up to date. Elastic Views continually monitors the source database for changes, and updates the target database within seconds. If there is a change to the data model in one of the source databases, Elastic Views proactively alerts the developers, so they can update their materialized view to adapt to the change. Customers can also use Elastic Views to copy operational data from an operational database to their data lake to run analytics in near real-time. AWS Glue Elastic Views automatically scales capacity to accommodate workloads as they ramp up or down, ensuring that the materialized views in the target databases are kept up to date. AWS Glue Elastic Views is available in preview today. To learn more, visit http://aws.amazon.com/glue/features/elastic-views</p><p><em>Amazon QuickSight Q is a machine learning-powered capability for Amazon QuickSight that lets users type natural language questions about their business data and receive highly accurate answers in seconds</em></p><p>Amazon QuickSight is a scalable, serverless, embeddable machine learning-powered business intelligence (BI) service built for the cloud. Amazon QuickSight provides all the benefits of a modern, interactive, self-service BI solution with capabilities that make it easy to embed dashboards in applications and cost-effectively scale to support thousands of customers. Amazon QuickSight's ‘Auto-Narratives' feature provides customers with an automatically generated summary in plain language that interprets and describes what the data in a BI dashboard means, so all users have a shared understanding of the data. Customers like these human-readable narratives because it enables them to quickly interpret the data in a shared dashboard and focus on the insights that matter most. Customers have also been interested in asking business questions of their data in plain language and receiving answers in near real-time. While some BI tools and vendors have attempted to solve this challenge with Natural Language Query (NLQ), the existing approaches require that customers first spend months in advance preparing and building a model, and even then, they still have no way of asking questions that require new calculations that are not pre-defined in the data model. For example, the question, "What is our year-over-year growth rate?" requires that ‘growth rate' be pre-defined as a calculation in the model. With today's BI tools, users need to work with their BI teams to update the model to account for any new calculation or data, which can take days or weeks of effort.</p><p>Amazon QuickSight Q gives users the ability to ask any question of all their data in natural language and receive an answer in seconds. To ask a question, users simply type it into the Amazon QuickSight Q search bar. As users begin typing their questions, Amazon QuickSight Q provides auto-complete suggestions with key phrases and business terms, and automatically performs spell-check and acronym and synonym matching, so users do not have to worry about typos or remembering the exact business terms for the data. Amazon QuickSight Q uses deep learning and machine learning (natural language processing, schema understanding, and semantic parsing for SQL code generation) to generate a data model that automatically understands the meaning of and relationships between business data, so users receive highly accurate answers to their business questions and do not have to wait days or weeks for a data model to be built. Because Amazon QuickSight Q eliminates the need for BI teams to build a data model, users are also not limited to asking only a specific set of questions. Furthermore, users can get more complete and accurate answers because the query is applied to all of the data, not just the datasets in a pre-determined model. Amazon QuickSight Q comes pre-trained on data from various domains and industries like sales, marketing, operations, retail, human resources, pharmaceuticals, insurance, energy, and more, so it is optimized to also understand complex business language. For example, sales users can ask <em>"how are my sales tracking against quota,"</em> or retail users can ask <em>"what are the top products sold week-over-week by region?"</em> Amazon QuickSight Q continually improves its accuracy over time by learning from user interactions. If Amazon QuickSight Q does not understand a phrase in a question, users are prompted to select from a drop-down menu of suggested options in the search bar and Amazon QuickSight Q remembers the phrase for the next interaction. To learn more about Amazon QuickSight Q, visit https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/q</p><p>Tokyo-based NTT DOCOMO is the largest mobile service provider in Japan, serving more than 80 million customers. "Since migrating to Amazon Redshift in 2014, Amazon Redshift has been the center of our analytics environment and has allowed us to scale to over ten petabytes of uncompressed data with a 10x performance improvement over our prior on-premises system," said Ken Ohta, General Manager of Service Innovation Department, NTT DOCOMO. "As customer demand for data and data volumes grow, continuous innovation from Amazon Redshift has helped us with the flexibility and ease of use needed to scale our systems. We are excited about the launch of AQUA for Amazon Redshift as we continue to increase the performance and scale of our Amazon Redshift data warehouse."</p><p>Intercom is a fast-growing startup with a $1.3 billion valuation and over $240 million in funding. "Strong customer relationships are more important than ever, but the scale and nature of online business can make it hard to create personal connections. That's why we created the world's first Conversational Relationship Platform to help businesses build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences. To make this work well, and understand our business as it explodes, we rely on an enormous amount of data—70 terabytes and growing," said Paul Vickers, Data Engineering Manager, Intercom. "Our Amazon Redshift cloud data warehouse has made it easy to scale and stay on budget. We're excited about the new AQUA capabilities in Amazon Redshift which will accelerate our queries and reduce our analysts' time to insights. We know with AWS we can focus on our growth, without worrying about how technology will support it."</p><p>Accenture is a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital, cloud and security. "At Accenture we are committed to providing services and solutions that help customers around the world use data for real-time decision making. However, as data and the demand for insight grows at an incredible pace, it can be challenging to define, prioritize, and process the data," said A.K. Radhakrishnan, North American Data &amp; AI AWS Lead, Accenture. "AQUA for Amazon Redshift provides an innovative new way to approach data warehousing with up to 10x faster query performance. This makes it easier for us to support the goal of a data-driven enterprise."</p><p>ZS Associates is a professional services firm that works side-by-side with companies to help develop and deliver products that drive customer value and company results. "AWS has always been at the forefront of innovation and is known for bringing best-in-class solutions to help its customers. Using AWS's next-gen technologies and ZS's deep technical as well as domain expertise, we have deployed several large scale data and analytics platforms on Amazon Redshift for customers," said Nishesh Aggarwal, Enterprise Architecture Lead, ZS Associates. "With the introduction of RA3 instances for Amazon Redshift we were able to significantly improve the performance of analytical workloads while solving the data storage issue at the same time. We are really excited to explore AQUA for Amazon Redshift as it promises to further improve the performance of our most complex workloads by around 10x with no additional effort."</p><p>Sisense is an independent analytics platform that enables more than 2,000 customers worldwide to simplify complex data, and build and embed analytic apps. "The strong collaboration between Sisense and Amazon Redshift results in an improved cloud analytics experience for our many joint customers," said Guy Levy-Yurista, Chief Strategy Officer, Sisense. "With AQUA, we're expecting performance boosts of up to 10x, allowing customers to optimize their Redshift data clusters. These in turn will empower our customers to quickly turn data into insights and infuse intelligence throughout their business."</p><p>Audible is the leading producer and provider of original spoken-word entertainment and audiobooks, enriching the lives of millions of listeners every day. "At Audible, customers can search and discover original spoken-word entertainment and audiobooks across multiple categories. To power this experience, we need to quickly analyze data from a number of databases to deliver personalized results," said Shailesh Vyas, Principal Software Development Engineer, Audible. "We look forward to trying AWS Glue Elastic Views as a serverless solution to create materialized views from data across multiple different databases in our environment. With AWS Glue Elastic Views, our developers should be able to move faster and focus more on innovating on behalf of our customers versus managing complex data integration pipelines."</p><p>Best Western Hotels &amp; Resorts, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, is a privately held hotel brand with a global network of approximately 4,700 hotels in over 100countriesand territories worldwide. Best Western offers 18 hotel brands to suit the needs of developers and guests in every market. "Amazon QuickSight's pay-per-use pricing and serverless architecture enabled Best Western's lean analytics team to be agile and deliver increased value to the business, faster, and at less than half the cost of our previous analytics architecture," said Joseph Landucci, Senior Manager, Database and Enterprise Analytics, Best Western Hotels &amp; Resorts. "With Amazon QuickSight Q, we look forward to enabling our business partners to self-serve their questions while reducing the operational overhead on our team for ad hoc requests. This will allow our partners to get answers to their critical business questions quickly by simply typing their questions in plain language."</p><p>Founded in 1994, Capital One is a leading information-based technology company that is on a mission to help its customers succeed by bringing ingenuity, simplicity, and humanity to banking. "With Amazon QuickSight, we have been able to quickly roll out new machine learning-powered BI dashboards at scale and without any server setup or onerous capacity planning," said Peter Tyson, Senior Data Engineer, Capital One. "Now, with the launch of Amazon QuickSight Q we look forward to making it easy for our users to quickly get answers to their ad-hoc business questions that aren't even part of the BI dashboards."</p><p>Panasonic Avionics Corporation is the world's leading supplier of in-flight entertainment and communication systems. "Our cloud-based solution collects large amounts of anonymized data that help us optimize the experience for both our airline partners and their passengers," says Anand Desikan, Director of Cloud Operations at Panasonic Avionics Corporation. "We started using Amazon QuickSight to report on in-flight Wi-Fi performance, and with its rich APIs, pay-per-session pricing, and ability to scale, we quickly rolled out Amazon QuickSight dashboards to hundreds of users. The constant evolution of the platform has been impressive: machine learning-powered anomaly detection, Amazon SageMaker integration, embedding, theming, and cross-visual filtering, and now with Amazon QuickSight Q, our users can consume insights by simply typing their business questions in the search bar and Amazon QuickSight Q interprets the business context, provides synonyms, and shows them an answer with no complex interpretation needed."</p><p>Vyaire Medical, Inc., a global company dedicated to respiratory care, enables, improves, and extends lives with an unyielding focus on improving patient outcomes and increasing value for customers. "In less than two months we were able to pivot our old BI reporting tool into Amazon QuickSight," said Gopal Ramamurthi, Sr. Director Analytics &amp; Enterprise Data Management, Vyaire. "We gained so much in terms of ease of management, especially while scaling the tool to support the increase in number of BI users. Now with the launch of Amazon QuickSight Q, we are looking forward to making it easier for our executive leadership team, sales users in the field, and supervisors in the manufacturing plant to ask their data questions in plain English when the answers are unavailable in the dashboards, providing faster insights that help in making our sales and manufacturing processes even more efficient."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201006065/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

AWS Announces Multiple New Compute Innovations, Including Five New Instance Types for Amazon EC2, Two New AWS Outposts SKUs, and Three New AWS Local Zones Locations Across the US

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-Multiple-New-Compute-Innovations-Including-Five-New-Instance-Types-for-Amazon-EC2-Two-New-AWS-Outposts-SKUs-and-Three-New-AWS-Local-Zones-Locations-Across-the-US/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-Multiple-New-Compute-Innovations-Including-Five-New-Instance-Types-for-Amazon-EC2-Two-New-AWS-Outposts-SKUs-and-Three-New-AWS-Local-Zones-Locations-Across-the-US

12/01/2020 10:53:00

AWS Announces Multiple New Compute Innovations, Including Five New Instance Types for Amazon EC2, Two New AWS Outposts SKUs, and Three New AWS Local Zones Locations Across the US

12/01/2020

2020

New AWS Graviton2-powered C6gn instances deliver 100 Gbps networking performance and provide 40% better price performance over comparable current generation x86-based instances New AMD-powered G4ad Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) instances provide the industry's best price performance for graphics-intensive applications New M5zn instances offer the fastest Intel Xeon Scalable processors in the cloud with an all-core turbo frequency of up to 4.5 GHz and up to 45% better compute performance per core than current M5 instances Next-generation Intel-powered D3/D3en instances offer the highest storage capacity for local HDD storage available in the cloud New memory-optimized R5b instances deliver 3x higher performance compared to same size R5 instances for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), providing the fastest block storage performance available for Amazon EC2 Two smaller AWS Outposts form factors—1U and 2U servers—give customers access to AWS on-premises in space-constrained locations AWS Local Zones expand to Boston, Houston, and Miami, with plans to launch in 12 additional cities across the US in 2021 SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced five new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, two new AWS Outposts form factors, and three new AWS Local Zones locations that extend its lead in offering the broadest and deepest portfolio of compute offerings in the cloud. AWS already has more compute instance types than any other cloud provider, with instances based on the fastest processors from Intel, cost-optimized instances with AMD processors, the most powerful GPU instances from NVIDIA, instances that feature up to 400 Gbps networking performance, and the only Arm-based instances in the cloud offering customers 40% better price performance with AWS-designed AWS Graviton2 processors. AWS Outposts is unique in the industry as it enables customers who want to run AWS on-premises to do so with the same Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), tools, and hardware that they use to run AWS in AWS's Regions. AWS Local Zones gives customers who need low latency infrastructure in major metropolitan areas but don't want to provision or maintain datacenter space in those locales the ability to use AWS in these metropolitan areas. Today's announcement provides even more options for customers looking to choose the best compute for their unique needs. To learn more about AWS compute, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/products/compute/ AWS Graviton2-powered C6gn instances: New AWS Graviton2-powered, Arm-based C6gn instances deliver 100 Gbps networking performance (4x higher than C6g) and 38 Gbps EBS bandwidth (2x higher than C6g) for compute-intensive workloads. They also provide 40% better price performance over comparable current generation network-optimized x86-based instances. Today, customers use AWS network optimized instances (e.g. C5n, M5n, R5n) for a variety of network-intensive workloads like firewall, router, and load-balancing appliances, video transcoding, and analytics that can take advantage of high networking throughput and packet rate performance. However, because these instances have a limit in maximum packet rate, some customers need to overprovision compute resources to drive higher packet processing power to achieve the desired networking throughput. C6gn instances provide the best packet processing performance on EC2, enabling customers to migrate to C6gn and consolidate their workloads onto fewer instances or smaller instance sizes, and reduce infrastructure costs. With the new Amazon EC2 C6gn instances, AWS is expanding its Graviton2 portfolio to help customers meet the demands of network-intensive workloads while lowering costs. C6gn supports Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), a network interface for EC2 that makes it possible for applications using popular HPC technologies like Message Passing Interface (MPI) to scale to thousands of CPU cores. C6gn instances will be available later this month in eight sizes providing up to 64 vCPUs, 100 Gbps of network bandwidth, and 38 Gbps of EBS bandwidth. To learn more about C6gn instances visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/c6 Graphics-optimized G4ad instances powered by AMD GPUs: New AMD-powered GPU instances offer the best price performance for graphics-intensive applications in the cloud. Today, customers use G4dn instances powered by NVIDIA GPUs and custom Intel CPUs for graphics-intensive applications like remote graphics workstations, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), video transcoding, photo-realistic design, and game streaming. New G4ad instances feature AMD GPUs and CPUs to offer the lowest cost in the cloud for graphics intensive-applications, providing up to 45% better price performance when compared to NVIDIA GPU-based G4dn instances. G4ad instances feature the latest AMD Radeon Pro V520 GPUs and 2nd generation AMD EPYC processors and offer up to 2.4 TB of local NVMe storage for fast data access. This enables customers to efficiently create photo-realistic and high-resolution 3D content for movies, games, and AR/VR experiences. With access to AMD Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise at no additional cost, G4ad instances offer professional-grade graphics rendering for virtual workstations. Customers looking to use remote workstations in the cloud for running graphics applications (e.g. ESRI ArcGIS Pro, Autodesk Revit, Autodesk Maya, or 3D Studio Max) can use G4ad instances to give them the flexibility to provision resources on a per-project basis and not be limited by availability of on-premises hardware. G4ad instances will be available in the coming days in three sizes, with 1, 2, or 4 GPUs each. To learn more about G4ad instances visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/g4 General purpose M5zn instances powered by the fastest Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs: New M5zn instances feature the highest single-threaded performance (for applications that execute a series of individual tasks sequentially) from Intel Xeon Scalable (Cascade Lake) processors available in the cloud. Today, customers use Amazon EC2 z1d instances when they need a high-frequency CPU (to perform single-threaded tasks more quickly and run more jobs per core) and local, low latency storage for workloads like electronic design automation (EDA) and relational database applications that require both high per-core performance and a large memory footprint. While many customers benefit from the high compute performance of z1d instances, they do not always fully utilize the available memory and local storage, which results in overprovisioning compute and leads to higher infrastructure costs. Customers performing complex calculations and real-time analysis for their financial, analytics, and gaming workloads have asked for an EC2 instance that balances faster compute performance, lower memory, and higher networking throughput. M5zn instances deliver an all-core turbo frequency of up to 4.5 GHz, 4 GiB memory per vCPU, 100 Gbps of network bandwidth, and are available in seven sizes (up to 48 vCPUs and 192 GiB memory). M5zn instances offer up to 45% better per-core performance compared to M5 instances, allowing them to right-size their instances to save on infrastructure costs and reduce per-core software licensing. M5zn instances support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), which provides low latency, high throughput networking, and the ability to scale up to tens of thousands of processor cores. The combination of high per-core performance and network throughput make M5zn instances ideal for gaming, analytical, and simulation applications like those used by the financial, automotive, aerospace, energy, and telecommunication industries, where performance per-core is a bottleneck. M5zn instances are available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo), with availability planned for additional Regions soon. To get started with M5zn instances visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/m5/ Highest capacity D3/D3en storage-optimized instances: Next-generation Intel-powered storage-optimized instances deliver the highest capacity HDD instance storage in the cloud.Today,customers rely on Amazon EC2 to run dense storage workloads that require high throughput access to large quantities of data like massively parallel processing data warehousing (e.g. Amazon Redshift and HP Vertica), big data and analytics distributed file systems (e.g. Hadoop and MapReduce), network file systems (e.g. Lustre and Windows File System), and log or data processing applications (e.g. Kafka and Elasticsearch). While customers running these workloads on D2 instances today enjoy the available storage per vCPU and low cost, they also want higher CPU performance and network speed to meet the increasing performance requirements of these dense storage workloads. At the same time, customers running compute and storage clusters on-premises have expressed a need for dense storage with even more storage per vCPU at a lower cost for migrating and scaling their network and distributed file systems on AWS. Next-generation D3 instances deliver up to 30% better processing performance, and up to 2.5x higher network performance over previous generation D2 instances. D3 instances feature 2nd generation Intel Xeon (Cascade Lake) processors with a sustained all-core frequency of 3.1 GHz, and they offer up to 48 TB of storage, 32 vCPUs, 256 GiB of memory, and 25 Gbps of network bandwidth. A new extended storage and high-speed networking variant, D3en instances, provides additional HDD storage capacity compared to D2 instances, offering 336 total TB of storage (7x higher than D2 instances), 75 Gbps of network bandwidth (7.5x higher than D2 instances), and up to 6.2 GiBps of disk throughput (2x higher than D2 instances). D3en instances deliver highest capacity local HDD storage in the cloud, an up to 80% reduction in cost-per-TB compared to D2 instances, and let customers architect petabyte-scale file storage clusters so they can consolidate their high capacity big data analytical workloads. D3/D3en instances are available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Paris), Europe (Sweden), Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), China (Beijing), China (Ningxia), GovCloud (US East), and GovCloud (US West). To get started with D3/D3en instances visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/d3 R5b memory-optimized instances: New memory-optimized instances enhanced for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) deliver up to 60 Gbps of bandwidth and 260,000 IOPS of instance-to-EBS performance for the most demanding database workloads. Today, many customers use R5 instances for large relational database workloads like commerce platforms, ERP systems, and health record systems, and rely on EBS to deliver scalable, durable, and highly available block storage. While R5 instances offer sufficient storage performance for many use cases, some customers have on-premises workloads that would benefit from even more EBS performance, including large commercial database workloads from SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server that have high performance storage requirements. These customers have to scale their R5 instances to achieve their desired EBS performance, increasing their infrastructure and database licensing costs and reducing the compute and memory utilization. With 60 Gbps of bandwidth and 260,000 IOPS, R5b instances increase instance-to-EBS performance by 3x compared to same-sized R5 instances. This drives significantly increased performance for large database workloads that process large data sets in memory. The increased instance-to-EBS performance of R5b instances allows customers to move their storage performance-intensive workloads like relational databases and data analytics from on-premises data centers to AWS to realize reduced costs and greater security, scalability, and reliability. R5b instances also support EBS io2 Block Express volumes (in preview) enabling customers to have a single 99.999% (five 9s) durable EBS volume with up to 256,000 IOPS and 4,000 MB/second of throughput to further consolidate their storage intensive workloads. Existing EC2 customers with workloads sensitive to storage performance can consolidate their workloads on fewer R5b instances, or on smaller instance sizes by migrating from R5 to R5b. This enables them to reduce both infrastructure and licensing costs. R5b instances are supported by Amazon RDS for Oracle and Amazon RDS for SQL Server. This simplifies the migration path for running commercial database applications on AWS and improves storage performance for current RDS customers by up to 3x. R5b instances are available in US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Europe (Frankfurt), with availability in additional regions to follow. To get started with R5b instances visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/r5/ Smaller AWS Outposts form factors give customers access to AWS on-premises in space-constrained locations Before today's announcement, AWS Outposts provided customers with the ability to run their workloads on-premises and seamlessly connect with the broad array of AWS services in the cloud in a form factor that scales from one rack (roughly the size of a refrigerator) to dozens of racks, with capacity equivalent to hundreds or thousands of servers. Some customers also want to extend the benefit of AWS Outposts to locations that may have constraints on space, power, or networking, or do not need a full rack of capacity. For example, retail stores may need to run their sales or security systems on-premises for low latency and local network access, but still want to aggregate inventory data and analyze customer behavior using data lakes and machine learning models running in an AWS Region. Other customers may have workloads that do not require a full rack of capacity, such as a hospital's patient portal, a product line-monitoring workload in a factory, or a telecommunications provider's 5G network management application. Also, for many of these use cases, customers may need to set up servers across hundreds or thousands of remote locations, which can take weeks or months. In all of these cases, customers then need to manage applications across servers, monitor health and performance of the applications and infrastructure, and ensure that the applications have the latest security patches, which is time-consuming and can impact application availability. Two new smaller AWS Outposts form factors will allow customers to bring the same AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models on-premises to space-constrained locations like branch offices, factories, hospitals, cell towers, or retail stores. AWS Outposts will now be available in two new smaller form factors – a 1U (a 1 ¾-inch tall one rack unit server) and a 2U (a 3 ½-inch tall two rack unit server) version – that require significantly less power and network connectivity than the full 42-rack unit AWS Outposts. The 1U form factor AWS Outposts is suitable for 19-inch wide, 24-inch deep cabinets in space-constrained locations (e.g. cell sites or some retail shops) and provides 64 vCPUs, 128 GiB memory, and 4 TB of local NVMe storage. The 2U form factor is suitable for standard 19-inch wide, 36-inch deep cabinets, and provides up to 128 vCPUs, 512 GiB memory, and 8 TB of local NVMe storage, with configurations that support accelerators like AWS Inferentia or GPUs. Each of these smaller form factors allow customers to run AWS services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on-premises. Once AWS Outposts is connected to a customer's network, AWS will remotely manage the infrastructure just like the hardware running in an AWS Region, including pushing automated security patches and monitoring hardware health, which saves customers time and money. As before, AWS Outposts gives customers access to the same familiar AWS APIs, control plane, tools, and hardware on-premises as in an AWS Region at virtually any location, regardless of space constraints or capacity requirements. It also seamlessly connects back to AWS for the full array of AWS services – providing for a truly consistent hybrid experience. The smaller AWS Outposts form factors will be available in 2021. To learn more, visit https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/ AWS Local Zones expand to Boston, Houston, and Miami, with plans to launch 12 additional Local Zones across the US in 2021 AWS spans 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions around the world, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. The vast majority of customers get the necessary performance for their applications in public AWS Regions. However, for some of the more latency-sensitive and throughput-sensitive workloads (e.g. remote real-time gaming, machine learning inference, and live video streaming), customers want AWS infrastructure closer to their end-users. These latency-sensitive workloads have traditionally required customers to procure, operate, and maintain IT infrastructure in their own data center or co-location facility, adding cost and operational complexity. Customers also had to build and run these low latency application components with a different set of APIs and tools than the other parts of their applications running in AWS. Prior to today, customers could use AWS Local Zones in Los Angeles to deliver single-digit latency access to applications for end-users located in the Southern California area. However, customers outside of Southern California also want this capability for end-users in other cities across the US. With today's announcement, customers can now use new AWS Local Zones in Houston, Boston, and Miami to run AWS compute, storage, database, analytics, and machine learning services, and deliver applications with single-digit millisecond latencies to local end-users nearby. With an additional 12 Local Zones launching in 2021 in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, and Seattle, customers will be able to deliver ultra-low latency applications to end-users in cities across the US. AWS Local Zones are managed and supported by AWS, meaning customers no longer need to incur the expense or effort of procuring, operating, and maintaining data centers or co-location facilities in various cities to support ultra-low latency applications. AWS Local Zones provide customers a high-bandwidth, secure connection between their local workloads and those running in the closest AWS Region. This gives customers the ability to use the same AWS APIs and tools to run latency-sensitive workloads nearby to end-users, while seamlessly connecting to the full range of services in the AWS Region. To learn more about AWS Local Zones, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/localzones "Whether your organization has been all-in on the cloud since day one or is just beginning to move workloads to the cloud, all customers want to optimize for price performance," said Dave Brown, Vice President, EC2, AWS. "As customers bring more and more workloads to the cloud, AWS continues to expand the industry's leading compute portfolio to meet their increasingly diverse needs. With the new EC2 instance types, AWS Outposts and AWS Local Zones options we're introducing today, we're providing customers with an unmatched breadth and depth of capabilities to help them innovate more cost-effectively, with the right compute for the right job." Datadog, Inc. is the monitoring and security platform for cloud applications. "We're excited about the M5zn instances and the impact they can have on our high throughput compute and network intensive applications," said Rob Boll, Director, Runtime Platforms, at Datadog. "Many of our compute intensive workloads will benefit from the improved performance per core, and with 100 Gbps networking throughput, we'll be able to pack workloads more efficiently onto fewer nodes. We expect to see significant infrastructure cost savings as we move our larger workloads over to M5zn instances." Ubitus is a cloud gaming technology leader. Through their platforms, users can enjoy a AAA gaming experience on any device including smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, smart TVs, and computers as long as they're connected to a broadband network. "We used AWS to partner with 505 Games to bring Control Ultimate Edition to a highly popular portable gaming device," said Wesley Kuo, CEO of Ubitus. "With the new EC2 G4ad instances we have a lower cost structure, which will enable us to bring more games like Control Ultimate Edition to the mobile users globally." Netflix is the world's leading streaming entertainment service with over 190 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, documentaries, and feature films across a wide variety of genres and languages. "We have many artists and content creators who can benefit from bringing the on-premises infrastructure they use day-to-day to the cloud. However, every second counts, especially when it comes to the time it takes to compile and render 3D models and animations. For some time, we have wanted to move these artists' workstations to AWS in order to take advantage of the performance, elasticity, and cost benefits of the cloud. However, due to the interactive nature of these applications, our artists need very low latency access to their workstations to have a good working experience," said Nils Pommerien, Director, Cloud Infrastructure Engineering, Netflix. "AWS Local Zones, which bring cloud resources closer to our artists, have been a game-changer for these applications. By taking advantage of access to AWS's highly performant and cost-effective compute resources, we have been able to migrate portions of our content creation process to AWS Local Zones, while ensuring an even better experience for artists." Mindbody is the leading technology platform for the fitness, wellness, and beauty industries. "We have a portfolio of interdependent applications running in our existing on-premises data centers. We have been looking to move these workloads to the public cloud for some time. However, it is daunting to migrate such complex, interdependent applications to the cloud at the same time while ensuring a seamless experience for our end users," said John Strong, Senior Director of Production Engineering, Mindbody. "AWS Local Zones have solved a significant problem for us here. We are using Local Zones to migrate our complex, legacy on-premises applications to AWS without an expensive revamp of our architecture. With a Direct Connect to Local Zones, we are able to establish a hybrid environment that provides ultra-low latency communication between applications running in the Local Zone and our on-premises installations. In turn, this has enabled us to migrate applications incrementally, simplifying our migrations drastically while reducing any business risk with on-going hybrid deployments." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201005873/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>New AWS Graviton2-powered C6gn instances deliver 100 Gbps networking performance and provide 40% better price performance over comparable current generation x86-based instances</em></p><p><em>New AMD-powered G4ad Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) instances provide the industry's best price performance for graphics-intensive applications</em></p><p><em>New M5zn instances offer the fastest Intel Xeon Scalable processors in the cloud with an all-core turbo frequency of up to 4.5 GHz and up to 45% better compute performance per core than current M5 instances</em></p><p><em>Next-generation Intel-powered D3/D3en instances</em> <em>offer the highest storage capacity for local HDD storage available in the cloud</em></p><p><em>New memory-optimized R5b instances deliver 3x higher performance compared to same size R5 instances for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), providing the fastest block storage performance available for Amazon EC2</em></p><p><em>Two smaller AWS Outposts form factors—1U and 2U servers—give customers access to AWS on-premises in space-constrained locations</em></p><p><em>AWS Local Zones expand to Boston, Houston, and Miami, with plans to launch in 12 additional cities across the US in 2021</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced five new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, two new AWS Outposts form factors, and three new AWS Local Zones locations that extend its lead in offering the broadest and deepest portfolio of compute offerings in the cloud. AWS already has more compute instance types than any other cloud provider, with instances based on the fastest processors from Intel, cost-optimized instances with AMD processors, the most powerful GPU instances from NVIDIA, instances that feature up to 400 Gbps networking performance, and the only Arm-based instances in the cloud offering customers 40% better price performance with AWS-designed AWS Graviton2 processors. AWS Outposts is unique in the industry as it enables customers who want to run AWS on-premises to do so with the same Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), tools, and hardware that they use to run AWS in AWS's Regions. AWS Local Zones gives customers who need low latency infrastructure in major metropolitan areas but don't want to provision or maintain datacenter space in those locales the ability to use AWS in these metropolitan areas. Today's announcement provides even more options for customers looking to choose the best compute for their unique needs. To learn more about AWS compute, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/products/compute/</p><ul><li>AWS Graviton2-powered C6gn instances: New AWS Graviton2-powered, Arm-based C6gn instances deliver 100 Gbps networking performance (4x higher than C6g) and 38 Gbps EBS bandwidth (2x higher than C6g) for compute-intensive workloads. They also provide 40% better price performance over comparable current generation network-optimized x86-based instances. Today, customers use AWS network optimized instances (e.g. C5n, M5n, R5n) for a variety of network-intensive workloads like firewall, router, and load-balancing appliances, video transcoding, and analytics that can take advantage of high networking throughput and packet rate performance. However, because these instances have a limit in maximum packet rate, some customers need to overprovision compute resources to drive higher packet processing power to achieve the desired networking throughput. C6gn instances provide the best packet processing performance on EC2, enabling customers to migrate to C6gn and consolidate their workloads onto fewer instances or smaller instance sizes, and reduce infrastructure costs. With the new Amazon EC2 C6gn instances, AWS is expanding its Graviton2 portfolio to help customers meet the demands of network-intensive workloads while lowering costs. C6gn supports Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), a network interface for EC2 that makes it possible for applications using popular HPC technologies like Message Passing Interface (MPI) to scale to thousands of CPU cores. C6gn instances will be available later this month in eight sizes providing up to 64 vCPUs, 100 Gbps of network bandwidth, and 38 Gbps of EBS bandwidth. To learn more about C6gn instances visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/c6</li><li>Graphics-optimized G4ad instances powered by AMD GPUs: New AMD-powered GPU instances offer the best price performance for graphics-intensive applications in the cloud. Today, customers use G4dn instances powered by NVIDIA GPUs and custom Intel CPUs for graphics-intensive applications like remote graphics workstations, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), video transcoding, photo-realistic design, and game streaming. New G4ad instances feature AMD GPUs and CPUs to offer the lowest cost in the cloud for graphics intensive-applications, providing up to 45% better price performance when compared to NVIDIA GPU-based G4dn instances. G4ad instances feature the latest AMD Radeon Pro V520 GPUs and 2nd generation AMD EPYC processors and offer up to 2.4 TB of local NVMe storage for fast data access. This enables customers to efficiently create photo-realistic and high-resolution 3D content for movies, games, and AR/VR experiences. With access to AMD Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise at no additional cost, G4ad instances offer professional-grade graphics rendering for virtual workstations. Customers looking to use remote workstations in the cloud for running graphics applications (e.g. ESRI ArcGIS Pro, Autodesk Revit, Autodesk Maya, or 3D Studio Max) can use G4ad instances to give them the flexibility to provision resources on a per-project basis and not be limited by availability of on-premises hardware. G4ad instances will be available in the coming days in three sizes, with 1, 2, or 4 GPUs each. To learn more about G4ad instances visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/g4</li><li>General purpose M5zn instances powered by the fastest Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs: New M5zn instances feature the highest single-threaded performance (for applications that execute a series of individual tasks sequentially) from Intel Xeon Scalable (Cascade Lake) processors available in the cloud. Today, customers use Amazon EC2 z1d instances when they need a high-frequency CPU (to perform single-threaded tasks more quickly and run more jobs per core) and local, low latency storage for workloads like electronic design automation (EDA) and relational database applications that require both high per-core performance and a large memory footprint. While many customers benefit from the high compute performance of z1d instances, they do not always fully utilize the available memory and local storage, which results in overprovisioning compute and leads to higher infrastructure costs. Customers performing complex calculations and real-time analysis for their financial, analytics, and gaming workloads have asked for an EC2 instance that balances faster compute performance, lower memory, and higher networking throughput. M5zn instances deliver an all-core turbo frequency of up to 4.5 GHz, 4 GiB memory per vCPU, 100 Gbps of network bandwidth, and are available in seven sizes (up to 48 vCPUs and 192 GiB memory). M5zn instances offer up to 45% better per-core performance compared to M5 instances, allowing them to right-size their instances to save on infrastructure costs and reduce per-core software licensing. M5zn instances support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), which provides low latency, high throughput networking, and the ability to scale up to tens of thousands of processor cores. The combination of high per-core performance and network throughput make M5zn instances ideal for gaming, analytical, and simulation applications like those used by the financial, automotive, aerospace, energy, and telecommunication industries, where performance per-core is a bottleneck. M5zn instances are available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo), with availability planned for additional Regions soon. To get started with M5zn instances visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/m5/</li><li>Highest capacity D3/D3en storage-optimized instances: Next-generation Intel-powered storage-optimized instances deliver the highest capacity HDD instance storage in the cloud.Today,customers rely on Amazon EC2 to run dense storage workloads that require high throughput access to large quantities of data like massively parallel processing data warehousing (e.g. Amazon Redshift and HP Vertica), big data and analytics distributed file systems (e.g. Hadoop and MapReduce), network file systems (e.g. Lustre and Windows File System), and log or data processing applications (e.g. Kafka and Elasticsearch). While customers running these workloads on D2 instances today enjoy the available storage per vCPU and low cost, they also want higher CPU performance and network speed to meet the increasing performance requirements of these dense storage workloads. At the same time, customers running compute and storage clusters on-premises have expressed a need for dense storage with even more storage per vCPU at a lower cost for migrating and scaling their network and distributed file systems on AWS. Next-generation D3 instances deliver up to 30% better processing performance, and up to 2.5x higher network performance over previous generation D2 instances. D3 instances feature 2nd generation Intel Xeon (Cascade Lake) processors with a sustained all-core frequency of 3.1 GHz, and they offer up to 48 TB of storage, 32 vCPUs, 256 GiB of memory, and 25 Gbps of network bandwidth. A new extended storage and high-speed networking variant, D3en instances, provides additional HDD storage capacity compared to D2 instances, offering 336 total TB of storage (7x higher than D2 instances), 75 Gbps of network bandwidth (7.5x higher than D2 instances), and up to 6.2 GiBps of disk throughput (2x higher than D2 instances). D3en instances deliver highest capacity local HDD storage in the cloud, an up to 80% reduction in cost-per-TB compared to D2 instances, and let customers architect petabyte-scale file storage clusters so they can consolidate their high capacity big data analytical workloads. D3/D3en instances are available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Paris), Europe (Sweden), Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), China (Beijing), China (Ningxia), GovCloud (US East), and GovCloud (US West). To get started with D3/D3en instances visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/d3</li><li>R5b memory-optimized instances: New memory-optimized instances enhanced for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) deliver up to 60 Gbps of bandwidth and 260,000 IOPS of instance-to-EBS performance for the most demanding database workloads. Today, many customers use R5 instances for large relational database workloads like commerce platforms, ERP systems, and health record systems, and rely on EBS to deliver scalable, durable, and highly available block storage. While R5 instances offer sufficient storage performance for many use cases, some customers have on-premises workloads that would benefit from even more EBS performance, including large commercial database workloads from SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server that have high performance storage requirements. These customers have to scale their R5 instances to achieve their desired EBS performance, increasing their infrastructure and database licensing costs and reducing the compute and memory utilization. With 60 Gbps of bandwidth and 260,000 IOPS, R5b instances increase instance-to-EBS performance by 3x compared to same-sized R5 instances. This drives significantly increased performance for large database workloads that process large data sets in memory. The increased instance-to-EBS performance of R5b instances allows customers to move their storage performance-intensive workloads like relational databases and data analytics from on-premises data centers to AWS to realize reduced costs and greater security, scalability, and reliability. R5b instances also support EBS io2 Block Express volumes (in preview) enabling customers to have a single 99.999% (five 9s) durable EBS volume with up to 256,000 IOPS and 4,000 MB/second of throughput to further consolidate their storage intensive workloads. Existing EC2 customers with workloads sensitive to storage performance can consolidate their workloads on fewer R5b instances, or on smaller instance sizes by migrating from R5 to R5b. This enables them to reduce both infrastructure and licensing costs. R5b instances are supported by Amazon RDS for Oracle and Amazon RDS for SQL Server. This simplifies the migration path for running commercial database applications on AWS and improves storage performance for current RDS customers by up to 3x. R5b instances are available in US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Europe (Frankfurt), with availability in additional regions to follow. To get started with R5b instances visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/r5/</li></ul><p><em>Smaller AWS Outposts form factors give customers access to AWS on-premises in space-constrained locations</em></p><p>Before today's announcement, AWS Outposts provided customers with the ability to run their workloads on-premises and seamlessly connect with the broad array of AWS services in the cloud in a form factor that scales from one rack (roughly the size of a refrigerator) to dozens of racks, with capacity equivalent to hundreds or thousands of servers. Some customers also want to extend the benefit of AWS Outposts to locations that may have constraints on space, power, or networking, or do not need a full rack of capacity. For example, retail stores may need to run their sales or security systems on-premises for low latency and local network access, but still want to aggregate inventory data and analyze customer behavior using data lakes and machine learning models running in an AWS Region. Other customers may have workloads that do not require a full rack of capacity, such as a hospital's patient portal, a product line-monitoring workload in a factory, or a telecommunications provider's 5G network management application. Also, for many of these use cases, customers may need to set up servers across hundreds or thousands of remote locations, which can take weeks or months. In all of these cases, customers then need to manage applications across servers, monitor health and performance of the applications and infrastructure, and ensure that the applications have the latest security patches, which is time-consuming and can impact application availability.</p><p>Two new smaller AWS Outposts form factors will allow customers to bring the same AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models on-premises to space-constrained locations like branch offices, factories, hospitals, cell towers, or retail stores. AWS Outposts will now be available in two new smaller form factors – a 1U (a 1 ¾-inch tall one rack unit server) and a 2U (a 3 ½-inch tall two rack unit server) version – that require significantly less power and network connectivity than the full 42-rack unit AWS Outposts. The 1U form factor AWS Outposts is suitable for 19-inch wide, 24-inch deep cabinets in space-constrained locations (e.g. cell sites or some retail shops) and provides 64 vCPUs, 128 GiB memory, and 4 TB of local NVMe storage. The 2U form factor is suitable for standard 19-inch wide, 36-inch deep cabinets, and provides up to 128 vCPUs, 512 GiB memory, and 8 TB of local NVMe storage, with configurations that support accelerators like AWS Inferentia or GPUs. Each of these smaller form factors allow customers to run AWS services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on-premises. Once AWS Outposts is connected to a customer's network, AWS will remotely manage the infrastructure just like the hardware running in an AWS Region, including pushing automated security patches and monitoring hardware health, which saves customers time and money. As before, AWS Outposts gives customers access to the same familiar AWS APIs, control plane, tools, and hardware on-premises as in an AWS Region at virtually any location, regardless of space constraints or capacity requirements. It also seamlessly connects back to AWS for the full array of AWS services – providing for a truly consistent hybrid experience. The smaller AWS Outposts form factors will be available in 2021. To learn more, visit https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/</p><p><em>AWS Local Zones expand to Boston, Houston, and Miami, with plans to launch 12 additional Local Zones across the US in 2021</em></p><p>AWS spans 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions around the world, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. The vast majority of customers get the necessary performance for their applications in public AWS Regions. However, for some of the more latency-sensitive and throughput-sensitive workloads (e.g. remote real-time gaming, machine learning inference, and live video streaming), customers want AWS infrastructure closer to their end-users. These latency-sensitive workloads have traditionally required customers to procure, operate, and maintain IT infrastructure in their own data center or co-location facility, adding cost and operational complexity. Customers also had to build and run these low latency application components with a different set of APIs and tools than the other parts of their applications running in AWS. Prior to today, customers could use AWS Local Zones in Los Angeles to deliver single-digit latency access to applications for end-users located in the Southern California area. However, customers outside of Southern California also want this capability for end-users in other cities across the US.</p><p>With today's announcement, customers can now use new AWS Local Zones in Houston, Boston, and Miami to run AWS compute, storage, database, analytics, and machine learning services, and deliver applications with single-digit millisecond latencies to local end-users nearby. With an additional 12 Local Zones launching in 2021 in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, and Seattle, customers will be able to deliver ultra-low latency applications to end-users in cities across the US. AWS Local Zones are managed and supported by AWS, meaning customers no longer need to incur the expense or effort of procuring, operating, and maintaining data centers or co-location facilities in various cities to support ultra-low latency applications. AWS Local Zones provide customers a high-bandwidth, secure connection between their local workloads and those running in the closest AWS Region. This gives customers the ability to use the same AWS APIs and tools to run latency-sensitive workloads nearby to end-users, while seamlessly connecting to the full range of services in the AWS Region. To learn more about AWS Local Zones, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/localzones</p><p>"Whether your organization has been all-in on the cloud since day one or is just beginning to move workloads to the cloud, all customers want to optimize for price performance," said Dave Brown, Vice President, EC2, AWS. "As customers bring more and more workloads to the cloud, AWS continues to expand the industry's leading compute portfolio to meet their increasingly diverse needs. With the new EC2 instance types, AWS Outposts and AWS Local Zones options we're introducing today, we're providing customers with an unmatched breadth and depth of capabilities to help them innovate more cost-effectively, with the right compute for the right job."</p><p>Datadog, Inc. is the monitoring and security platform for cloud applications. "We're excited about the M5zn instances and the impact they can have on our high throughput compute and network intensive applications," said Rob Boll, Director, Runtime Platforms, at Datadog. "Many of our compute intensive workloads will benefit from the improved performance per core, and with 100 Gbps networking throughput, we'll be able to pack workloads more efficiently onto fewer nodes. We expect to see significant infrastructure cost savings as we move our larger workloads over to M5zn instances."</p><p>Ubitus is a cloud gaming technology leader. Through their platforms, users can enjoy a AAA gaming experience on any device including smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, smart TVs, and computers as long as they're connected to a broadband network. "We used AWS to partner with 505 Games to bring Control Ultimate Edition to a highly popular portable gaming device," said Wesley Kuo, CEO of Ubitus. "With the new EC2 G4ad instances we have a lower cost structure, which will enable us to bring more games like Control Ultimate Edition to the mobile users globally."</p><p>Netflix is the world's leading streaming entertainment service with over 190 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, documentaries, and feature films across a wide variety of genres and languages. "We have many artists and content creators who can benefit from bringing the on-premises infrastructure they use day-to-day to the cloud. However, every second counts, especially when it comes to the time it takes to compile and render 3D models and animations. For some time, we have wanted to move these artists' workstations to AWS in order to take advantage of the performance, elasticity, and cost benefits of the cloud. However, due to the interactive nature of these applications, our artists need very low latency access to their workstations to have a good working experience," said Nils Pommerien, Director, Cloud Infrastructure Engineering, Netflix. "AWS Local Zones, which bring cloud resources closer to our artists, have been a game-changer for these applications. By taking advantage of access to AWS's highly performant and cost-effective compute resources, we have been able to migrate portions of our content creation process to AWS Local Zones, while ensuring an even better experience for artists."</p><p>Mindbody is the leading technology platform for the fitness, wellness, and beauty industries. "We have a portfolio of interdependent applications running in our existing on-premises data centers. We have been looking to move these workloads to the public cloud for some time. However, it is daunting to migrate such complex, interdependent applications to the cloud at the same time while ensuring a seamless experience for our end users," said John Strong, Senior Director of Production Engineering, Mindbody. "AWS Local Zones have solved a significant problem for us here. We are using Local Zones to migrate our complex, legacy on-premises applications to AWS without an expensive revamp of our architecture. With a Direct Connect to Local Zones, we are able to establish a hybrid environment that provides ultra-low latency communication between applications running in the Local Zone and our on-premises installations. In turn, this has enabled us to migrate applications incrementally, simplifying our migrations drastically while reducing any business risk with on-going hybrid deployments."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201005873/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

Boom Supersonic Goes All-In on AWS

/news/news-details/2020/Boom-Supersonic-Goes-All-In-on-AWS/default.aspx

Boom-Supersonic-Goes-All-In-on-AWS

12/01/2020 10:30:00

Boom Supersonic Goes All-In on AWS

12/01/2020

2020

Aerospace company leverages AWS's unmatched breadth and depth of services and proven infrastructure to design and manufacture the world's fastest and most sustainable commercial aircraft SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Boom Technology, Inc. (Boom Supersonic), a Denver-based aviation company that is bringing commercial supersonic flight back to the skies, is going all-in on AWS. Boom Supersonic is leveraging the world's leading cloud to provide the company with the virtually unlimited compute power, storage, security, and comprehensive set of services that it will take to reinvent supersonic commercial travel. The company is designing the first supersonic airliner in decades, called Overture, which will roll out in 2025, and will fly more than 500 transoceanic routes in half the time. For example, Overture will take passengers from Tokyo to Seattle in four and a half hours. Since its inception, Boom has leveraged AWS's unmatched portfolio of services to accelerate the design and construction of its aircraft, including XB-1 – the demonstrator airplane for Overture and the world's first independently developed supersonic aircraft – which Boom unveiled on October 7, 2020. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201005786/en/ A rendering of Boom's Overture supersonic airliner, which will roll out in 2025 and fly to more than 500 transoceanic routes in half the time. (Photo: Business Wire) Supersonic aircraft require a precise combination of performance, structural stability, and safety that makes designing them both resource and time intensive. With an on-premises infrastructure, a design team would have to manage a large queue of design iterations running one after the other, to find the right balance. However, by tapping into the virtually unlimited scale of AWS HPC resources, Boom can run thousands of advanced computer simulations concurrently, far faster and more cost-effectively than ever before possible, resulting in an estimated 6x increase in productivity versus running these simulations in an on-premises environment. In order to refine its design, conduct stress tests, and simulate flight conditions for XB-1, Boom utilized more than 53 million compute hours on AWS with expectations to scale to more than 100 million compute hours in order to complete design and testing of its Overture airliner. By going all-in on AWS, Boom is able to leverage AWS's global infrastructure and unmatched portfolio of services to manufacture aircraft that meet security and compliance regulations while delivering on its commitment to sustainability. Boom plans to use AWS services, including capabilities in Internet of Things, machine learning, compute, storage, security, managed database, and analytics to build its 65-88-seat supersonic airliner and transform the flight experience for passengers. In addition, Boom's 525 terabyte repository of XB-1 design and testing data will be stored in AWS, along with its core IT applications which will streamline the company's operations so it can focus on innovation. Boom also plans to build a data lake for its manufacturing operations on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and use AWS IoT services including AWS IoT Core (a cloud service that lets connected devices easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices) to collect and process real-time data from its manufacturing equipment. Leveraging AWS analytics and machine learning services, Boom will gain deeper insights into its manufacturing processes to inform future decision-making, streamline workflows, and improve quality control. In addition to developing its state-of-the art aircraft design, which promises to be the next major innovation in high speed air travel since jet airplanes were introduced more than 60 years ago, Boom also plans for Overture to be the most passenger-centric airliner in the world by offering passengers superior comfort, tranquility, and productivity. To support this development, Boom is exploring how AWS IoT and machine learning solutions can be used inside the Overture cabin to reimagine the on-board experience for both passengers and crew, looking at ways to customize passenger messaging, deliver intelligent in-flight entertainment, create wearables for crew members, and improve on-time departure performance using live occupancy and equipment data. "Boom is committed to making supersonic flight mainstream by leveraging improvements in technology, sustainability, and passenger experience. As we build the first supersonic airliner in a new age of travel, AWS, the world's leading cloud provider, will help us continuously refine our designs without compromise so that we can deliver a superior flight experience to the flying public," said Blake Scholl, Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. "AWS's proven infrastructure and unparalleled portfolio of services are helping us deliver a revolution in air travel." "Boom is taking a born-in-the-cloud approach to innovation and embracing the breadth, depth, and performance of AWS to reinvent commercial supersonic air travel," said Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector and Regulated Industries at Amazon Web Services, Inc. "We are thrilled to be collaborating with Boom to leverage the cloud to launch the next era of travel. By going all-in on AWS, Boom can innovate without bounds and more quickly than was previously possible, to make the world more accessible to everyone." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. About Boom Supersonic Boom Supersonic is redefining commercial flight by bringing supersonic flight back to the skies with Overture. This historic commercial airliner is designed and committed to industry-leading standards of speed, safety, and sustainability. Boom's vision is to bring families, businesses, and cultures closer together through supersonic travel and make the world dramatically more accessible. Boom is the first commercial airplane manufacturer to commit to a carbon-neutral flight test program and to build sustainability into its entire aircraft program. XB-1, Boom's supersonic demonstrator aircraft for Overture, rolled out in 2020 and is poised for its first flight in 2021. The company is backed by world-class investors and has 30 aircraft on pre-order. Founded in 2014, Boom has assembled a team of over 150 full-time employees who have made contributions to over 220 air and spacecraft programs. For more information, please visit https://boomsupersonic.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201005786/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>Aerospace company leverages AWS's unmatched breadth and depth of services and proven infrastructure to design and manufacture the world's fastest and most sustainable commercial aircraft</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Boom Technology, Inc. (Boom Supersonic), a Denver-based aviation company that is bringing commercial supersonic flight back to the skies, is going all-in on AWS. Boom Supersonic is leveraging the world's leading cloud to provide the company with the virtually unlimited compute power, storage, security, and comprehensive set of services that it will take to reinvent supersonic commercial travel. The company is designing the first supersonic airliner in decades, called Overture, which will roll out in 2025, and will fly more than 500 transoceanic routes in half the time. For example, Overture will take passengers from Tokyo to Seattle in four and a half hours. Since its inception, Boom has leveraged AWS's unmatched portfolio of services to accelerate the design and construction of its aircraft, including XB-1 – the demonstrator airplane for Overture and the world's first independently developed supersonic aircraft – which Boom unveiled on October 7, 2020.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201005786/en/</p><div><p>A rendering of Boom's Overture supersonic airliner, which will roll out in 2025 and fly to more than 500 transoceanic routes in half the time. (Photo: Business Wire)</p></div><p>Supersonic aircraft require a precise combination of performance, structural stability, and safety that makes designing them both resource and time intensive. With an on-premises infrastructure, a design team would have to manage a large queue of design iterations running one after the other, to find the right balance. However, by tapping into the virtually unlimited scale of AWS HPC resources, Boom can run thousands of advanced computer simulations concurrently, far faster and more cost-effectively than ever before possible, resulting in an estimated 6x increase in productivity versus running these simulations in an on-premises environment. In order to refine its design, conduct stress tests, and simulate flight conditions for XB-1, Boom utilized more than 53 million compute hours on AWS with expectations to scale to more than 100 million compute hours in order to complete design and testing of its Overture airliner.</p><p>By going all-in on AWS, Boom is able to leverage AWS's global infrastructure and unmatched portfolio of services to manufacture aircraft that meet security and compliance regulations while delivering on its commitment to sustainability. Boom plans to use AWS services, including capabilities in Internet of Things, machine learning, compute, storage, security, managed database, and analytics to build its 65-88-seat supersonic airliner and transform the flight experience for passengers. In addition, Boom's 525 terabyte repository of XB-1 design and testing data will be stored in AWS, along with its core IT applications which will streamline the company's operations so it can focus on innovation. Boom also plans to build a data lake for its manufacturing operations on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and use AWS IoT services including AWS IoT Core (a cloud service that lets connected devices easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices) to collect and process real-time data from its manufacturing equipment. Leveraging AWS analytics and machine learning services, Boom will gain deeper insights into its manufacturing processes to inform future decision-making, streamline workflows, and improve quality control.</p><p>In addition to developing its state-of-the art aircraft design, which promises to be the next major innovation in high speed air travel since jet airplanes were introduced more than 60 years ago, Boom also plans for Overture to be the most passenger-centric airliner in the world by offering passengers superior comfort, tranquility, and productivity. To support this development, Boom is exploring how AWS IoT and machine learning solutions can be used inside the Overture cabin to reimagine the on-board experience for both passengers and crew, looking at ways to customize passenger messaging, deliver intelligent in-flight entertainment, create wearables for crew members, and improve on-time departure performance using live occupancy and equipment data.</p><p>"Boom is committed to making supersonic flight mainstream by leveraging improvements in technology, sustainability, and passenger experience. As we build the first supersonic airliner in a new age of travel, AWS, the world's leading cloud provider, will help us continuously refine our designs without compromise so that we can deliver a superior flight experience to the flying public," said Blake Scholl, Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. "AWS's proven infrastructure and unparalleled portfolio of services are helping us deliver a revolution in air travel."</p><p>"Boom is taking a born-in-the-cloud approach to innovation and embracing the breadth, depth, and performance of AWS to reinvent commercial supersonic air travel," said Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector and Regulated Industries at Amazon Web Services, Inc. "We are thrilled to be collaborating with Boom to leverage the cloud to launch the next era of travel. By going all-in on AWS, Boom can innovate without bounds and more quickly than was previously possible, to make the world more accessible to everyone."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>About Boom Supersonic</p><p>Boom Supersonic is redefining commercial flight by bringing supersonic flight back to the skies with Overture. This historic commercial airliner is designed and committed to industry-leading standards of speed, safety, and sustainability. Boom's vision is to bring families, businesses, and cultures closer together through supersonic travel and make the world dramatically more accessible. Boom is the first commercial airplane manufacturer to commit to a carbon-neutral flight test program and to build sustainability into its entire aircraft program. XB-1, Boom's supersonic demonstrator aircraft for Overture, rolled out in 2020 and is poised for its first flight in 2021. The company is backed by world-class investors and has 30 aircraft on pre-order. Founded in 2014, Boom has assembled a team of over 150 full-time employees who have made contributions to over 220 air and spacecraft programs. For more information, please visit https://boomsupersonic.com.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201005786/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

AWS and BlackBerry Join Forces to Accelerate Innovation with New Intelligent Vehicle Data Platform

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-and-BlackBerry-Join-Forces-to-Accelerate-Innovation-with-New-Intelligent-Vehicle-Data-Platform/default.aspx

AWS-and-BlackBerry-Join-Forces-to-Accelerate-Innovation-with-New-Intelligent-Vehicle-Data-Platform

12/01/2020 08:00:00

AWS and BlackBerry Join Forces to Accelerate Innovation with New Intelligent Vehicle Data Platform

12/01/2020

2020

BlackBerry IVY will help automakers create personalized driver and passenger experiences and improve operations of cloud-connected vehicles with new BlackBerry QNX and AWS technology SEATTLE & WATERLOO, Ontario--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), and BlackBerry Limited (NYSE: BB, TSX: BB), a worldwide leader in intelligent security software and services, announced a multi-year, global agreement to develop and market BlackBerry's Intelligent Vehicle Data Platform, IVY. BlackBerry IVY is a scalable, cloud-connected software platform that will allow automakers to provide a consistent and secure way to read vehicle sensor data, normalize it, and create actionable insights from that data both locally in the vehicle and in the cloud. Automakers can use this information to create responsive in-vehicle services that enhance driver and passenger experiences. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201005424/en/ BlackBerry IVY will help automakers create personalized driver and passenger experiences and improve operations of cloud-connected vehicles with new BlackBerry QNX and AWS technology. (Graphic: Business Wire) BlackBerry IVY addresses a critical data access, collection, and management problem in the automotive industry. Modern cars and trucks are built with thousands of parts from many different suppliers, with each vehicle model comprising a unique set of proprietary hardware and software components. These components, which include an increasing variety of vehicle sensors, produce data in unique and specialized formats. The highly specific skills required to interact with this data, as well as the challenges of accessing it from within contained vehicle subsystems, limit developers' abilities to innovate quickly and bring new solutions to market. BlackBerry IVY will solve for these challenges by applying machine learning to that data to generate predictive insights and inferences, making it possible for automakers to offer in-vehicle experiences that are highly personalized and able to take action based on those insights. BlackBerry IVY will support multiple vehicle operating systems and multi-cloud deployments in order to ensure compatibility across vehicle models and brands. It will build upon BlackBerry QNX's capabilities for surfacing and normalizing data from automobiles and AWS's broad portfolio of services, including capabilities for IoT and machine learning. BlackBerry IVY will run inside a vehicle's embedded systems, but will be managed and configured remotely from the cloud. As a result, automakers will gain greater visibility into vehicle data, control over who can access it, and edge computing capabilities to optimize how quickly and efficiently the data is processed. With BlackBerry IVY's integrated capabilities, automakers will be able to deliver new features, functionality, and performance to customers over the lifetime of their cloud-connected vehicles, as well as unlock new revenue streams and business models built on vehicle data. For instance, BlackBerry IVY could leverage vehicle data to recognize driver behavior and hazardous conditions such as icy roads or heavy traffic and then recommend that a driver enable relevant vehicle safety features such as traction control, lane-keeping assist, or adaptive cruise control. IVY could then provide automakers with feedback on how and when those safety features are used, allowing them to make targeted investments to improve vehicle performance. Additionally, drivers of electric vehicles could choose to share their car's battery information with third-party charging networks to proactively reserve a charging connector and tailor charging time according to the driver's current location and travel plans. BlackBerry IVY could also provide insights to parents of teenage drivers who may choose to receive customized notifications based on insights from vehicle sensors when the number of passengers in the vehicle changes, when the driver appears to be texting, distracted, or not observing speed limits, or when the vehicle occupancy level rises above the parents' desired safety threshold. Similarly, parents of infants could receive a reminder to engage the child safety lock when the vehicle detects a child in the rear seat. BlackBerry IVY will enable automakers to compress the timeline to build, deploy, and monetize new in-vehicle applications and connected services across multiple vehicle brands and models. Instead of investing in one-off solutions that conform to the unique engineering of different vehicle models (as they do today), automakers using BlackBerry IVY will be able to leverage different types of data as common building blocks for new services that could work across a range of models. Automakers will be able to use the platform's application programming interfaces (APIs) to share data and outputs with their software development teams, giving them the ability to innovate, while also protecting customer privacy and security by controlling whom can access vehicle and app data and at what level of detail. In addition, BlackBerry IVY will make it easier for automakers to collaborate with a wider pool of developers to accelerate creation of new offerings that deliver improved vehicle performance, reduced costs for maintenance and repairs, and added convenience. For instance, by analyzing real-time performance data, automakers could recognize the first signs of potentially faulty parts, deploy code to identify affected vehicles, notify impacted drivers, and perform targeted recalls. Automakers will be able to remotely deploy and update the software from the platform's Cloud Console (a web interface for managing BlackBerry IVY) to continuously improve the functionality of the system. "Data and connectivity are opening new avenues for innovation in the automotive industry, and BlackBerry and AWS share a common vision to provide automakers and developers with better insights so that they can deliver new services to consumers," said John Chen, Executive Chairman and CEO, BlackBerry. "This software platform promises to bring an era of invention to the in-vehicle experience and help create new applications, services, and opportunities without compromising safety, security, or customer privacy. We are pleased to expand our relationship with AWS to execute this vision and deliver BlackBerry IVY." "AWS and BlackBerry are making it possible for any automaker to continuously reinvent the customer experience and transform vehicles from fixed pieces of technology into systems that can grow and adapt with a user's needs and preferences," said Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, Inc. "Through this joint effort with BlackBerry, we will provide automakers with the insights, capabilities, agility, and speed they need to thrive in an increasingly connected world. As automakers seek to race ahead in their digital transformations, BlackBerry IVY empowers them to build their brands and set the standard for connected vehicle services across the automotive industry." To learn more about BlackBerry IVY and general availability, please visit https://blackberry.qnx.com/en/aws. About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. About BlackBerry BlackBerry (NYSE: BB; TSX: BB) provides intelligent security software and services to enterprises and governments around the world. The company secures more than 500M endpoints including 175M cars on the road today. Based in Waterloo, Ontario, the company leverages AI and machine learning to deliver innovative solutions in the areas of cybersecurity, safety and data privacy solutions, and is a leader in the areas of endpoint security management, encryption, and embedded systems. BlackBerry's vision is clear - to secure a connected future you can trust. For more information, visit BlackBerry.com and follow @BlackBerry.  View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201005424/en/ AWSAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr BlackBerry BlackBerry Media Relations+1 (519) 597-7273mediarelations@BlackBerry.com Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>BlackBerry IVY will help automakers create personalized driver and passenger experiences and improve operations of cloud-connected vehicles with new BlackBerry QNX and AWS technology</em></p><p>SEATTLE &amp; WATERLOO, Ontario--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), and BlackBerry Limited (NYSE: BB, TSX: BB), a worldwide leader in intelligent security software and services, announced a multi-year, global agreement to develop and market BlackBerry's Intelligent Vehicle Data Platform, IVY. BlackBerry IVY is a scalable, cloud-connected software platform that will allow automakers to provide a consistent and secure way to read vehicle sensor data, normalize it, and create actionable insights from that data both locally in the vehicle and in the cloud. Automakers can use this information to create responsive in-vehicle services that enhance driver and passenger experiences.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201005424/en/</p><div><p>BlackBerry IVY will help automakers create personalized driver and passenger experiences and improve operations of cloud-connected vehicles with new BlackBerry QNX and AWS technology. (Graphic: Business Wire)</p></div><p>BlackBerry IVY addresses a critical data access, collection, and management problem in the automotive industry. Modern cars and trucks are built with thousands of parts from many different suppliers, with each vehicle model comprising a unique set of proprietary hardware and software components. These components, which include an increasing variety of vehicle sensors, produce data in unique and specialized formats. The highly specific skills required to interact with this data, as well as the challenges of accessing it from within contained vehicle subsystems, limit developers' abilities to innovate quickly and bring new solutions to market. BlackBerry IVY will solve for these challenges by applying machine learning to that data to generate predictive insights and inferences, making it possible for automakers to offer in-vehicle experiences that are highly personalized and able to take action based on those insights.</p><p>BlackBerry IVY will support multiple vehicle operating systems and multi-cloud deployments in order to ensure compatibility across vehicle models and brands. It will build upon BlackBerry QNX's capabilities for surfacing and normalizing data from automobiles and AWS's broad portfolio of services, including capabilities for IoT and machine learning. BlackBerry IVY will run inside a vehicle's embedded systems, but will be managed and configured remotely from the cloud. As a result, automakers will gain greater visibility into vehicle data, control over who can access it, and edge computing capabilities to optimize how quickly and efficiently the data is processed. With BlackBerry IVY's integrated capabilities, automakers will be able to deliver new features, functionality, and performance to customers over the lifetime of their cloud-connected vehicles, as well as unlock new revenue streams and business models built on vehicle data.</p><p>For instance, BlackBerry IVY could leverage vehicle data to recognize driver behavior and hazardous conditions such as icy roads or heavy traffic and then recommend that a driver enable relevant vehicle safety features such as traction control, lane-keeping assist, or adaptive cruise control. IVY could then provide automakers with feedback on how and when those safety features are used, allowing them to make targeted investments to improve vehicle performance. Additionally, drivers of electric vehicles could choose to share their car's battery information with third-party charging networks to proactively reserve a charging connector and tailor charging time according to the driver's current location and travel plans. BlackBerry IVY could also provide insights to parents of teenage drivers who may choose to receive customized notifications based on insights from vehicle sensors when the number of passengers in the vehicle changes, when the driver appears to be texting, distracted, or not observing speed limits, or when the vehicle occupancy level rises above the parents' desired safety threshold. Similarly, parents of infants could receive a reminder to engage the child safety lock when the vehicle detects a child in the rear seat.</p><p>BlackBerry IVY will enable automakers to compress the timeline to build, deploy, and monetize new in-vehicle applications and connected services across multiple vehicle brands and models. Instead of investing in one-off solutions that conform to the unique engineering of different vehicle models (as they do today), automakers using BlackBerry IVY will be able to leverage different types of data as common building blocks for new services that could work across a range of models. Automakers will be able to use the platform's application programming interfaces (APIs) to share data and outputs with their software development teams, giving them the ability to innovate, while also protecting customer privacy and security by controlling whom can access vehicle and app data and at what level of detail.</p><p>In addition, BlackBerry IVY will make it easier for automakers to collaborate with a wider pool of developers to accelerate creation of new offerings that deliver improved vehicle performance, reduced costs for maintenance and repairs, and added convenience. For instance, by analyzing real-time performance data, automakers could recognize the first signs of potentially faulty parts, deploy code to identify affected vehicles, notify impacted drivers, and perform targeted recalls. Automakers will be able to remotely deploy and update the software from the platform's Cloud Console (a web interface for managing BlackBerry IVY) to continuously improve the functionality of the system.</p><p>"Data and connectivity are opening new avenues for innovation in the automotive industry, and BlackBerry and AWS share a common vision to provide automakers and developers with better insights so that they can deliver new services to consumers," said John Chen, Executive Chairman and CEO, BlackBerry. "This software platform promises to bring an era of invention to the in-vehicle experience and help create new applications, services, and opportunities without compromising safety, security, or customer privacy. We are pleased to expand our relationship with AWS to execute this vision and deliver BlackBerry IVY."</p><p>"AWS and BlackBerry are making it possible for any automaker to continuously reinvent the customer experience and transform vehicles from fixed pieces of technology into systems that can grow and adapt with a user's needs and preferences," said Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, Inc. "Through this joint effort with BlackBerry, we will provide automakers with the insights, capabilities, agility, and speed they need to thrive in an increasingly connected world. As automakers seek to race ahead in their digital transformations, BlackBerry IVY empowers them to build their brands and set the standard for connected vehicle services across the automotive industry."</p><p>To learn more about BlackBerry IVY and general availability, please visit https://blackberry.qnx.com/en/aws.</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>About BlackBerry</p><p>BlackBerry (NYSE: BB; TSX: BB) provides intelligent security software and services to enterprises and governments around the world. The company secures more than 500M endpoints including 175M cars on the road today. Based in Waterloo, Ontario, the company leverages AI and machine learning to deliver innovative solutions in the areas of cybersecurity, safety and data privacy solutions, and is a leader in the areas of endpoint security management, encryption, and embedded systems. BlackBerry's vision is clear - to secure a connected future you can trust. For more information, visit BlackBerry.com and follow @BlackBerry. </p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201005424/en/</p><p>AWSAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>BlackBerry BlackBerry Media Relations+1 (519) 597-7273mediarelations@BlackBerry.com</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

AWS Announces Mac Instances for Amazon EC2

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-Mac-Instances-for-Amazon-EC2/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-Mac-Instances-for-Amazon-EC2

11/30/2020 23:35:00

AWS Announces Mac Instances for Amazon EC2

11/30/2020

2020

Amazon EC2 Mac instances enable Apple developers to natively run macOS within AWS—extending the flexibility and scalability of the cloud with pay-as-you-go pricing to all Apple developers Intuit, Ring, and FiLMiC among customers using EC2 Mac instances SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 30, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced new Mac instances (EC2 Mac instances) for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Built on Mac mini computers, EC2 Mac instances enable customers to run on-demand macOS workloads in the AWS cloud for the first time ever, extending the flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits of AWS to all Apple developers. With EC2 Mac instances, developers creating apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari can now provision and access macOS environments within seconds, dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from AWS's pay-as-you-go pricing. To get started with EC2 Mac instances, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/Mac/ This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201130006036/en/ Mac mini (Photo: Business Wire) Today, millions of developers rely on Apple's industry-leading platforms and tools such as Xcode and Swift, and powerful frameworks like Core ML and Metal, to create the world's most amazing apps for over a billion customers globally. Now with EC2 Mac instances, AWS customers can run macOS workloads on AWS and benefit from the scale, elasticity, reliability, and experience that AWS's secure, on-demand infrastructure has offered to millions of customers for more than a decade. Customers can seamlessly provision and access macOS compute environments to enjoy convenient, distributed testing and fast app builds, bringing additional choice to developers so they can use Mac as their trusted platform, on-premises or in the cloud. Customers can also consolidate development of cross-platform Apple, Windows, and Android apps onto AWS, leading to increased developer productivity and accelerated time to market. Similar to other Amazon EC2 instances, customers can easily use EC2 Mac instances together with AWS services and features like Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for network security, Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) for expandable storage, Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) for distributing build queues, and Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for OS image orchestration. The availability of EC2 Mac instances also offloads the heavy lifting that comes with managing infrastructure to AWS, which means Apple developers can focus entirely on building great apps. "Our customers tell us they would love to have their Apple build environment integrated with AWS services," said David Brown, Vice President of EC2, at AWS. "With EC2 Mac instances, developers can now provision and access on-demand macOS compute environments in AWS for the first time ever, so they can focus on creating groundbreaking apps for Apple's industry-leading platforms, rather than procuring and managing the underlying infrastructure." "Apple's thriving community of more than 28 million developers continues to create groundbreaking app experiences that delight customers around the world," said Bob Borchers, Vice President, Worldwide Product Marketing, at Apple. "With the launch of EC2 Mac instances, we're thrilled to make development for Apple's platforms accessible in new ways, and combine the performance and reliability of our world-class hardware with the scalability of AWS." EC2 Mac instances are powered by a combination of Mac mini computers—featuring Intel's eighth-generation 3.2GHz (4.6GHz turbo) Core i7 processors, 6 physical/12 logical cores, and 32 GiB of memory—and the AWS Nitro System, providing up to 10 Gbps of VPC network bandwidth and 8 Gbps of EBS storage bandwidth through high speed Thunderbolt 3 connections. Amazon EC2 Mac instances are uniquely enabled by the AWS Nitro System, which makes it possible to offer Mac mini computers as a fully integrated and managed compute instances with Amazon VPC networking and Amazon EBS storage just like any other Amazon EC2 instance. EC2 Mac instances are available to be purchased On-Demand or with Savings Plans. EC2 Mac instances are available now in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) regions, with other regions coming soon. Intuit is a mission-driven, global financial platform company. Its products—including TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint—are designed to empower more than 50 million consumer, small business and self-employed customers around the world to improve their financial lives. "EC2 Mac instances, with their familiar EC2 interfaces and APIs, have enabled us to seamlessly migrate our existing iOS and macOS build-and-test pipelines to AWS, further improving developer productivity," said Pratik Wadher, Vice President of Product Development at Intuit. "We‘re experiencing up to 30 percent better performance over our data center infrastructure, thanks to elastic capacity expansion, and a high availability setup leveraging multiple zones. We're now running around 80 percent of our production builds on EC2 Mac instances, and are excited to see what the future holds for AWS innovation in this space." Since its founding in 2013, Ring has been on a mission to make neighborhoods safer, together for everyone. "At Ring, we are committed to making home and neighborhood security accessible and effective for everyone—while working hard to bring communities together," said Joshua Roth, Chief Technology Officer, at Ring. "EC2 Mac instances will allow us to migrate our Apple build infrastructure to AWS, unlocking the scalability, reliability, security, and capabilities of AWS for all our Apple developers. These EC2 Mac instances will also let us quickly scale up our Mac build fleet whenever we need it, simplify cross-platform app development through consolidation on a single infrastructure provider, and ultimately accelerate innovations for thousands of our Apple customers." FiLMiC Inc. is the creator of the award-winning mobile cinema camera app, FiLMiC Pro. "With a global team of filmmakers, photographers, creatives, and software developers who share the same passion for mobile cinema and content creation, FiLMiC has designed what has become the industry's most sought-after app that transforms a simple mobile device into a cinematic film camera," said Seth Faxon, iOS Development Manager for FiLMiC. "EC2 Mac instances give us the ability to scale up our continuous integration build farm in order to quickly go through development, testing and TestFlight stages. This leads to better velocity and more time working on the fun stuff." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, Spain and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201130006036/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>Amazon EC2 Mac instances enable Apple developers to natively run macOS within AWS—extending the flexibility and scalability of the cloud with pay-as-you-go pricing to all Apple developers</em></p><p><em>Intuit, Ring, and FiLMiC among customers using EC2 Mac instances</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 30, 2020-- Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced new Mac instances (EC2 Mac instances) for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Built on Mac mini computers, EC2 Mac instances enable customers to run on-demand macOS workloads in the AWS cloud for the first time ever, extending the flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits of AWS to all Apple developers. With EC2 Mac instances, developers creating apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari can now provision and access macOS environments within seconds, dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from AWS's pay-as-you-go pricing. To get started with EC2 Mac instances, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/Mac/</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201130006036/en/</p><div><p>Mac mini (Photo: Business Wire)</p></div><p>Today, millions of developers rely on Apple's industry-leading platforms and tools such as Xcode and Swift, and powerful frameworks like Core ML and Metal, to create the world's most amazing apps for over a billion customers globally. Now with EC2 Mac instances, AWS customers can run macOS workloads on AWS and benefit from the scale, elasticity, reliability, and experience that AWS's secure, on-demand infrastructure has offered to millions of customers for more than a decade. Customers can seamlessly provision and access macOS compute environments to enjoy convenient, distributed testing and fast app builds, bringing additional choice to developers so they can use Mac as their trusted platform, on-premises or in the cloud. Customers can also consolidate development of cross-platform Apple, Windows, and Android apps onto AWS, leading to increased developer productivity and accelerated time to market. Similar to other Amazon EC2 instances, customers can easily use EC2 Mac instances together with AWS services and features like Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for network security, Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) for expandable storage, Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) for distributing build queues, and Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for OS image orchestration. The availability of EC2 Mac instances also offloads the heavy lifting that comes with managing infrastructure to AWS, which means Apple developers can focus entirely on building great apps.</p><p>"Our customers tell us they would love to have their Apple build environment integrated with AWS services," said David Brown, Vice President of EC2, at AWS. "With EC2 Mac instances, developers can now provision and access on-demand macOS compute environments in AWS for the first time ever, so they can focus on creating groundbreaking apps for Apple's industry-leading platforms, rather than procuring and managing the underlying infrastructure."</p><p>"Apple's thriving community of more than 28 million developers continues to create groundbreaking app experiences that delight customers around the world," said Bob Borchers, Vice President, Worldwide Product Marketing, at Apple. "With the launch of EC2 Mac instances, we're thrilled to make development for Apple's platforms accessible in new ways, and combine the performance and reliability of our world-class hardware with the scalability of AWS."</p><p>EC2 Mac instances are powered by a combination of Mac mini computers—featuring Intel's eighth-generation 3.2GHz (4.6GHz turbo) Core i7 processors, 6 physical/12 logical cores, and 32 GiB of memory—and the AWS Nitro System, providing up to 10 Gbps of VPC network bandwidth and 8 Gbps of EBS storage bandwidth through high speed Thunderbolt 3 connections. Amazon EC2 Mac instances are uniquely enabled by the AWS Nitro System, which makes it possible to offer Mac mini computers as a fully integrated and managed compute instances with Amazon VPC networking and Amazon EBS storage just like any other Amazon EC2 instance. EC2 Mac instances are available to be purchased On-Demand or with Savings Plans. EC2 Mac instances are available now in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) regions, with other regions coming soon.</p><p>Intuit is a mission-driven, global financial platform company. Its products—including TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint—are designed to empower more than 50 million consumer, small business and self-employed customers around the world to improve their financial lives. "EC2 Mac instances, with their familiar EC2 interfaces and APIs, have enabled us to seamlessly migrate our existing iOS and macOS build-and-test pipelines to AWS, further improving developer productivity," said Pratik Wadher, Vice President of Product Development at Intuit. "We‘re experiencing up to 30 percent better performance over our data center infrastructure, thanks to elastic capacity expansion, and a high availability setup leveraging multiple zones. We're now running around 80 percent of our production builds on EC2 Mac instances, and are excited to see what the future holds for AWS innovation in this space."</p><p>Since its founding in 2013, Ring has been on a mission to make neighborhoods safer, together for everyone. "At Ring, we are committed to making home and neighborhood security accessible and effective for everyone—while working hard to bring communities together," said Joshua Roth, Chief Technology Officer, at Ring. "EC2 Mac instances will allow us to migrate our Apple build infrastructure to AWS, unlocking the scalability, reliability, security, and capabilities of AWS for all our Apple developers. These EC2 Mac instances will also let us quickly scale up our Mac build fleet whenever we need it, simplify cross-platform app development through consolidation on a single infrastructure provider, and ultimately accelerate innovations for thousands of our Apple customers."</p><p>FiLMiC Inc. is the creator of the award-winning mobile cinema camera app, FiLMiC Pro. "With a global team of filmmakers, photographers, creatives, and software developers who share the same passion for mobile cinema and content creation, FiLMiC has designed what has become the industry's most sought-after app that transforms a simple mobile device into a cinematic film camera," said Seth Faxon, iOS Development Manager for FiLMiC. "EC2 Mac instances give us the ability to scale up our continuous integration build farm in order to quickly go through development, testing and TestFlight stages. This leads to better velocity and more time working on the fun stuff."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, Spain and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201130006036/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

AWS and Zoom Extend Strategic Relationship

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-and-Zoom-Extend-Strategic-Relationship/default.aspx

AWS-and-Zoom-Extend-Strategic-Relationship

11/30/2020 19:00:00

AWS and Zoom Extend Strategic Relationship

11/30/2020

2020

AWS continues to be Zoom's preferred cloud provider to seamlessly grow its core video meeting platform and innovate new customer experiences using AWS's unmatched portfolio of services SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 30, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Zoom Video Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZM) has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider. The multi-year agreement extends the longstanding relationship between the two companies, enabling Zoom to rapidly scale its service on the world's leading cloud, rise to the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, and deliver reliable services and continuous innovation for its expanding base of corporate and individual customers. Zoom will continue to leverage AWS's global infrastructure and unmatched portfolio of services – including capabilities in compute, storage, content distribution, and security – to create a seamless, secure extension of its data centers. In addition, AWS and Zoom are collaborating to develop new solutions for Zoom's enterprise users, leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS to integrate Zoom services with Amazon devices and capabilities to make it easier for organizations to run hybrid office and remote work models. AWS has supported Zoom since 2011, and earlier this year when the COVID-19 pandemic began impacting businesses, schools, and governments around the world, Zoom expanded its relationship with AWS to keep up with surging demand as hundreds of millions of new Zoom participants began to use the platform for everything from online education to business meetings to social gatherings to exercise classes. Over the past year, Zoom has grown on AWS to accommodate an increase from 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to more than 300 million a day regularly since April 2020. Beginning in February 2020, engineering teams from AWS and Zoom worked around the clock and across remote locations to securely and reliably meet the needs of this vast, globally dispersed user community, adding tens of thousands of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances (virtual servers) to Zoom's overall capacity, even adding thousands of instances in a day as usage demanded. With AWS, Zoom is ready to meet customer demand with low latency anywhere in the world, while continuously delivering new features that improve the Zoom user experience. Today, leveraging AWS, Zoom is able to seamlessly scale with global demand for its services. Zoom now provides video conferencing technology to more than 130,000 schools globally at no charge, as well as millions of families and individuals, in addition to the company's traditional enterprise-scale users – businesses, governments, healthcare and educational institutions, and other large organizations. Tied to its sudden growth, Zoom also faced sharply increased demand for customer service over the past nine months as new users adopted its platform. AWS provided Zoom with over 1,000 Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktops to help the company manage an unprecedented increase in demand for help desk support while its employees work remotely during the pandemic. AWS also provided additional cloud infrastructure and security monitoring support to help Zoom successfully stream major events more securely, including nationally-televised sporting and entertainment events, standing up a dedicated threat intelligence team to monitor Zoom's AWS environments during the events. Zoom and AWS are also making it increasingly easy and secure for businesses to employ hybrid workplace models where employees move seamlessly between home and the office. For instance, Zoom will be integrating its video meeting service into select Amazon Echo Show devices (Amazon's Alexa-enabled smart display), as well as incorporating Alexa for Business features, including voice control, into its Zoom Rooms service. In addition, Zoom and AWS are deepening their collaboration to reimagine the future of online communication, leveraging AWS's unmatched portfolio of services, with capabilities in machine learning, threat monitoring and response, encryption, and data visualization, to innovate new features, products, and services for Zoom users. "Faced with unprecedented global demand this past year, we've been able to handle it in significant part by running the substantial majority of our cloud-based workloads on our preferred cloud provider, AWS, and relying on AWS's performance and scalability," said Eric S. Yuan, CEO of Zoom. "Looking forward, we will continue to innovate alongside AWS to reinvent virtual collaboration and deliver secure and exciting experiences for our customers." "COVID-19 changed everything for Zoom, putting demands on the company to meet the video conferencing needs of hundreds of millions of new participants around the globe, and AWS was there from the beginning to ensure Zoom could scale to meet these new requirements virtually overnight," said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. "When organizations build on AWS – as Zoom has done since 2011 – they transform their business, expanding and innovating much faster. Together, Zoom and AWS have delivered great experiences for new Zoom users around the world, and we look forward to using the cloud to develop new ways to help the world communicate." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.  View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201130005189/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>AWS continues to be Zoom's preferred cloud provider to seamlessly grow its core video meeting platform and innovate new customer experiences using AWS's unmatched portfolio of services</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 30, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Zoom Video Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZM) has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider. The multi-year agreement extends the longstanding relationship between the two companies, enabling Zoom to rapidly scale its service on the world's leading cloud, rise to the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, and deliver reliable services and continuous innovation for its expanding base of corporate and individual customers. Zoom will continue to leverage AWS's global infrastructure and unmatched portfolio of services – including capabilities in compute, storage, content distribution, and security – to create a seamless, secure extension of its data centers. In addition, AWS and Zoom are collaborating to develop new solutions for Zoom's enterprise users, leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS to integrate Zoom services with Amazon devices and capabilities to make it easier for organizations to run hybrid office and remote work models.</p><p>AWS has supported Zoom since 2011, and earlier this year when the COVID-19 pandemic began impacting businesses, schools, and governments around the world, Zoom expanded its relationship with AWS to keep up with surging demand as hundreds of millions of new Zoom participants began to use the platform for everything from online education to business meetings to social gatherings to exercise classes. Over the past year, Zoom has grown on AWS to accommodate an increase from 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to more than 300 million a day regularly since April 2020. Beginning in February 2020, engineering teams from AWS and Zoom worked around the clock and across remote locations to securely and reliably meet the needs of this vast, globally dispersed user community, adding tens of thousands of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances (virtual servers) to Zoom's overall capacity, even adding thousands of instances in a day as usage demanded.</p><p>With AWS, Zoom is ready to meet customer demand with low latency anywhere in the world, while continuously delivering new features that improve the Zoom user experience. Today, leveraging AWS, Zoom is able to seamlessly scale with global demand for its services. Zoom now provides video conferencing technology to more than 130,000 schools globally at no charge, as well as millions of families and individuals, in addition to the company's traditional enterprise-scale users – businesses, governments, healthcare and educational institutions, and other large organizations.</p><p>Tied to its sudden growth, Zoom also faced sharply increased demand for customer service over the past nine months as new users adopted its platform. AWS provided Zoom with over 1,000 Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktops to help the company manage an unprecedented increase in demand for help desk support while its employees work remotely during the pandemic. AWS also provided additional cloud infrastructure and security monitoring support to help Zoom successfully stream major events more securely, including nationally-televised sporting and entertainment events, standing up a dedicated threat intelligence team to monitor Zoom's AWS environments during the events.</p><p>Zoom and AWS are also making it increasingly easy and secure for businesses to employ hybrid workplace models where employees move seamlessly between home and the office. For instance, Zoom will be integrating its video meeting service into select Amazon Echo Show devices (Amazon's Alexa-enabled smart display), as well as incorporating Alexa for Business features, including voice control, into its Zoom Rooms service. In addition, Zoom and AWS are deepening their collaboration to reimagine the future of online communication, leveraging AWS's unmatched portfolio of services, with capabilities in machine learning, threat monitoring and response, encryption, and data visualization, to innovate new features, products, and services for Zoom users.</p><p>"Faced with unprecedented global demand this past year, we've been able to handle it in significant part by running the substantial majority of our cloud-based workloads on our preferred cloud provider, AWS, and relying on AWS's performance and scalability," said Eric S. Yuan, CEO of Zoom. "Looking forward, we will continue to innovate alongside AWS to reinvent virtual collaboration and deliver secure and exciting experiences for our customers."</p><p>"COVID-19 changed everything for Zoom, putting demands on the company to meet the video conferencing needs of hundreds of millions of new participants around the globe, and AWS was there from the beginning to ensure Zoom could scale to meet these new requirements virtually overnight," said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. "When organizations build on AWS – as Zoom has done since 2011 – they transform their business, expanding and innovating much faster. Together, Zoom and AWS have delivered great experiences for new Zoom users around the world, and we look forward to using the cloud to develop new ways to help the world communicate."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. </p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201130005189/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

Itaú Unibanco Selects AWS as Its Long-Term Strategic Cloud Provider to Accelerate Digital Transformation

/news/news-details/2020/Ita-Unibanco-Selects-AWS-as-Its-Long-Term-Strategic-Cloud-Provider-to-Accelerate-Digital-Transformation/default.aspx

Ita-Unibanco-Selects-AWS-as-Its-Long-Term-Strategic-Cloud-Provider-to-Accelerate-Digital-Transformation

11/30/2020 03:01:00

Itaú Unibanco Selects AWS as Its Long-Term Strategic Cloud Provider to Accelerate Digital Transformation

11/30/2020

2020

Latin America's largest bank leverages the breadth and depth of AWS to increase agility and efficiency, enhance its security posture, and accelerate delivery of customer-centric financial services Itaú Unibanco will train thousands of employees in advanced cloud skills to empower innovation throughout its lines of business, including Rede, one of the largest electronic payments providers in Brazil SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 30, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Itaú Unibanco Holding (NYSE: ITUB), Latin America's largest bank, has selected AWS as its long-term strategic cloud provider. Itaú Unibanco will leverage the world's leading cloud to accelerate its digital transformation and enhance the banking experience for its 56 million customers around the world. As part of the 10 year deal, which expands on the bank's existing relationship with AWS, Itaú Unibanco will move the majority of its IT infrastructure off mainframes and out of its on-premises data centers to the cloud. Itaú Unibanco will also migrate its core banking platforms, call center solutions, online, and mobile banking applications to AWS, creating a more flexible and efficient technology architecture that will help the bank to introduce new customer-facing services faster with lower operating costs. In addition, the bank will leverage AWS's proven infrastructure and breadth and depth of services, including capabilities for analytics, machine learning, serverless, containers, managed database, compute, storage, and security, to gain agility and insights, helping it pursue new lines of business, develop new applications, and ensure security and regulatory compliance. The bank also plans to upskill thousands of its employees, expanding on the 1,300 professionals the company has already trained in advanced cloud technologies, to put new customer service ideas into development faster. Itaú Unibanco is expanding its use of AWS's comprehensive portfolio of capabilities across its banking, credit cards, and insurance lines of business, as well as throughout its subsidiaries, such as Rede, one of the largest electronic payment solution providers in Brazil. The bank leverages Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to provide secure, scalable compute capacity for Pix, Brazil's first nationwide digital instant payment platform that helps reduce reliance on cash and credit card-based transactions. Similarly, Itaú Unibanco uses Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and AWS Lambda (AWS's serverless computing service), to quickly launch and scale new financial services offerings, including iti, the bank's free digital account platform that allows users to scan QR codes to easily and securely pay for products and services and transfer funds. By modernizing Credicard, one of Brazil's largest credit card platforms, on AWS Itaú Unibanco can create a digital payment and banking platform that can easily incorporate new features to meet evolving customer needs. Looking ahead, Itaú will migrate off legacy databases to AWS's cloud-native databases, such as Amazon Aurora (AWS's relational database) and Amazon DynamoDB (AWS's key-value database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale with built-in encryption and data recovery) to quickly, reliably, and securely process financial transactions and build new applications that feature microservices architectures to support scalability and simplify updates. Itaú Unibanco is also leveraging AWS analytics and machine learning technologies to gain deeper insights into its customers' banking needs and deliver more personalized experiences. For instance, the bank is using Amazon SageMaker (AWS's service that enables data scientists and developers to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly) to identify patterns in individual customer's banking habits and then use that information to help the bank's customer service chatbots proactively offer assistance and deliver faster and more precise answers to customer questions. Itaú Unibanco is creating a company-wide machine learning platform on AWS to further expand innovation, automate workflows, and generate predictive insights. "Banking is all about delivering value to customers and AWS helps us improve the time to value in every aspect of our business while expanding the benefits of digital payments to our customers. We are pursuing a complete digital transformation on AWS, moving off legacy mainframe technology, and using its portfolio of services to gain insights and agility that will make us even more responsive to our customers' needs. At the same time, we're investing in our employees, training them in the most advanced cloud technologies so that they can continuously innovate on behalf of the individuals and businesses we serve," said Candido Bracher, CEO of Itaú Unibanco. "We chose AWS because of its breadth of capabilities, high levels of security, global infrastructure, and strong financial services experience. We see AWS as a strategic collaborator, and we look forward to aggressively expanding our footprint in the cloud to help our customers' financial dreams come true." "AWS is helping Itaú Unibanco deliver the transformative benefits of online banking and digital payments to its customers in Latin America and around the globe. By migrating its core applications to the world's leading cloud, Itaú Unibanco can rely on the proven performance, scale, and unparalleled portfolio of capabilities of AWS to complete its transformation into an agile, more customer-centric business," said Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, Inc. "Financial institutions rely on AWS for our secure, resilient global cloud infrastructure and services, industry expertise, and expansive network of partners. We continuously innovate so that AWS customers like Itaú Unibanco have the best resources to grow their businesses and meet rapidly changing customer behaviors and expectations." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

<p><em>Latin America's largest bank leverages the breadth and depth of AWS to increase agility and efficiency, enhance its security posture, and accelerate delivery of customer-centric financial services</em></p><p><em>Itaú Unibanco will train thousands of employees in advanced cloud skills to empower innovation throughout its lines of business, including Rede, one of the largest electronic payments providers in Brazil</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 30, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Itaú Unibanco Holding (NYSE: ITUB), Latin America's largest bank, has selected AWS as its long-term strategic cloud provider. Itaú Unibanco will leverage the world's leading cloud to accelerate its digital transformation and enhance the banking experience for its 56 million customers around the world. As part of the 10 year deal, which expands on the bank's existing relationship with AWS, Itaú Unibanco will move the majority of its IT infrastructure off mainframes and out of its on-premises data centers to the cloud. Itaú Unibanco will also migrate its core banking platforms, call center solutions, online, and mobile banking applications to AWS, creating a more flexible and efficient technology architecture that will help the bank to introduce new customer-facing services faster with lower operating costs. In addition, the bank will leverage AWS's proven infrastructure and breadth and depth of services, including capabilities for analytics, machine learning, serverless, containers, managed database, compute, storage, and security, to gain agility and insights, helping it pursue new lines of business, develop new applications, and ensure security and regulatory compliance. The bank also plans to upskill thousands of its employees, expanding on the 1,300 professionals the company has already trained in advanced cloud technologies, to put new customer service ideas into development faster.</p><p>Itaú Unibanco is expanding its use of AWS's comprehensive portfolio of capabilities across its banking, credit cards, and insurance lines of business, as well as throughout its subsidiaries, such as Rede, one of the largest electronic payment solution providers in Brazil. The bank leverages Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to provide secure, scalable compute capacity for Pix, Brazil's first nationwide digital instant payment platform that helps reduce reliance on cash and credit card-based transactions. Similarly, Itaú Unibanco uses Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and AWS Lambda (AWS's serverless computing service), to quickly launch and scale new financial services offerings, including iti, the bank's free digital account platform that allows users to scan QR codes to easily and securely pay for products and services and transfer funds. By modernizing Credicard, one of Brazil's largest credit card platforms, on AWS Itaú Unibanco can create a digital payment and banking platform that can easily incorporate new features to meet evolving customer needs. Looking ahead, Itaú will migrate off legacy databases to AWS's cloud-native databases, such as Amazon Aurora (AWS's relational database) and Amazon DynamoDB (AWS's key-value database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale with built-in encryption and data recovery) to quickly, reliably, and securely process financial transactions and build new applications that feature microservices architectures to support scalability and simplify updates.</p><p>Itaú Unibanco is also leveraging AWS analytics and machine learning technologies to gain deeper insights into its customers' banking needs and deliver more personalized experiences. For instance, the bank is using Amazon SageMaker (AWS's service that enables data scientists and developers to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly) to identify patterns in individual customer's banking habits and then use that information to help the bank's customer service chatbots proactively offer assistance and deliver faster and more precise answers to customer questions. Itaú Unibanco is creating a company-wide machine learning platform on AWS to further expand innovation, automate workflows, and generate predictive insights.</p><p>"Banking is all about delivering value to customers and AWS helps us improve the time to value in every aspect of our business while expanding the benefits of digital payments to our customers. We are pursuing a complete digital transformation on AWS, moving off legacy mainframe technology, and using its portfolio of services to gain insights and agility that will make us even more responsive to our customers' needs. At the same time, we're investing in our employees, training them in the most advanced cloud technologies so that they can continuously innovate on behalf of the individuals and businesses we serve," said Candido Bracher, CEO of Itaú Unibanco. "We chose AWS because of its breadth of capabilities, high levels of security, global infrastructure, and strong financial services experience. We see AWS as a strategic collaborator, and we look forward to aggressively expanding our footprint in the cloud to help our customers' financial dreams come true."</p><p>"AWS is helping Itaú Unibanco deliver the transformative benefits of online banking and digital payments to its customers in Latin America and around the globe. By migrating its core applications to the world's leading cloud, Itaú Unibanco can rely on the proven performance, scale, and unparalleled portfolio of capabilities of AWS to complete its transformation into an agile, more customer-centric business," said Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, Inc. "Financial institutions rely on AWS for our secure, resilient global cloud infrastructure and services, industry expertise, and expansive network of partners. We continuously innovate so that AWS customers like Itaú Unibanco have the best resources to grow their businesses and meet rapidly changing customer behaviors and expectations."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p>

Amazon Launches IP Accelerator in Europe to Help Small Businesses Protect Their Brands and Tackle Counterfeit

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Launches-IP-Accelerator-in-Europe-to-Help-Small-Businesses-Protect-Their-Brands-and-Tackle-Counterfeit/default.aspx

Amazon-Launches-IP-Accelerator-in-Europe-to-Help-Small-Businesses-Protect-Their-Brands-and-Tackle-Counterfeit

11/25/2020 06:36:00

Amazon Launches IP Accelerator in Europe to Help Small Businesses Protect Their Brands and Tackle Counterfeit

11/25/2020

2020

IP Accelerator connects businesses with a network of trusted IP law firms who will charge pre-negotiated fees Participating small businesses can access Amazon's brand protection tools months before their trademark registration is issued SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 25, 2020-- Today, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) launched Intellectual Property Accelerator (IP Accelerator) in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands and the United Kingdom, making it easier and more cost effective for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to obtain trademarks, protect their brands and tackle counterfeit goods. IP Accelerator, which is available to any brand selling in Amazon's stores, connects entrepreneurs directly with a curated network of European law firms with expertise in IP rights. Participating law firms will charge fees to SMBs at competitive, pre-negotiated rates, giving sellers confidence and clarity about how much obtaining a trademark will cost them. In addition, SMBs can also seek general IP advice from these law firms as their brands and businesses grow. Amazon launched IP Accelerator specifically with small business owners in mind. Larger businesses are four times more likely than SMBs to register their Intellectual Property (IP) rights1. The main reason small business entrepreneurs do not protect their rights is because of a lack of knowledge about IP and not knowing where to turn2. The process can be complicated, particularly for entrepreneurs in the early stages of setting up a business, and Amazon wanted to provide low cost assistance to all European SMBs, including the over 150,000 European-based SMBs selling on Amazon. Selling partners continue to account for more than 50% of products Amazon sells in its online stores. IP rights are vital for businesses wanting to stop unauthorized parties from using their brands or copying their ideas. Owning IP can also create new sources of revenue should entrepreneurs wish to license their goods or services to third parties. Businesses using IP Accelerator will also get access to Amazon's wider brand protection services months or even years before their trademark registration is officially issued. Amazon's Brand Registry provides SMBs with powerful tools that help them manage and protect their brand and IP rights in Amazon stores. Brand Registry is a free service and more than 350,000 brands are already enrolled. Participants benefit from Amazon's automated protections that use information about brands to proactively remove suspected infringing or inaccurate content. Brands are also able to find and report suspected infringement through more powerful tools and can gain greater influence over product information displayed on Amazon's product detail pages so customers can make confident, informed purchasing decisions on Amazon. Francois Saugier, Vice President for EU Seller Services, Amazon, said: "We know from our conversations with small business owners that there is often confusion about why IP rights are important and how sellers can secure them. As part of our broader commitment to supporting small businesses, we have set up IP Accelerator to make the IP registration process as easy and as affordable as possible for entrepreneurs in the early days of their businesses." Pippa Hall, Director of Innovation and Chief Economist, from the UK's Intellectual Property Office, said: "Great ideas are the core of every good business. Turning those ideas into a reality relies on IP. Understanding, protecting and getting the most out of your IP is a crucial ingredient of success. A good IP strategy should sit at the heart of every good business plan." Amazon has selected participating IP law firms based on their experience, expertise, and customer service. They will support SMBs with all aspects of the trademark filing process, such as researching a brand to see if anyone else is already using it and providing tailored advice on trademark applications. Over one hundred trademark experts across Europe have signed up to the program. Tilman Vossius, of Barkhoff, Reimann Vossius, Germany, said: "The IP Accelerator Programme is the first worldwide programme to provide rapid trademarking registration for small and medium-sized businesses. Amazon has helped SMBs by selecting respected IP firms across Europe and negotiating extremely good prices for them." José Ignacio San Martín, Associate Partner, Elzaburu, Spain, said: "The trademark is probably the most important intangible asset for a company. It allows a company's products to be identified and differentiated from those of the competition. Amazon's IP Accelerator is to be welcomed because it will mean more businesses will register their trademarks and also allows them to access all the benefits of Amazon's Brand Registry." Julius Stobbs, Founder, Stobbs IP, UK, said: "We are excited to be involved in this programme. It is great that Amazon is placing such an emphasis on IP protection and respecting the rights of brand owners. IP Accelerator elevates the importance of IP and pushes smaller companies to do the right thing: obtaining and respecting IP rights." IP Accelerator was launched in the United States in 2019. Since the launch, Amazon has connected SMBs with participating IP law firms, resulting in 6,000 trademark applications submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office. Dewar Gaines, Owner and Operator of premium pet products business Gaines Family Farmstead, used IP Accelerator in 2019 to register his trademark, and can testify how European small firms can also benefit from the programme. Mr Gaines said: "As with any quickly growing business, there is always risk of people copying or stealing your hard work and capitalizing on your growth. As a result of filing our trademark through IP Accelerator, I am more confident than ever that our brand is secure, leaving me and my team more time to concentrate on providing awesome products to our incredible customers." Amazon does not charge businesses to use IP Accelerator – SMBs only pay their law firm directly for the work performed at pre-negotiated rates. Businesses interested in IP Accelerator can go to: http://brandservices.amazon.com/ipaccelerator. Law firms that are interested in participating in the program should contact IPAcceleratorWaitList@amazon.com About Amazon"Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. 1 According to research conducted by the EUIPO, 9% of EU SMBs have registered IP rights compared to 36% of larger companies. https://www.clustercollaboration.eu/sites/default/files/news_attachment/roadmap_-_intellectual_property_action_plan.pdf 2 38% of respondents to a recent study (IP SME scorecard, EUIPO 2019) reported a lack of knowledge about IP as the main reason for not seeking registration. Research cited in https://www.clustercollaboration.eu/sites/default/files/news_attachment/roadmap_-_intellectual_property_action_plan.pdf View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201125005567/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>IP Accelerator connects businesses with a network of trusted IP law firms who will charge pre-negotiated fees</em></p><p><em>Participating small businesses can access Amazon's brand protection tools months before their trademark registration is issued</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 25, 2020-- Today, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) launched Intellectual Property Accelerator (IP Accelerator) in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands and the United Kingdom, making it easier and more cost effective for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to obtain trademarks, protect their brands and tackle counterfeit goods.</p><p>IP Accelerator, which is available to any brand selling in Amazon's stores, connects entrepreneurs directly with a curated network of European law firms with expertise in IP rights. Participating law firms will charge fees to SMBs at competitive, pre-negotiated rates, giving sellers confidence and clarity about how much obtaining a trademark will cost them. In addition, SMBs can also seek general IP advice from these law firms as their brands and businesses grow.</p><p>Amazon launched IP Accelerator specifically with small business owners in mind. Larger businesses are four times more likely than SMBs to register their Intellectual Property (IP) rights¹. The main reason small business entrepreneurs do not protect their rights is because of a lack of knowledge about IP and not knowing where to turn². The process can be complicated, particularly for entrepreneurs in the early stages of setting up a business, and Amazon wanted to provide low cost assistance to all European SMBs, including the over 150,000 European-based SMBs selling on Amazon. Selling partners continue to account for more than 50% of products Amazon sells in its online stores.</p><p>IP rights are vital for businesses wanting to stop unauthorized parties from using their brands or copying their ideas. Owning IP can also create new sources of revenue should entrepreneurs wish to license their goods or services to third parties.</p><p>Businesses using IP Accelerator will also get access to Amazon's wider brand protection services months or even years before their trademark registration is officially issued. Amazon's Brand Registry provides SMBs with powerful tools that help them manage and protect their brand and IP rights in Amazon stores. Brand Registry is a free service and more than 350,000 brands are already enrolled. Participants benefit from Amazon's automated protections that use information about brands to proactively remove suspected infringing or inaccurate content. Brands are also able to find and report suspected infringement through more powerful tools and can gain greater influence over product information displayed on Amazon's product detail pages so customers can make confident, informed purchasing decisions on Amazon.</p><p>Francois Saugier, Vice President for EU Seller Services, Amazon, said: <em>"We know from our conversations with small business owners that there is often confusion about why IP rights are important and how sellers can secure them. As part of our broader commitment to supporting small businesses, we have set up IP Accelerator to make the IP registration process as easy and as affordable as possible for entrepreneurs in the early days of their businesses."</em></p><p>Pippa Hall, Director of Innovation and Chief Economist, from the UK's Intellectual Property Office, said:<em> "Great ideas are the core of every good business. Turning those ideas into a reality relies on IP. Understanding, protecting and getting the most out of your IP is a crucial ingredient of success. A good IP strategy should sit at the heart of every good business plan."</em></p><p>Amazon has selected participating IP law firms based on their experience, expertise, and customer service. They will support SMBs with all aspects of the trademark filing process, such as researching a brand to see if anyone else is already using it and providing tailored advice on trademark applications. Over one hundred trademark experts across Europe have signed up to the program.</p><p>Tilman Vossius, of Barkhoff, Reimann Vossius, Germany, said: <em>"The IP Accelerator Programme is the first worldwide programme to provide rapid trademarking registration for small and medium-sized businesses. Amazon has helped SMBs by selecting respected IP firms across Europe and negotiating extremely good prices for them."</em></p><p>José Ignacio San Martín, Associate Partner, Elzaburu, Spain, said:<em> "The trademark is probably the most important intangible asset for a company. It allows a company's products to be identified and differentiated from those of the competition. Amazon's IP Accelerator is to be welcomed because it will mean more businesses will register their trademarks and also allows them to access all the benefits of Amazon's Brand Registry."</em></p><p>Julius Stobbs, Founder, Stobbs IP, UK, said:<em> "We are excited to be involved in this programme. It is great that Amazon is placing such an emphasis on IP protection and respecting the rights of brand owners. IP Accelerator elevates the importance of IP and pushes smaller companies to do the right thing: obtaining and respecting IP rights."</em></p><p>IP Accelerator was launched in the United States in 2019. Since the launch, Amazon has connected SMBs with participating IP law firms, resulting in 6,000 trademark applications submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office.</p><p>Dewar Gaines, Owner and Operator of premium pet products business Gaines Family Farmstead, used IP Accelerator in 2019 to register his trademark, and can testify how European small firms can also benefit from the programme. Mr Gaines said: <em>"As with any quickly growing business, there is always risk of people copying or stealing your hard work and capitalizing on your growth. As a result of filing our trademark through IP Accelerator, I am more confident than ever that our brand is secure, leaving me and my team more time to concentrate on providing awesome products to our incredible customers."</em></p><p>Amazon does not charge businesses to use IP Accelerator – SMBs only pay their law firm directly for the work performed at pre-negotiated rates. Businesses interested in IP Accelerator can go to: http://brandservices.amazon.com/ipaccelerator. Law firms that are interested in participating in the program should contact IPAcceleratorWaitList@amazon.com</p><p>About Amazon"Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>¹ According to research conducted by the EUIPO, 9% of EU SMBs have registered IP rights compared to 36% of larger companies. https://www.clustercollaboration.eu/sites/default/files/news_attachment/roadmap_-_intellectual_property_action_plan.pdf</p><p>² 38% of respondents to a recent study (IP SME scorecard, EUIPO 2019) reported a lack of knowledge about IP as the main reason for not seeking registration. Research cited in https://www.clustercollaboration.eu/sites/default/files/news_attachment/roadmap_-_intellectual_property_action_plan.pdf</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201125005567/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-General-Availability-of-Amazon-Managed-Workflows-for-Apache-Airflow/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-General-Availability-of-Amazon-Managed-Workflows-for-Apache-Airflow

11/24/2020 15:53:00

AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow

11/24/2020

2020

Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow makes it easy to author, schedule, and monitor data processing and machine learning workflows in the cloud The Pokémon Company International, Rocket Mortgage, and GoDaddy among the customers using Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 24, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA), a new managed service that makes it easy for data engineers to execute data processing workflows in the cloud. Apache Airflow is a popular open-source tool that helps customers author, schedule, and monitor workflows. With Amazon MWAA, customers can use the same familiar Airflow platform as they do today to manage their workflows, and enjoy improved scalability, availability, and security without the burden of having to build, scale, and manage the underlying infrastructure. Amazon MWAA scales workflow execution capacity based on customer needs, and integrates with AWS security services to provide secure access to customers' data. There are no up-front investments required to use Amazon MWAA and customers only pay for what they use. To get started with Amazon MWAA, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/managed-workflows-for-apache-airflows/. Today, customers are using analytics and machine learning to derive insights from massive amounts of data. To effectively use this data, customers often need to first build a workflow that defines a series of sequential tasks to prepare and process the data. Tens of thousands of customers use AWS Step Functions to visually build and run cost-effective and scalable event-driven workflows that execute tasks across multiple AWS services. There are also customers who want the Apache Airflow orchestration workflow, which has an active open source community, a large library of pre-built integrations to third-party data processing tools like Apache Spark and Hadoop, and the ability to use Python scripts to create workflows. However, using Apache Airflow requires data engineers to install, maintain, scale, and secure the Apache Airflow environments, which adds cost and operational complexity. Furthermore, to support role-based authentication for secure access, Apache Airflow often requires a manual, iterative, and error-prone combination of configuration changes, command-line interface (CLI) commands, and, in some cases, edits to the Apache Airflow code. Customers also must integrate and configure additional tools for alerting for issues like system downtime, workflow errors, and task execution delays. While customers really enjoy the pre-built integrations and familiar Python programming language of Apache Airflow, they want it without the added operational cost and complexity. Amazon MWAA makes it easy for customers to build and execute Apache Airflow workflows in AWS. Amazon MWAA manages the provisioning and ongoing maintenance of Apache Airflow so customers no longer need to worry about patching, scaling, or securing self-managed Apache Airflow implementations. With Amazon MWAA, compute resources that execute tasks are scaled on demand, providing consistent performance for users. Customer data is secure by default as workloads run in customers' own isolated and secure cloud environments using Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), with stored data encrypted using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Amazon MWAA makes it easy for customers to combine data using any of Apache Airflow's integrations, including AWS services and popular third-party tools like Apache Hadoop, Presto, Hive, and Spark, to automate data processing, machine learning pipelines, and software development and operations. Customers can provide role-based access to Apache Airflow's user interface easily and securely via AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), providing users Single Sign-On (SSO) access for scheduling and viewing their workflow executions. Amazon MWAA automatically sends Apache Airflow system metrics and logs to AWS's monitoring service, Amazon CloudWatch, making it easy for customers to view task execution delays and workflow errors across one or more environments without third party tools. With Amazon MWAA, data engineers get the extensibility of Apache Airflow with the scalability, availability, and security of AWS. "Customers have told us they really like Apache Airflow because it speeds the development of their data processing and machine learning workflows, but they want it without the burden of scaling, operating, and securing servers," said Jesse Dougherty, Vice President, Application Integration, AWS. "With Amazon MWAA, customers can use the same Apache Airflow platform as they do today with the scalability, availability, and security of AWS." Customers can launch a new Amazon MWAA environment from the AWS Management Console, CLI, AWS CloudFormation, or AWS SDK, and start running in minutes. Amazon MWAA is available today in US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Stockholm), with more regions to come. The Pokémon Company International, a subsidiary of The Pokémon Company in Japan, manages the property outside of Asia and is responsible for brand management, licensing, marketing, the Pokémon Trading Card Game, the animated TV series, home entertainment, and the official Pokémon website. "Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow meshes with our security policy by providing single sign-on controlled access through IAM roles and the ability to restrict access to our Amazon Virtual Private Cloud," said Eric Smith, Data Platform Engineer at The Pokémon Company International. "With Amazon MWAA, we can focus on building reliable data pipelines that achieve business goals rather than patching and securing instances." Detroit-based Rocket Mortgage, the nation's largest mortgage lender, enables the American Dream of homeownership and financial freedom through an industry-leading, digital-driven client experience. "Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow has helped us grow and scale our data science and machine learning workflows with significantly less infrastructure overhead," said Dan Jones, Senior Vice President of Data Intelligence for Rocket Mortgage. "With this new service, our technology teams are able to deliver best-in-class, data-driven solutions faster than ever before." GoDaddy is the company that empowers everyday entrepreneurs. With more than 20 million customers worldwide, GoDaddy is the place people come to name their ideas, build a professional website, attract customers, and manage their work. "Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow solves one of the biggest operational overheads with orchestration," said Jeremy Zogg, Senior Director of Engineering at GoDaddy. "We have spent a lot of hours setting up, configuring, scaling, and monitoring our on-premises Apache Airflow instances. This was our top challenge for our workflow deployments and we're excited to migrate and concentrate on what we do best: harnessing the power of data to drive great outcomes for our customers and business." About Amazon Web Services  For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201124005986/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow makes it easy to author, schedule, and monitor data processing and machine learning workflows in the cloud</em></p><p><em>The Pokémon Company International, Rocket Mortgage, and GoDaddy among the customers using Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 24, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA), a new managed service that makes it easy for data engineers to execute data processing workflows in the cloud. Apache Airflow is a popular open-source tool that helps customers author, schedule, and monitor workflows. With Amazon MWAA, customers can use the same familiar Airflow platform as they do today to manage their workflows, and enjoy improved scalability, availability, and security without the burden of having to build, scale, and manage the underlying infrastructure. Amazon MWAA scales workflow execution capacity based on customer needs, and integrates with AWS security services to provide secure access to customers' data. There are no up-front investments required to use Amazon MWAA and customers only pay for what they use. To get started with Amazon MWAA, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/managed-workflows-for-apache-airflows/.</p><p>Today, customers are using analytics and machine learning to derive insights from massive amounts of data. To effectively use this data, customers often need to first build a workflow that defines a series of sequential tasks to prepare and process the data. Tens of thousands of customers use AWS Step Functions to visually build and run cost-effective and scalable event-driven workflows that execute tasks across multiple AWS services. There are also customers who want the Apache Airflow orchestration workflow, which has an active open source community, a large library of pre-built integrations to third-party data processing tools like Apache Spark and Hadoop, and the ability to use Python scripts to create workflows. However, using Apache Airflow requires data engineers to install, maintain, scale, and secure the Apache Airflow environments, which adds cost and operational complexity. Furthermore, to support role-based authentication for secure access, Apache Airflow often requires a manual, iterative, and error-prone combination of configuration changes, command-line interface (CLI) commands, and, in some cases, edits to the Apache Airflow code. Customers also must integrate and configure additional tools for alerting for issues like system downtime, workflow errors, and task execution delays. While customers really enjoy the pre-built integrations and familiar Python programming language of Apache Airflow, they want it without the added operational cost and complexity.</p><p>Amazon MWAA makes it easy for customers to build and execute Apache Airflow workflows in AWS. Amazon MWAA manages the provisioning and ongoing maintenance of Apache Airflow so customers no longer need to worry about patching, scaling, or securing self-managed Apache Airflow implementations. With Amazon MWAA, compute resources that execute tasks are scaled on demand, providing consistent performance for users. Customer data is secure by default as workloads run in customers' own isolated and secure cloud environments using Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), with stored data encrypted using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Amazon MWAA makes it easy for customers to combine data using any of Apache Airflow's integrations, including AWS services and popular third-party tools like Apache Hadoop, Presto, Hive, and Spark, to automate data processing, machine learning pipelines, and software development and operations. Customers can provide role-based access to Apache Airflow's user interface easily and securely via AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), providing users Single Sign-On (SSO) access for scheduling and viewing their workflow executions. Amazon MWAA automatically sends Apache Airflow system metrics and logs to AWS's monitoring service, Amazon CloudWatch, making it easy for customers to view task execution delays and workflow errors across one or more environments without third party tools. With Amazon MWAA, data engineers get the extensibility of Apache Airflow with the scalability, availability, and security of AWS.</p><p>"Customers have told us they really like Apache Airflow because it speeds the development of their data processing and machine learning workflows, but they want it without the burden of scaling, operating, and securing servers," said Jesse Dougherty, Vice President, Application Integration, AWS. "With Amazon MWAA, customers can use the same Apache Airflow platform as they do today with the scalability, availability, and security of AWS."</p><p>Customers can launch a new Amazon MWAA environment from the AWS Management Console, CLI, AWS CloudFormation, or AWS SDK, and start running in minutes. Amazon MWAA is available today in US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Stockholm), with more regions to come.</p><p>The Pokémon Company International, a subsidiary of The Pokémon Company in Japan, manages the property outside of Asia and is responsible for brand management, licensing, marketing, the Pokémon Trading Card Game, the animated TV series, home entertainment, and the official Pokémon website. "Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow meshes with our security policy by providing single sign-on controlled access through IAM roles and the ability to restrict access to our Amazon Virtual Private Cloud," said Eric Smith, Data Platform Engineer at The Pokémon Company International. "With Amazon MWAA, we can focus on building reliable data pipelines that achieve business goals rather than patching and securing instances."</p><p>Detroit-based Rocket Mortgage, the nation's largest mortgage lender, enables the American Dream of homeownership and financial freedom through an industry-leading, digital-driven client experience. "Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow has helped us grow and scale our data science and machine learning workflows with significantly less infrastructure overhead," said Dan Jones, Senior Vice President of Data Intelligence for Rocket Mortgage. "With this new service, our technology teams are able to deliver best-in-class, data-driven solutions faster than ever before."</p><p>GoDaddy is the company that empowers everyday entrepreneurs. With more than 20 million customers worldwide, GoDaddy is the place people come to name their ideas, build a professional website, attract customers, and manage their work. "Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow solves one of the biggest operational overheads with orchestration," said Jeremy Zogg, Senior Director of Engineering at GoDaddy. "We have spent a lot of hours setting up, configuring, scaling, and monitoring our on-premises Apache Airflow instances. This was our top challenge for our workflow deployments and we're excited to migrate and concentrate on what we do best: harnessing the power of data to drive great outcomes for our customers and business."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services </p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201124005986/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

IPR Center, Amazon Launch ‘Operation Fulfilled Action' to Stop Counterfeits

/news/news-details/2020/IPR-Center-Amazon-Launch-Operation-Fulfilled-Action-to-Stop-Counterfeits/default.aspx

IPR-Center-Amazon-Launch-Operation-Fulfilled-Action-to-Stop-Counterfeits

11/24/2020 08:00:00

IPR Center, Amazon Launch ‘Operation Fulfilled Action' to Stop Counterfeits

11/24/2020

2020

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 24, 2020-- The U.S. government's National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center) and Amazon today announced the launch of a joint operation to prevent counterfeit goods from entering the U.S. and help protect American consumers. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and DHL are also supporting the operation. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201124005382/en/ "The IPR Center plays a critical role in securing the global supply-chain to protect the health and safety of the American public," said IPR Center Director Steve Francis. "However, our efforts are increased with partners like Amazon to identify, interdict, and investigate individuals, companies, and criminal organizations engaging in the illegal importation of counterfeit products. This joint operation is our latest public-private initiative bringing us one step closer to border security." "Amazon conducts investigations and sidelines inventory if we suspect a product may be counterfeit, ensuring our customers are protected," said Dharmesh Mehta, vice president, Customer Trust and Partner Support, Amazon. "But we also know that counterfeiters don't just attempt to offer their wares in one store, they attempt to offer them in multiple places. Now, by combining intelligence from Amazon, the IPR Center, and other agencies, we're able to stop counterfeits at the border, regardless of where bad actors were intending to offer them. We appreciate the partnership from the IPR Center and other agencies to protect American consumers and prosecute bad actors." In an effort to protect consumers, this joint operation will analyze data and conduct targeted inspections at US ports of entry aimed at preventing counterfeit products from entering the U.S. supply chain. The IPR Center and Amazon will leverage evidence obtained during the operation to expand on-going investigations, with the goal of holding bad actors accountable to the fullest extent of the law. This operation will be led by Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit, which was created earlier this year to support law enforcement investigations and to initiate civil litigation against counterfeiters. Amazon strictly prohibits the sale of counterfeit products, and in 2019 alone, invested more than $500 million to protect its store and customers from counterfeit and other forms of fraud and abuse. These investments include machine learning and automated systems to detect bad actors and potentially counterfeit products, dedicated teams to operate and continually refine its anti-counterfeiting programs, and tools that help Amazon work with and empower brands. As a result, 99.9% of pages viewed by customers on Amazon did not receive a valid counterfeit complaint and customers continue to shop with confidence on Amazon. This operation builds on longstanding strategic public-private initiatives currently in place at the IPR Center. Amazon proactively provides the IPR Center with data on confirmed counterfeiters to assist with investigative efforts to stop crime. More recently in May, Amazon was one of six industry leaders to join the IPR Center in an unprecedented public-private partnership to combat fraud and other illegal activity related to COVID-19 through Operation Stolen Promise (OSP). OSP is a joint task force focused on combating COVID-19 related fraud and criminal activity. The IPR Center is one of the U.S. government's key weapons in the fight against criminal counterfeiting and piracy. The center uses the expertise of 25 key federal and international agencies to share information, develop initiatives, coordinate enforcement actions, and conduct investigations related to IP theft and commercial fraud crimes. About National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center The National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, working collaboratively with its public and private sector partners, stands at the forefront of the United States government's response to combatting global intellectual property theft and enforcing intellectual properties rights violations. The IPR Center was established to combat global intellectual property theft – and, accordingly, has a significant role policing the sale and distribution of counterfeit goods on websites, social media, and the dark web. To report IP theft or to learn more about the IPR Center, visit www.IPRCenter.gov. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201124005382/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon

<p>WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 24, 2020-- The U.S. government's National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center) and Amazon today announced the launch of a joint operation to prevent counterfeit goods from entering the U.S. and help protect American consumers. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and DHL are also supporting the operation.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201124005382/en/</p><p>"The IPR Center plays a critical role in securing the global supply-chain to protect the health and safety of the American public," said IPR Center Director Steve Francis. "However, our efforts are increased with partners like Amazon to identify, interdict, and investigate individuals, companies, and criminal organizations engaging in the illegal importation of counterfeit products. This joint operation is our latest public-private initiative bringing us one step closer to border security."</p><p>"Amazon conducts investigations and sidelines inventory if we suspect a product may be counterfeit, ensuring our customers are protected," said Dharmesh Mehta, vice president, Customer Trust and Partner Support, Amazon. "But we also know that counterfeiters don't just attempt to offer their wares in one store, they attempt to offer them in multiple places. Now, by combining intelligence from Amazon, the IPR Center, and other agencies, we're able to stop counterfeits at the border, regardless of where bad actors were intending to offer them. We appreciate the partnership from the IPR Center and other agencies to protect American consumers and prosecute bad actors."</p><p>In an effort to protect consumers, this joint operation will analyze data and conduct targeted inspections at US ports of entry aimed at preventing counterfeit products from entering the U.S. supply chain. The IPR Center and Amazon will leverage evidence obtained during the operation to expand on-going investigations, with the goal of holding bad actors accountable to the fullest extent of the law.</p><p>This operation will be led by Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit, which was created earlier this year to support law enforcement investigations and to initiate civil litigation against counterfeiters.</p><p>Amazon strictly prohibits the sale of counterfeit products, and in 2019 alone, invested more than $500 million to protect its store and customers from counterfeit and other forms of fraud and abuse. These investments include machine learning and automated systems to detect bad actors and potentially counterfeit products, dedicated teams to operate and continually refine its anti-counterfeiting programs, and tools that help Amazon work with and empower brands. As a result, 99.9% of pages viewed by customers on Amazon did not receive a valid counterfeit complaint and customers continue to shop with confidence on Amazon.</p><p>This operation builds on longstanding strategic public-private initiatives currently in place at the IPR Center. Amazon proactively provides the IPR Center with data on confirmed counterfeiters to assist with investigative efforts to stop crime. More recently in May, Amazon was one of six industry leaders to join the IPR Center in an unprecedented public-private partnership to combat fraud and other illegal activity related to COVID-19 through Operation Stolen Promise (OSP). OSP is a joint task force focused on combating COVID-19 related fraud and criminal activity.</p><p>The IPR Center is one of the U.S. government's key weapons in the fight against criminal counterfeiting and piracy. The center uses the expertise of 25 key federal and international agencies to share information, develop initiatives, coordinate enforcement actions, and conduct investigations related to IP theft and commercial fraud crimes.</p><p>About National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center</p><p>The National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, working collaboratively with its public and private sector partners, stands at the forefront of the United States government's response to combatting global intellectual property theft and enforcing intellectual properties rights violations. The IPR Center was established to combat global intellectual property theft – and, accordingly, has a significant role policing the sale and distribution of counterfeit goods on websites, social media, and the dark web. To report IP theft or to learn more about the IPR Center, visit www.IPRCenter.gov.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201124005382/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon</p>

Mercado Libre Selects AWS as Its Primary Cloud Provider to Accelerate Growth and Transformation into a Data-Driven Company

/news/news-details/2020/Mercado-Libre-Selects-AWS-as-Its-Primary-Cloud-Provider-to-Accelerate-Growth-and-Transformation-into-a-Data-Driven-Company/default.aspx

Mercado-Libre-Selects-AWS-as-Its-Primary-Cloud-Provider-to-Accelerate-Growth-and-Transformation-into-a-Data-Driven-Company

11/24/2020 03:01:00

Mercado Libre Selects AWS as Its Primary Cloud Provider to Accelerate Growth and Transformation into a Data-Driven Company

11/24/2020

2020

Latin America's most valuable company by market capitalization turns to AWS to improve scalability, respond to consumer trends, and transform online commerce and payments SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 24, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Mercado Libre, Inc. (NASDAQ: MELI), headquartered in Argentina and Brazil, has selected AWS as its primary cloud provider to further transform the company into a data-driven organization, improve user experiences, accelerate the launch of new services, and support its regional expansion. Mercado Libre is the largest online commerce and payments provider in Latin America and connects businesses across 18 countries with more than 76 million active users. Mercado Libre builds on the scalability, security, and proven performance of the world's leading cloud, as well as AWS's unparalleled portfolio of services, to drive e-commerce and support the rapid growth of its Mercado Pago digital payment platform and Mercado Crédito credit line. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mercado Libre leveraged AWS to extend its services to more small and medium businesses in Latin America, giving them access to online payments and contactless store payment technology. Mercado Libre selected AWS to support the development of a common platform to gain insights from more than 20 years of data gathered from its marketplace, digital payments, logistics, advertising, and software services divisions. As part of its transformation into a data-driven organization, Mercado Libre is building MeliLake, a data lake built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), to ingest data from sales, payments, fulfillment, and shipping transactions and make it available for analysis by teams throughout the company. MeliLake leverages Amazon EMR (AWS's industry-leading cloud big data service for processing vast amounts of data using open source tools) to facilitate the processing and analysis of more than 25 terabytes of transaction data each day. The company also leverages tools from AWS partners Tableau and MicroStrategy to automatically tag, search, share, transform, and analyze that data. Mercado Libre employees can now discover and query datasets and uncover customer purchase patterns or types of payments, helping to improve operational efficiency and drive the development of new customer experiences. In addition, Mercado Libre applies AWS machine learning services to enhance security across its divisions and deliver a better customer experience. The fraud detection team for Mercado Pago (the platform responsible for payments inside Mercado Libre) leverages Amazon Rekognition (AWS's video and image analysis service) as part of its identity verification process for consumers seeking to buy through Mercado Libre, helping to minimize any type of fraud. To rapidly adapt its content to a multicultural region where most customers speak Portuguese or Spanish, Mercado Libre uses Amazon Translate (AWS's machine learning service for highly accurate language translation) to automatically translate product titles and descriptions when vendors from other countries upload their catalogs. Mercado Libre relies on AWS's highly secure, performant, and broad infrastructure including compute, storage, database, analytics, and machine learning services for busy shopping periods such as holidays (when it processes more than 2.2 million transactions per second at peak) as well as unexpected events like the COVID-19 pandemic when more people have turned to e-commerce and digital payments. The company uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to process an average of 464 visits and 19 purchases per second. It also leverages Amazon DynamoDB (AWS's key-value database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale with built-in encryption and data recovery) to support secure purchase and payment transactions for its customers, as well as manage billing, shipping, and logistics. "Mercado Libre has grown dramatically over the past two decades, democratizing the benefits of trade and digital payments to entrepreneurs, small and medium- sized enterprises, businesses, and millions of customers throughout Latin America. Working with AWS, we aim to further exceed our customers' expectations by leveraging data to continuously improve our operations and innovate new services," said Sebastian Barrios, Tech Vice President of Mercado Libre. "Mercado Libre employees use data in their daily tasks to make better business decisions and stay ahead of buying trends. We look forward to expanding our use of AWS machine learning and analytics services throughout the company to develop deeper insights that will sustain Mercado Libre's position as a growth engine for Latin America." "As one of the leading innovators in the e-commerce, finance, and technology industries, Mercado Libre is leveraging the unmatched scale, performance, and breadth and depth of services of the world's leading cloud to rapidly develop and implement new ideas that raise the bar for customer experiences," said Jaime Valles, Director of AWS Sales, Latin America. "AWS not only powers Mercado Libre's vast backend operations for its marketplace, but also provides the services to enable Mercado Libre to gain predictive insights into business trends and innovate new services to more seamlessly connect their growing community of buyers and sellers." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

<p><em>Latin America's most valuable company by market capitalization turns to AWS to improve scalability, respond to consumer trends, and transform online commerce and payments</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 24, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Mercado Libre, Inc. (NASDAQ: MELI), headquartered in Argentina and Brazil, has selected AWS as its primary cloud provider to further transform the company into a data-driven organization, improve user experiences, accelerate the launch of new services, and support its regional expansion. Mercado Libre is the largest online commerce and payments provider in Latin America and connects businesses across 18 countries with more than 76 million active users. Mercado Libre builds on the scalability, security, and proven performance of the world's leading cloud, as well as AWS's unparalleled portfolio of services, to drive e-commerce and support the rapid growth of its Mercado Pago digital payment platform and Mercado Crédito credit line. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mercado Libre leveraged AWS to extend its services to more small and medium businesses in Latin America, giving them access to online payments and contactless store payment technology.</p><p>Mercado Libre selected AWS to support the development of a common platform to gain insights from more than 20 years of data gathered from its marketplace, digital payments, logistics, advertising, and software services divisions. As part of its transformation into a data-driven organization, Mercado Libre is building MeliLake, a data lake built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), to ingest data from sales, payments, fulfillment, and shipping transactions and make it available for analysis by teams throughout the company. MeliLake leverages Amazon EMR (AWS's industry-leading cloud big data service for processing vast amounts of data using open source tools) to facilitate the processing and analysis of more than 25 terabytes of transaction data each day. The company also leverages tools from AWS partners Tableau and MicroStrategy to automatically tag, search, share, transform, and analyze that data. Mercado Libre employees can now discover and query datasets and uncover customer purchase patterns or types of payments, helping to improve operational efficiency and drive the development of new customer experiences.</p><p>In addition, Mercado Libre applies AWS machine learning services to enhance security across its divisions and deliver a better customer experience. The fraud detection team for Mercado Pago (the platform responsible for payments inside Mercado Libre) leverages Amazon Rekognition (AWS's video and image analysis service) as part of its identity verification process for consumers seeking to buy through Mercado Libre, helping to minimize any type of fraud. To rapidly adapt its content to a multicultural region where most customers speak Portuguese or Spanish, Mercado Libre uses Amazon Translate (AWS's machine learning service for highly accurate language translation) to automatically translate product titles and descriptions when vendors from other countries upload their catalogs.</p><p>Mercado Libre relies on AWS's highly secure, performant, and broad infrastructure including compute, storage, database, analytics, and machine learning services for busy shopping periods such as holidays (when it processes more than 2.2 million transactions per second at peak) as well as unexpected events like the COVID-19 pandemic when more people have turned to e-commerce and digital payments. The company uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to process an average of 464 visits and 19 purchases per second. It also leverages Amazon DynamoDB (AWS's key-value database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale with built-in encryption and data recovery) to support secure purchase and payment transactions for its customers, as well as manage billing, shipping, and logistics.</p><p>"Mercado Libre has grown dramatically over the past two decades, democratizing the benefits of trade and digital payments to entrepreneurs, small and medium- sized enterprises, businesses, and millions of customers throughout Latin America. Working with AWS, we aim to further exceed our customers' expectations by leveraging data to continuously improve our operations and innovate new services," said Sebastian Barrios, Tech Vice President of Mercado Libre. "Mercado Libre employees use data in their daily tasks to make better business decisions and stay ahead of buying trends. We look forward to expanding our use of AWS machine learning and analytics services throughout the company to develop deeper insights that will sustain Mercado Libre's position as a growth engine for Latin America."</p><p>"As one of the leading innovators in the e-commerce, finance, and technology industries, Mercado Libre is leveraging the unmatched scale, performance, and breadth and depth of services of the world's leading cloud to rapidly develop and implement new ideas that raise the bar for customer experiences," said Jaime Valles, Director of AWS Sales, Latin America. "AWS not only powers Mercado Libre's vast backend operations for its marketplace, but also provides the services to enable Mercado Libre to gain predictive insights into business trends and innovate new services to more seamlessly connect their growing community of buyers and sellers."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p>

Zalando Selects AWS as Its Preferred Cloud Provider

/news/news-details/2020/Zalando-Selects-AWS-as-Its-Preferred-Cloud-Provider/default.aspx

Zalando-Selects-AWS-as-Its-Preferred-Cloud-Provider

11/24/2020 03:01:00

Zalando Selects AWS as Its Preferred Cloud Provider

11/24/2020

2020

Europe's largest online fashion and lifestyle platform uses AWS machine learning technology to innovate faster and redefine the online shopping experience SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 24, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Zalando has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider and is going all-in on AWS for machine learning, running all of its machine learning workloads on the world's leading cloud. Zalando, which offers lifestyle and fashion products to more than 35 million customers across 17 countries, will use AWS's machine learning services to innovate faster and offer a more personalized online shopping experience. In addition to machine learning, Zalando is using the breadth and depth of AWS technologies in analytics, compute, database, networking, serverless, storage, and more to transform the company into a more data-driven organization, optimizing critical business functions such as supply chain management, pricing, marketing, and customer care. AWS's machine learning services will enable Zalando to continuously improve the customer experience by reducing the time it takes to design, launch, and scale new features for its e-commerce platform. Using Amazon SageMaker to build, train and deploy machine learning models quickly, and Amazon EMR to capture, store, and analyze large volumes of data, Zalando's engineering teams can use customer purchase data to create personalized shopping features like individual product and size recommendations and to predict a customer's future outfit preferences. Zalando is also using AWS machine learning to offer more personalized recommendations based on style preferences or a brand's ethical practices, predict when items are in-stock for more accurate package delivery and return times, and forecast real-time availability of the latest fashion trends. Working with AWS, Zalando can develop and implement new customer applications faster, such as creating digital avatars that allow customers to virtually try on clothes, and delivering a customer experience that enables shoppers to see which outfits fit them best without trying them on physically. Zalando is using a wide portfolio of AWS services to drive operational efficiencies and track business performance in near real-time with data and insights. Zalando used AWS Lake Formation to create a data lake running on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to securely enable its developer teams to collaborate more effectively on projects across different service lines. In addition to its data lake, Zalando also combines data from its internal SAP workloads, including accounting, supply chain management, and e-commerce platforms, with AWS's analytics portfolio, including AWS Glue, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Athena to produce transactional and analytical data reports that track business performance in real time. These insights help Zalando's Size & Fit team to significantly reduce size-related returns by predicting how a garment's fit is impacted by the material or stretch and making size recommendations that match the customer's fit preferences. Additionally, by migrating its SAP workloads to AWS, Zalando has reduced IT management time by more than 30 percent. "Working with AWS, we've created a next-generation machine learning platform that enables all of our data scientists and developers to collaborate better and work more efficiently with teams across the company," said Rodrigue Schaefer, Vice President Digital Foundation at Zalando. "This platform is enabling us to continuously improve the customer experience by rapidly reducing the time it takes to design and implement state-of-the-art personalization tools and new product features. From better stock management to a quicker returns process, we've also used a range of additional AWS services to drive operational efficiencies at all stages of the customer journey." "As one of the largest online retailers in Germany and Europe, it is exciting to see Zalando go all-in on AWS for its machine learning provider to support their growth and innovation strategy. With millions of customers across Europe, Zalando is a great example of a company that is using machine learning to build, test, and introduce new and more personalized features at scale," said Klaus Bürg, General Manager for Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. "By using the full portfolio of AWS in conjunction with machine learning, Zalando will become a more data-driven, flexible, and scalable organization that leverages customer insights to reimagine the online shopping experience." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. About Zalando Zalando is Europe's leading online platform for fashion and lifestyle. Founded in Berlin in 2008, we bring head-to-toe fashion to around 35 million active customers in 17 markets, offering clothing, footwear, accessories and beauty. The assortment of international brands ranges from world famous names to local labels. Our platform is a one-stop fashion destination for inspiration, innovation and interaction. As Europe's most fashionable tech company, we work hard to find digital solutions for every aspect of the fashion journey: for our customers, partners and every valuable player in the Zalando story. Our goal is to become the starting point for fashion. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201124005277/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services Inc.

<p><em>Europe's largest online fashion and lifestyle platform uses AWS machine learning technology to innovate faster and redefine the online shopping experience</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 24, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Zalando has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider and is going all-in on AWS for machine learning, running all of its machine learning workloads on the world's leading cloud. Zalando, which offers lifestyle and fashion products to more than 35 million customers across 17 countries, will use AWS's machine learning services to innovate faster and offer a more personalized online shopping experience. In addition to machine learning, Zalando is using the breadth and depth of AWS technologies in analytics, compute, database, networking, serverless, storage, and more to transform the company into a more data-driven organization, optimizing critical business functions such as supply chain management, pricing, marketing, and customer care.</p><p>AWS's machine learning services will enable Zalando to continuously improve the customer experience by reducing the time it takes to design, launch, and scale new features for its e-commerce platform. Using Amazon SageMaker to build, train and deploy machine learning models quickly, and Amazon EMR to capture, store, and analyze large volumes of data, Zalando's engineering teams can use customer purchase data to create personalized shopping features like individual product and size recommendations and to predict a customer's future outfit preferences. Zalando is also using AWS machine learning to offer more personalized recommendations based on style preferences or a brand's ethical practices, predict when items are in-stock for more accurate package delivery and return times, and forecast real-time availability of the latest fashion trends. Working with AWS, Zalando can develop and implement new customer applications faster, such as creating digital avatars that allow customers to virtually try on clothes, and delivering a customer experience that enables shoppers to see which outfits fit them best without trying them on physically.</p><p>Zalando is using a wide portfolio of AWS services to drive operational efficiencies and track business performance in near real-time with data and insights. Zalando used AWS Lake Formation to create a data lake running on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to securely enable its developer teams to collaborate more effectively on projects across different service lines. In addition to its data lake, Zalando also combines data from its internal SAP workloads, including accounting, supply chain management, and e-commerce platforms, with AWS's analytics portfolio, including AWS Glue, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Athena to produce transactional and analytical data reports that track business performance in real time. These insights help Zalando's Size &amp; Fit team to significantly reduce size-related returns by predicting how a garment's fit is impacted by the material or stretch and making size recommendations that match the customer's fit preferences. Additionally, by migrating its SAP workloads to AWS, Zalando has reduced IT management time by more than 30 percent.</p><p>"Working with AWS, we've created a next-generation machine learning platform that enables all of our data scientists and developers to collaborate better and work more efficiently with teams across the company," said Rodrigue Schaefer, Vice President Digital Foundation at Zalando. "This platform is enabling us to continuously improve the customer experience by rapidly reducing the time it takes to design and implement state-of-the-art personalization tools and new product features. From better stock management to a quicker returns process, we've also used a range of additional AWS services to drive operational efficiencies at all stages of the customer journey."</p><p>"As one of the largest online retailers in Germany and Europe, it is exciting to see Zalando go all-in on AWS for its machine learning provider to support their growth and innovation strategy. With millions of customers across Europe, Zalando is a great example of a company that is using machine learning to build, test, and introduce new and more personalized features at scale," said Klaus Bürg, General Manager for Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. "By using the full portfolio of AWS in conjunction with machine learning, Zalando will become a more data-driven, flexible, and scalable organization that leverages customer insights to reimagine the online shopping experience."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>About Zalando</p><p>Zalando is Europe's leading online platform for fashion and lifestyle. Founded in Berlin in 2008, we bring head-to-toe fashion to around 35 million active customers in 17 markets, offering clothing, footwear, accessories and beauty. The assortment of international brands ranges from world famous names to local labels. Our platform is a one-stop fashion destination for inspiration, innovation and interaction. As Europe's most fashionable tech company, we work hard to find digital solutions for every aspect of the fashion journey: for our customers, partners and every valuable player in the Zalando story. Our goal is to become the starting point for fashion.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201124005277/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services Inc.</p>

Miley Cyrus Kicks Off "Amazon Music Holiday Plays": A Weekly Concert Experience Featuring Performances and Whimsical Pageantry, December 1, in her First Performance Since the Release of New Album, Plastic Hearts

/news/news-details/2020/Miley-Cyrus-Kicks-Off-Amazon-Music-Holiday-Plays-A-Weekly-Concert-Experience-Featuring-Performances-and-Whimsical-Pageantry-December-1-in-her-First-Performance-Since-the-Release-of-New-Album-Plastic-Hearts/default.aspx

Miley-Cyrus-Kicks-Off-Amazon-Music-Holiday-Plays-A-Weekly-Concert-Experience-Featuring-Performances-and-Whimsical-Pageantry-December-1-in-her-First-Performance-Since-the-Release-of-New-Album-Plastic-Hearts

11/23/2020 09:05:00

Miley Cyrus Kicks Off "Amazon Music Holiday Plays": A Weekly Concert Experience Featuring Performances and Whimsical Pageantry, December 1, in her First Performance Since the Release of New Album, Plastic Hearts

11/23/2020

2020

Lil Nas X to Host and Give Debut Live Performance of His New Single, "HOLIDAY" Foo Fighters to Bring Concert Series to an Epic Finale December 15 Holiday Plays will also feature a performance from Amazon Music Breakthrough Artist, Kiana Ledé  Three-part concert series to stream globally in the Amazon Music app and on the Amazon Music Twitch Channel, and in the U.S. on Prime Video and the homepage of Amazon.com beginning December 1 at 8pm ET SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 23, 2020-- Today, Amazon Music announced a brand-new, three-part holiday concert series hosted by Lil Nas X titled "Amazon Music Holiday Plays," premiering December 1 with a new episode airing every Tuesday at 8pm ET through December 15. This global music moment is the first holiday special from Amazon Music, and will feature outlandish sets, playful Q&As, and intimate performances from artists. Amazon Music Holiday Plays kicks off with trailblazer Miley Cyrus in her first performance since the release of her new album,Plastic Hearts, and Grammy Award-winning artist Lil Nas X will not only host, but kick off the first episode with the world premiere live performance of his new single, "HOLIDAY." Amazon Music Holiday Plays will come to an explosive close with 12-time Grammy winners Foo Fighters, and Amazon Music Breakthrough artist Kiana Ledé, each in their own personalized production. For more information on "Amazon Music Holiday Plays," and to view a trailer for the series, click here. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201123005947/en/ Amazon Music Holiday Plays (Graphic: Business Wire) This press release features multimedia. Images are available to download here. Filmed within a historic theater, Amazon Music Holiday Plays will give fans truly unique and memorable music experiences while capturing the intimacy, joy and ensemble spirit of a school holiday concert. The immersive, at-home viewing experience will feature handcrafted stage designs curated by each artist, hydraulic snow machines, backstage ballyhoo, multiple costume changes, performances featuring a mix of new music, fresh takes on catalog classics and holiday covers, and Q&A's with Lil Nas X. "I can't wait for my fans to go back to the future with me, and have the world see me perform ‘HOLIDAY' live for the first time ever," said Lil Nas X. "I worked with Amazon Music to create a crazy set that's going to take everyone on a wild ride through a futuristic North Pole. It's going to be amazing!" The first episode will air December 1st with Miley Cyrus, in her first performance since the release of her new album Plastic Hearts via RCA Records. Miley will perform a mix of songs from her upcoming album, including "Prisoner" and "Plastic Hearts," in addition to a reimagined version of Wham!'s holiday classic hit, "Last Christmas." In this first episode, viewers will also witness the world premiere live performance of Lil Nas X and his new single, "HOLIDAY," in an over-the-top set featuring hydraulics and snow-capped robo-reindeer, based on the epic music video for the single that took the internet by storm, set on Christmas Eve of the year 2220. December 8th, Kiana Ledé will connect with her fans in a performance that includes riveting versions of her breakout single, "Ex," as well as her brand-new Amazon Original cover of the timeless holiday classic, "The Christmas Song," now available to stream as a studio version exclusively on Amazon Music here. Fresh off the release of the Deluxe version of her debut album KiKi, Ledé will also perform album favorites "Plenty More" and "Second Chances". Ledé is also part of the first class of artists to participate in Breakthrough, a developing artist program on Amazon Music announced earlier this year, aimed at championing emerging artists at the most crucial moment in their careers, accelerating them to the mainstream. Foo Fighters will have the (very loud) last word December 15, capturing rock ‘n roll lightning in a bottle playing their Billboard Rock Airplay #1 single, "Shame Shame," plus classics spanning their 25-year career, and an electrified cover of the Chuck Berry Christmas chestnut, "Run Rudolph Run." "This Amazon Music Christmas special will be magical," said Ledé. "Reading letters from my fans, singing songs from my album again, and a very special Christmas song live for the first time, really kick-started my holiday cheer." To watch Amazon Music Holiday Plays, fans can tune in beginning December 1at 8pm ET for a limited time. Customers across the world can stream the concert experience in the Amazon Music app (iOS and Android); from the Amazon Music channel on Twitch, here; and in the U.S., customers can stream on Amazon.com or Prime Video. Amazon Music Holiday Plays will be available on-demand on Prime Video until Dec. 31. About Amazon Music Amazon Music reimagines music listening by enabling customers to unlock millions of songs and thousands of curated playlists and stations with their voice. Amazon Music provides unlimited access to new releases and classic hits across iOS and Android mobile devices, PC, Mac, Echo, and Alexa-enabled devices including Fire TV and more. With Amazon Music, Prime members have access to ad-free listening of 2 million songs at no additional cost to their membership. Listeners can also enjoy the premium subscription service, Amazon Music Unlimited, which provides access to more than 70 million songs and the latest new releases. And with Amazon Music HD, customers have access to the highest-quality listening experience available, with more than 70 million songs available in High Definition (HD), millions of songs in Ultra HD, and a growing catalog of 3D Audio. Customers also have free access to an ad-supported selection of top playlists and stations on Amazon Music. All Amazon Music tiers now offer a wide selection of podcasts at no additional cost, and live streaming in partnership with Twitch. Engaging with music and culture has never been more natural, simple, and fun. For more information, visit amazonmusic.com or download the Amazon Music app. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201123005947/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Music

<p>Lil Nas X to Host and Give Debut Live Performance of His New Single, "HOLIDAY"</p><p>Foo Fighters to Bring Concert Series to an Epic Finale December 15</p><p><em>Holiday Plays will also feature a performance from Amazon Music Breakthrough Artist, Kiana Ledé </em></p><p><em>Three-part concert series to stream globally in the Amazon Music app and on the Amazon Music Twitch Channel, and in the U.S. on Prime Video and the homepage of Amazon.com beginning December 1 at 8pm ET</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 23, 2020-- Today, Amazon Music announced a brand-new, three-part holiday concert series hosted by Lil Nas X titled "Amazon Music Holiday Plays," premiering December 1 with a new episode airing every Tuesday at 8pm ET through December 15. This global music moment is the first holiday special from Amazon Music, and will feature outlandish sets, playful Q&amp;As, and intimate performances from artists. Amazon Music Holiday Plays kicks off with trailblazer Miley Cyrus in her first performance since the release of her new album,<em>Plastic Hearts</em>, and Grammy Award-winning artist Lil Nas X will not only host, but kick off the first episode with the world premiere live performance of his new single, "HOLIDAY." Amazon Music Holiday Plays will come to an explosive close with 12-time Grammy winners Foo Fighters, and Amazon Music Breakthrough artist Kiana Ledé, each in their own personalized production. For more information on "Amazon Music Holiday Plays," and to view a trailer for the series, click here.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201123005947/en/</p><div><p>Amazon Music Holiday Plays (Graphic: Business Wire)</p></div><p>This press release features multimedia. Images are available to download here.</p><p>Filmed within a historic theater, Amazon Music Holiday Plays will give fans truly unique and memorable music experiences while capturing the intimacy, joy and ensemble spirit of a school holiday concert. The immersive, at-home viewing experience will feature handcrafted stage designs curated by each artist, hydraulic snow machines, backstage ballyhoo, multiple costume changes, performances featuring a mix of new music, fresh takes on catalog classics and holiday covers, and Q&amp;A's with Lil Nas X.</p><p><em>"I can't wait for my fans to go back to the future with me, and have the world see me perform ‘HOLIDAY' live for the first time ever," said Lil Nas X. "I worked with Amazon Music to create a crazy set that's going to take everyone on a wild ride through a futuristic North Pole. It's going to be amazing!"</em></p><p>The first episode will air December 1^st with Miley Cyrus, in her first performance since the release of her new album <em>Plastic Hearts</em> via RCA Records. Miley will perform a mix of songs from her upcoming album, including "Prisoner" and "Plastic Hearts," in addition to a reimagined version of Wham!'s holiday classic hit, "Last Christmas." In this first episode, viewers will also witness the world premiere live performance of Lil Nas X and his new single, "HOLIDAY," in an over-the-top set featuring hydraulics and snow-capped robo-reindeer, based on the epic music video for the single that took the internet by storm, set on Christmas Eve of the year 2220.</p><p>December 8th, Kiana Ledé will connect with her fans in a performance that includes riveting versions of her breakout single, "Ex," as well as her brand-new Amazon Original cover of the timeless holiday classic, "The Christmas Song," now available to stream as a studio version exclusively on Amazon Music here. Fresh off the release of the Deluxe version of her debut album <em>KiKi</em>, Ledé will also perform album favorites "Plenty More" and "Second Chances". Ledé is also part of the first class of artists to participate in Breakthrough, a developing artist program on Amazon Music announced earlier this year, aimed at championing emerging artists at the most crucial moment in their careers, accelerating them to the mainstream. Foo Fighters will have the (very loud) last word December 15, capturing rock ‘n roll lightning in a bottle playing their Billboard Rock Airplay #1 single, "Shame Shame," plus classics spanning their 25-year career, and an electrified cover of the Chuck Berry Christmas chestnut, "Run Rudolph Run."</p><p><em>"This Amazon Music Christmas special will be magical," said</em> <em>Ledé. "Reading letters from my fans, singing songs from my album again, and a very special Christmas song live for the first time, really kick-started my holiday cheer."</em></p><p>To watch Amazon Music Holiday Plays, fans can tune in beginning December 1at 8pm ET for a limited time. Customers across the world can stream the concert experience in the Amazon Music app (iOS and Android); from the Amazon Music channel on Twitch, here; and in the U.S., customers can stream on Amazon.com or Prime Video. Amazon Music Holiday Plays will be available on-demand on Prime Video until Dec. 31.</p><p>About Amazon Music</p><p>Amazon Music reimagines music listening by enabling customers to unlock millions of songs and thousands of curated playlists and stations with their voice. Amazon Music provides unlimited access to new releases and classic hits across iOS and Android mobile devices, PC, Mac, Echo, and Alexa-enabled devices including Fire TV and more. With Amazon Music, Prime members have access to ad-free listening of 2 million songs at no additional cost to their membership. Listeners can also enjoy the premium subscription service, Amazon Music Unlimited, which provides access to more than 70 million songs and the latest new releases. And with Amazon Music HD, customers have access to the highest-quality listening experience available, with more than 70 million songs available in High Definition (HD), millions of songs in Ultra HD, and a growing catalog of 3D Audio. Customers also have free access to an ad-supported selection of top playlists and stations on Amazon Music. All Amazon Music tiers now offer a wide selection of podcasts at no additional cost, and live streaming in partnership with Twitch. Engaging with music and culture has never been more natural, simple, and fun. For more information, visit amazonmusic.com or download the Amazon Music app.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201123005947/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Music</p>

Amazon's Sneak Peek to Cyber Monday is Here—A Weekend to Shop and Score Even More Last Minute Holiday Deals

/news/news-details/2020/Amazons-Sneak-Peek-to-Cyber-Monday-is-HereA-Weekend-to-Shop-and-Score-Even-More-Last-Minute-Holiday-Deals/default.aspx

Amazons-Sneak-Peek-to-Cyber-Monday-is-HereA-Weekend-to-Shop-and-Score-Even-More-Last-Minute-Holiday-Deals

11/23/2020 09:00:00

Amazon's Sneak Peek to Cyber Monday is Here—A Weekend to Shop and Score Even More Last Minute Holiday Deals

11/23/2020

2020

Cyber Monday deals weekend kicks-off on November 28 and lasts through Monday November 30 with incredible deals and extra savings on a wide selection of products including top trending gifts, most-loved stocking suffers, and much more at amazon.com/cybermonday  Amazon continues to support small business selling partners this holiday season; customers can shop thousands of deals from small businesses and curated collections at amazon.com/supportsmall Don't wait—score last minute deals including: save up to 60% on HAUS LABORATORIES by Lady Gaga, up to 30% on Play-Doh, NERF, and Hasbro Games, up to 50% on CUBCOATs fashion hoodies, 40% on Wag dog food and treats and $70 off the 32" Insignia Smart HD TV Fire TV Edition  SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 23, 2020-- (NASDAQ:AMZN) – Amazon's Cyber Monday Deals Weekend will be a multi-day marathon of incredible savings and deep discounts across a wide selection of products from toys to home and kitchen items, beauty, electronics, Amazon Devices and much more. Starting on Saturday November 28 through November 30 (Cyber Monday) customers can grab top-trending gifts from iRobot, LEGO, Playskool, Cole Haan, Wag and many more on amazon.com/cybermonday or on the Amazon App. Customers can also shop deals and popular products within Amazon's Holiday Gift Guides, including the recently-launched Oprah's Favorite Things list, all at amazon.com/gifts. In addition to shopping top deals from small businesses, customers can easily support tens of thousands of small businesses through recently launched collections at amazon.com/supportsmall. Amazon is committed to making it easy to save this holiday season, in fact, according to a recent study by ecommerce analytics firm Profitero, Amazon was found to be the lowest priced online retailer. According to the National Retail Federation, 42 percent of customers planned to start their holiday shopping by the end of October this year. But for customers who haven't gotten a head start or tend to procrastinate, it's not too late—Amazon's Cyber Monday Deals Weekend will feature a wide selection of deals on giftable items and holiday must-haves from brands including NERF, Disney, Lacoste, Cuisinart and Belei so customers can still save big. The National Retail Federation also revealed that 91% of online shoppers plan to take advantage of free shipping this year—and with free delivery on millions of items for all Amazon customers, plus millions of items eligible for fast, free delivery with no minimum purchase for Prime members, Cyber Monday shoppers can spend more time finalizing their gift list, and less time worrying about how they'll get it in time. At Amazon, incredible employees come together to deliver magical experiences for customers—every day and throughout the holiday season—and that includes offering fast, free and convenient delivery options for customers. With more than 150 new process improvements and safety measures implemented over the last several months, approximately $10 billion expected to be invested this year to help keep employees safe and deliver products to customers, and hundreds of thousands of employees working across Amazon's network, customers can rely on fast and efficient delivery throughout the holiday season and beyond. Cyber Monday Deals Weekend – A Sneak Peek: Below is a selection of some of the top deals that will be available on various days and times from November 28 through November 30, while supplies last, at amazon.com/cybermonday, on the Amazon App or by simply asking, "Alexa, what are my deals?" Customers can check out the Holiday Gift Guides to find something for everyone on their list at amazon.com/gifts and discover more ways to save with Amazon Coupons at amazon.com/coupons. Customers can also shop on smile.amazon.com/cybermonday to find the same amazing deals and Amazon shopping experience, with the added bonus that AmazonSmile will donate a portion of the purchase price of eligible products to a charity of your choice. Support Small Businesses on Amazon  Save on thousands of Small Business Holiday Deals from November 26 – November 30. Customers can also shop for gifts exclusively from small businesses in the Small Business Gift Guide. Save from small brands on Amazon Launchpad, such as up to 50% on CUBCOATs fashion hoodies, 30% on the Taco vs Burrito strategic card game, 30% on iFox iF012 Bluetooth Shower Speaker, 50% on Kids Against Maturity Card Game, and 35% on Soliom Outdoor Home Security Camera. Customers can discover new, unique, and unexpected products from today's emerging brands in theLaunchpad Holiday Gift Guide. Save up to 20% on gifts and décor from Amazon Handmade Makers, such as Hereafter You + Me Puzzle Piece Wood Ornaments and Melanie Golden Topaz Stud Earrings. Customers can also support small businesses and Makers by browsing unique, handcrafted items in the Handmade Holiday Gift Guide. Save 50% on a new service called Amazon Explore that lets customers take virtual experiences to shop for unique gifts at boutiques and markets all around the world. Amazon Explore is a way for customers to support small businesses and even get to know shop owners and hosts while virtually browsing items, asking questions, and purchasing gifts instantly. Amazon Devices The all-new Echois $30 off – just $69.99 The all-new Echo Dot Kids Edition is $21 off – just $38.99 Echo Auto is $30 off – just $19.99 Fire TV Cube is $40 off – just $79.99 The all-new Fire TV Stick Lite is $12 off – just $17.99 The all-new Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote is $12 off – just $27.99 Get an all-new 32" Toshiba Smart HD TV Fire TV Edition for just $119.99 Get an all-new 24" Insignia Smart HD TV Fire TV Edition for just $79.99 Ring Video Doorbell 3 is $60 off – just $139.99 The eero mesh WiFi system 3-pack is $75 off – just $174.00 The all-new Fire HD 8 tablet is $35 off – just $54.99 Kindle Paperwhite is $45 off – just $84.99 Kindle Oasis is $75 off – just $174.99 The all-new Blink Outdoor camera kits are up to $130 off Echo Show 8 is $65 off – just $64.99 + $5 Blink Mini Amazon Brands Save up to 20% on AmazonBasics gaming accessories Save up to 20% on mattresses from Rivet and AmazonBasics Save up to 20% on select furniture and décor from Rivet Save 40% on Wag dog food and treats Save 20% on Belei skincare Save 20% on nutrition and wellness products from Amazon Elements and Revly Save 20% on coffee, snacks, and other grocery essentials from Solimo, Happy Belly, and Amazon Fresh Save up to 30% on kids' and baby clothing from Our Brands including Amazon Essentials and Simple Joys by Carter's Fashion Save up to 30% on select seasonal fashion trends including bright puffers, plaid and printed loungewear, and cozy fleece Save up to 50% on CUBCOATs fashion hoodies Save up to 30% on Dr. Scholl's Save up to 30% on Vaenait baby pajama sets Save up to 30% on Wantdo jacket Save up to 30% on Lacoste apparel, shoes, and accessories Save up to 30% on Nautica men's and women's apparel Save up to 50% on Cole Haan men's and women's shoes Save up to 40% on Lands' End apparel Save up to 25% on select cozy-comfy fashion from Shopbop including Honeydew Intimates and Z Supply Save up to 40% on select handbags and accessories from Shopbop including Baggu, Shashi, and Gorjana Beauty, Health and Personal Care Save up to 35% on razors from Braun, Gillette and more Save up to 60% on HAUS LABORATORIES by Lady Gaga collection Save up to 47% on whitening kits and oral care from Oral-B, Crest and more Save 50% on 23andMe Health + Ancestry Personal Genetic Service Kit Toys & Games Save up to 30% on Play-Doh Save up to 30% on Baby Alive, Littlest Pet Shop and more Save up to 30% on Playskool and more preschool toys Save up to 30% on NERF Save up to 30% on Magic the Gathering Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths Commander All 5 Decks Save up to 30% on Hasbro Games Save up to 30% on Action Figures from Beyblade, and more Save up to 40% on the L.O.L. Surprise! O.M.G. 4-in-1 Glamper Save up to 30% on Disney toys and home products Save up to 30% on Collectible Toys from L.O.L Surprise!, Calico Critters, Adora, and More Household, Kitchen, Office, Smart Home and Home Improvement Save 47% on select Bissell floorcare products Save 20% on select Levoit humidifiers Save on select Eufy floorcare products Save 30% on select All-Clad products Save up to 45% on select Instant Pot products Save 30% on select Dash products Save up to 30% on select Cuisinart products Save 23% on select Anova products Save up to 30% on Rugs from Safavieh, Nuloom and Unique Loom Save up to 30% on Ashley Furniture Save up to 30% on Classic Brands Furniture and Mattresses Save 10% on Tuft and Needle Original Mattress, Nod Mattresses and more Save up to 20% on Moen Showerheads and Faucets Save on BioBidet Supreme BB-1000 Save on Sylvania Light Bulbs and LED+ Light Bulbs Save on GenieMaster 3-Button Garage Door Opener (2 pack) Save on Kasa Smart Plugs Save up to 25% on Broan ventilation fans Save up to 30% on select Sengled Lightbulbs Save up to 25% on select Yale Assure Locks Save up to 30% on First Alert Plug-In Carbon Monoxide Detector with Battery Backup Save on select Simplisafe Security Systems Save up to 35% on iRobot 675 Roomba Vacuum Electronics Save up to 30% on Smart Home Security Cameras Save up to 15% on weBoost Signal Boosters Save up to 30% on Headphones from TaoTronics Save up to 40% on Jabra Headphones Save up to 35% on Nixplay Digital Frames Save 50% on H&R Block 2020 Tax software Save 20% off the Samsung 32in 4K Q50 Smart TV Save up to 15% on select Quartet products Save up to 40% off select Video Games, including Just Dance 2021 Major Appliances, Lawn & Garden and Tools Save 15% on select Walsh Appliances Save 15% on select Cosmo Appliances Save 15% on Midea 3.1 Cu. Ft. Compact Refrigerator Save 15% on select NewAir Appliances Save 15% on GE Profile Nugget Ice Maker Save 10% on select GE Compact Refrigerators Save 40% on Samsung AirDresser Save up to 20% on select Shop Succulents plants Save up to 17% on select Masterbuilt Digital Electric Smoker Save 15% on select Pool Covers from Robelle & Pool Mate Save up to 34% on Alpine Home Christmas Decor Save 15% or more on select Sun Joe & Snow Joe products Save up to 20% on select EGO and SKIL Outdoor Tools Save up to 30% on select Greenworks power tools Save up to 30% on select Renogy Solar Products Save 15% on select Worx Chainsaws Save 20% on select Worx Tools Save up to 30% on select BLACK+DECKER Products Save up to 20% on select SKIL Tools Save up to 15% on select Fluke Tools Save up to 20% on select Apex Tools Sports & Outdoors Save up to 15% on select Intex Airbeds Save up to 25% on select SUUNTO smartwatches Save up to 15% on select Sunny Health & Fitness gym equipment Save up to 25% on select baseball and softball equipment Save up to 20% on select kids bikes, adult bikes, helmets and more Save up to 60% on select golf clubs, balls, and accessories Save up to 25% on Joola table tennis tables and accessories Save up to 15% on Stiga table tennis tables Audible, Music, Video, Kindle and Books Audible: Between November 1 and December 31, new members save nearly 40% on the first six months of an Audible Plus membership at just $4.95 per month. Amazon Music: New Amazon Music Unlimited customers can get three months of the premium streaming tier free, to enjoy unlimited access to more than 70 million songs, ad-free and a wide selection of popular podcasts Amazon Music: Current Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers can upgrade to the Family Plan free for three months, with access for up to six accounts. Amazon Music: With purchase of select Echo devices, new Amazon Music Unlimited customers will receive six months of the premium, ad-free streaming tier for free. Amazon Music: Today, Amazon Music announced a brand-new, three-part holiday concert series hosted by Lil Nas X titled "Amazon Music Holiday Plays," premiering December 1 with a new episode airing every Tuesday at 8pm ET through December 15. This global music moment will feature outlandish sets, playful Q&As, and intimate performances from Miley Cyrus, Foo Fighters, Lil Nas X, and Amazon Music Breakthrough Artist, Kiana Ledé. Customers can watch Amazon Music Holiday Plays globally in the Amazon Music app (iOS and Android) and on the Amazon Music Twitch Channel; and in the U.S. on Prime Video and the homepage of Amazon.com beginning December 1 at 8pm ET. View a trailer for the concert series, here. Kindle Unlimited: Enjoy 2 months of Kindle Unlimited for $0.99 - access more than 1 million books, popular magazines and thousands of books with Audible narration. Offer valid for new members only. Terms and Conditions apply. Books: General book deals: Save up to 50% on select multi-genre books and eBooks. Need inspiration? Check out the Books Gift Guide here! Pets Save on select GloFish Aquarium Kits Save up to 51% on Dog and Cat Food from WellPet Business, Industrial and Scientific Save 15% on AmScope microscope kits for students and kids Save 20% on Oreck Commercial XL Upright Vacuum Cleaner Save up to 30% on Mynt 3D Printing Pens and Accessories Save 19% on the Flashforge Adventurer 3 Lite 3D Printer Save 16% on Dremel Digilab 3D Printer 3D45 Save 15% on Flashforge Finder 3D Printer Save up to 15% on First Aid Only all-purpose first aid kit Save 15% on Fluke 62 Max Thermometer and Fluke 59 Max Infrared Thermometer Automotive Save 50% on Tire Installation Save up to 30% on Select NOCO Products Save up to 22% on Select Chemical Guys Detailing Kits Save up to 22% on Select Chemical Guys Foam Cannon Bundles Save up to 20% on Select Gator ETX Roll Up Truck Bed Tonneau Covers Additionally, customers can enter our Holiday Vehicle Sweepstakes for a chance to win a 2021 Hyundai Santa Fe from December 1-31, 2020. To enter, customers need to visit one of the following pages: 1) Automotive Storefront, 2) Sweepstakes Landing Page, 3) Hyundai Santa Fe Vehicle Detail Page, and 4) Hyundai Virtual Showroom. A winner will be notified on January 15, 2021. Baby 30% off Evenflo Pivot Explore Wagon Amazon Gift Cards November 26 through November 30, save 20% or more on select gift card brands including Gap, H&M, Petco and more. Now through December 31, customers using Amazon Reload to replenish their Amazon Gift Card balance for the first time will receive a $10 bonus with their reload of $100 or more. Now through December 20, first-time Amazon Gift Card shoppers will receive a $15 promotional credit with the purchase of $50 or more in Amazon Gift Cards. The promotional credit expires on February 6, 2021. Other restrictions apply. Amazon Credit Cards Now through December 22, with an eligible Prime membership, customers who apply and are approved for the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa Card will instantly receive a $100 Gift Card. Prime Cardmembers earn 5% back at Whole Foods Market and Amazon.com. Additionally, customers without a Prime membership can apply for the Amazon Rewards Visa Card and receive a $60 Gift Card upon approval, in addition to earning 3% back at Whole Foods Market and Amazon.com as a cardmember. Restrictions apply. For details, visit amazon.com/visa for details. For a limited time, eligible Prime members with an Amazon Prime Rewards Visa Signature Card or Amazon Prime Store Card get 10% back on select items from the Amazon Holiday Gift Guide, including categories like Electronics, Toys, Home, Kitchen, Pets, holiday décor and more. For details, visit www.amazon.com/pcb. Whole Foods Market  From November 27 to December 1, Whole Foods Market is offering deals on customer favorites including organic honeycrisp apples ($2.99/lb), Animal Welfare Certified air-chilled organic chicken wings ($2.99/lb), and all probiotic supplements (25% off). Prime members can enjoy an additional 10% off, both in-store and online. Grocery Save up to 30% on Holiday beverages on Amazon.com Woot! Woot!: Amazon's deal site will have dozens of limited-time discounts for Black Friday and Cyber Monday with free shipping for Prime members and daily doorbuster deals. Visit woot.com or fire up the Woot! App now! Treasure Truck Save on the RockJam 61-key keyboard piano kit from Treasure Truck Amazon Warehouse Amazon Warehouse: Save an extra 20% on select quality pre-owned and open box items for the kitchen, home, office, sports and outdoors, including major appliances, furniture, home décor and more. Visit amazon.com/amazonwarehouse. Fast, Free & Convenient Delivery Options In addition to free delivery on millions of items for all Amazon customers, Amazon offers a number of ways for customers to shop for and receive holiday gifts: Free One-Day & Same-Day Delivery: Prime members in the U.S. can shop a selection of over 10 million items eligible for Prime Free One-Day Delivery with no minimum purchase, and millions of items available for Same-Day Delivery in 47 major metropolitan areas. These delivery options are not only convenient for customers but they're better for the planet because One-Day and Same-Day deliveries ship from local fulfillment centers so they travel shorter distances and generate less carbon emissions. This is just another way that Amazon is leveraging its scale for good to make investments that support communities. Learn more at amazon.com/primedelivery. Not a Prime member yet? Join Prime or start a 30-day free trial at amazon.com/prime. Ultrafast & Free Grocery Delivery & Pickup: Prime members in more than 2,000 cities and towns have access to free, two-hour delivery on more than 170,000 products from Whole Foods Market and Amazon Fresh. Plus, in addition to groceries, Prime members can find toys, gifts, household products, and everyday essentials, electronics, Amazon Devices, and more available with free, two-hour delivery from Amazon Fresh. Prime members also get free one-hour pickup at all U.S. Whole Foods Market and Amazon Fresh stores. Delivery Where it's Needed Most: Whether road-tripping to see family, staying home and need a secure delivery location, or sending a gift to a loved one or friend, there are thousands of alternative package pickup options customers can choose from via Amazon Hub. These locations are conveniently located near or in offices, convenience stores, malls, apartment buildings, and grocery stores, in more than 900 cities and towns across the country. Tens of millions of products can be easily and conveniently delivered to an Amazon Hub pickup point at Whole Foods Market, 7-11, Chase Bank, Rite-Aid, HealthMart, GNC, Stage Stores, and more. To find an Amazon Hub location, visit amazon.com/hub. Extended Returns Window: Customers can buy gifts with confidence on Amazon knowing that millions of items are eligible for free and convenient returns at over 18,000 locations in the U.S. and this year's return window is even longer—most items shipped between October 1 and December 31, 2020 can now be returned until January 31, 2021. In addition, over 5,800 locations including Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, UPS Store locations and Kohl's—and new this year Whole Foods Market—offer label-free, box-free returns, making it even easier than ever to check returns off your list. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. Profitero Study Methodology Each day, Profitero monitors prices and other data on more than 450 million product pages on hundreds of unique retailer sites. For this study, Profitero analyzed daily prices collected over an 8 week period (Aug. 24, 2020 to Oct. 18, 2020) at Amazon.com and other leading online retail sites across 20 categories. Only identical items available and in-stock in the same pack configuration were compared. Prices for the same items were collected within 24 hours of each other to ensure validity of the comparisons. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201123005689/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>Cyber Monday deals weekend kicks-off on November 28 and lasts through Monday November 30 with incredible deals and extra savings on a wide selection of products including top trending gifts, most-loved stocking suffers, and much more at amazon.com/cybermonday </em></p><p><em>Amazon continues to support small business selling partners this holiday season; customers can shop thousands of deals from small businesses and curated collections at amazon.com/supportsmall</em></p><p><em>Don't wait—score last minute deals including: save up to 60% on HAUS LABORATORIES by Lady Gaga, up to 30% on Play-Doh, NERF, and Hasbro Games, up to 50% on CUBCOATs fashion hoodies, 40% on Wag dog food and treats and $70 off the 32" Insignia Smart HD TV Fire TV Edition </em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 23, 2020-- (NASDAQ:AMZN) – Amazon's Cyber Monday Deals Weekend will be a multi-day marathon of incredible savings and deep discounts across a wide selection of products from toys to home and kitchen items, beauty, electronics, Amazon Devices and much more. Starting on Saturday November 28 through November 30 (Cyber Monday) customers can grab top-trending gifts from iRobot, LEGO, Playskool, Cole Haan, Wag and many more on amazon.com/cybermonday or on the Amazon App. Customers can also shop deals and popular products within Amazon's Holiday Gift Guides, including the recently-launched Oprah's Favorite Things list, all at amazon.com/gifts. In addition to shopping top deals from small businesses, customers can easily support tens of thousands of small businesses through recently launched collections at amazon.com/supportsmall. Amazon is committed to making it easy to save this holiday season, in fact, according to a recent study by ecommerce analytics firm Profitero, Amazon was found to be the lowest priced online retailer.</p><p>According to the National Retail Federation, 42 percent of customers planned to start their holiday shopping by the end of October this year. But for customers who haven't gotten a head start or tend to procrastinate, it's not too late—Amazon's Cyber Monday Deals Weekend will feature a wide selection of deals on giftable items and holiday must-haves from brands including NERF, Disney, Lacoste, Cuisinart and Belei so customers can still save big. The National Retail Federation also revealed that 91% of online shoppers plan to take advantage of free shipping this year—and with free delivery on millions of items for all Amazon customers, plus millions of items eligible for fast, free delivery with no minimum purchase for Prime members, Cyber Monday shoppers can spend more time finalizing their gift list, and less time worrying about how they'll get it in time.</p><p>At Amazon, incredible employees come together to deliver magical experiences for customers—every day and throughout the holiday season—and that includes offering fast, free and convenient delivery options for customers. With more than 150 new process improvements and safety measures implemented over the last several months, approximately $10 billion expected to be invested this year to help keep employees safe and deliver products to customers, and hundreds of thousands of employees working across Amazon's network, customers can rely on fast and efficient delivery throughout the holiday season and beyond.</p><p>Cyber Monday Deals Weekend – A Sneak Peek:</p><p>Below is a selection of some of the top deals that will be available on various days and times from November 28 through November 30, while supplies last, at amazon.com/cybermonday, on the Amazon App or by simply asking, "Alexa, what are my deals?" Customers can check out the Holiday Gift Guides to find something for everyone on their list at amazon.com/gifts and discover more ways to save with Amazon Coupons at amazon.com/coupons. Customers can also shop on smile.amazon.com/cybermonday to find the same amazing deals and Amazon shopping experience, with the added bonus that AmazonSmile will donate a portion of the purchase price of eligible products to a charity of your choice.</p><p>Support Small Businesses on Amazon </p><ul><li>Save on thousands of Small Business Holiday Deals from November 26 – November 30. Customers can also shop for gifts exclusively from small businesses in the Small Business Gift Guide.</li><li>Save from small brands on Amazon Launchpad, such as up to 50% on CUBCOATs fashion hoodies, 30% on the Taco vs Burrito strategic card game, 30% on iFox iF012 Bluetooth Shower Speaker, 50% on Kids Against Maturity Card Game, and 35% on Soliom Outdoor Home Security Camera. Customers can discover new, unique, and unexpected products from today's emerging brands in theLaunchpad Holiday Gift Guide.</li><li>Save up to 20% on gifts and décor from Amazon Handmade Makers, such as Hereafter You + Me Puzzle Piece Wood Ornaments and Melanie Golden Topaz Stud Earrings. Customers can also support small businesses and Makers by browsing unique, handcrafted items in the Handmade Holiday Gift Guide.</li><li>Save 50% on a new service called Amazon Explore that lets customers take virtual experiences to shop for unique gifts at boutiques and markets all around the world. Amazon Explore is a way for customers to support small businesses and even get to know shop owners and hosts while virtually browsing items, asking questions, and purchasing gifts instantly.</li></ul><p>Amazon Devices</p><ul><li>The all-new Echois $30 off – just $69.99</li><li>The all-new Echo Dot Kids Edition is $21 off – just $38.99</li><li>Echo Auto is $30 off – just $19.99</li><li>Fire TV Cube is $40 off – just $79.99</li><li>The all-new Fire TV Stick Lite is $12 off – just $17.99</li><li>The all-new Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote is $12 off – just $27.99</li><li>Get an all-new 32" Toshiba Smart HD TV Fire TV Edition for just $119.99</li><li>Get an all-new 24" Insignia Smart HD TV Fire TV Edition for just $79.99</li><li>Ring Video Doorbell 3 is $60 off – just $139.99</li><li>The eero mesh WiFi system 3-pack is $75 off – just $174.00</li><li>The all-new Fire HD 8 tablet is $35 off – just $54.99</li><li>Kindle Paperwhite is $45 off – just $84.99</li><li>Kindle Oasis is $75 off – just $174.99</li><li>The all-new Blink Outdoor camera kits are up to $130 off</li><li>Echo Show 8 is $65 off – just $64.99 + $5 Blink Mini</li></ul><p>Amazon Brands</p><ul><li>Save up to 20% on AmazonBasics gaming accessories</li><li>Save up to 20% on mattresses from Rivet and AmazonBasics</li><li>Save up to 20% on select furniture and décor from Rivet</li><li>Save 40% on Wag dog food and treats</li><li>Save 20% on Belei skincare</li><li>Save 20% on nutrition and wellness products from Amazon Elements and Revly</li><li>Save 20% on coffee, snacks, and other grocery essentials from Solimo, Happy Belly, and Amazon Fresh</li><li>Save up to 30% on kids' and baby clothing from Our Brands including Amazon Essentials and Simple Joys by Carter's</li></ul><p>Fashion</p><ul><li>Save up to 30% on select seasonal fashion trends including bright puffers, plaid and printed loungewear, and cozy fleece</li><li>Save up to 50% on CUBCOATs fashion hoodies</li><li>Save up to 30% on Dr. Scholl's</li><li>Save up to 30% on Vaenait baby pajama sets</li><li>Save up to 30% on Wantdo jacket</li><li>Save up to 30% on Lacoste apparel, shoes, and accessories</li><li>Save up to 30% on Nautica men's and women's apparel</li><li>Save up to 50% on Cole Haan men's and women's shoes</li><li>Save up to 40% on Lands' End apparel</li><li>Save up to 25% on select cozy-comfy fashion from Shopbop including Honeydew Intimates and Z Supply</li><li>Save up to 40% on select handbags and accessories from Shopbop including Baggu, Shashi, and Gorjana</li></ul><p>Beauty, Health and Personal Care</p><ul><li>Save up to 35% on razors from Braun, Gillette and more</li><li>Save up to 60% on HAUS LABORATORIES by Lady Gaga collection</li><li>Save up to 47% on whitening kits and oral care from Oral-B, Crest and more</li><li>Save 50% on 23andMe Health + Ancestry Personal Genetic Service Kit</li></ul><p>Toys &amp; Games</p><ul><li>Save up to 30% on Play-Doh</li><li>Save up to 30% on Baby Alive, Littlest Pet Shop and more</li><li>Save up to 30% on Playskool and more preschool toys</li><li>Save up to 30% on NERF</li><li>Save up to 30% on Magic the Gathering Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths Commander All 5 Decks</li><li>Save up to 30% on Hasbro Games</li><li>Save up to 30% on Action Figures from Beyblade, and more</li><li>Save up to 40% on the L.O.L. Surprise! O.M.G. 4-in-1 Glamper</li><li>Save up to 30% on Disney toys and home products</li><li>Save up to 30% on Collectible Toys from L.O.L Surprise!, Calico Critters, Adora, and More</li></ul><p>Household, Kitchen, Office, Smart Home and Home Improvement</p><ul><li>Save 47% on select Bissell floorcare products</li><li>Save 20% on select Levoit humidifiers</li><li>Save on select Eufy floorcare products</li><li>Save 30% on select All-Clad products</li><li>Save up to 45% on select Instant Pot products</li><li>Save 30% on select Dash products</li><li>Save up to 30% on select Cuisinart products</li><li>Save 23% on select Anova products</li><li>Save up to 30% on Rugs from Safavieh, Nuloom and Unique Loom</li><li>Save up to 30% on Ashley Furniture</li><li>Save up to 30% on Classic Brands Furniture and Mattresses</li><li>Save 10% on Tuft and Needle Original Mattress, Nod Mattresses and more</li><li>Save up to 20% on Moen Showerheads and Faucets</li><li>Save on BioBidet Supreme BB-1000</li><li>Save on Sylvania Light Bulbs and LED+ Light Bulbs</li><li>Save on GenieMaster 3-Button Garage Door Opener (2 pack)</li><li>Save on Kasa Smart Plugs</li><li>Save up to 25% on Broan ventilation fans</li><li>Save up to 30% on select Sengled Lightbulbs</li><li>Save up to 25% on select Yale Assure Locks</li><li>Save up to 30% on First Alert Plug-In Carbon Monoxide Detector with Battery Backup</li><li>Save on select Simplisafe Security Systems</li><li>Save up to 35% on iRobot 675 Roomba Vacuum</li></ul><p>Electronics</p><ul><li>Save up to 30% on Smart Home Security Cameras</li><li>Save up to 15% on weBoost Signal Boosters</li><li>Save up to 30% on Headphones from TaoTronics</li><li>Save up to 40% on Jabra Headphones</li><li>Save up to 35% on Nixplay Digital Frames</li><li>Save 50% on H&amp;R Block 2020 Tax software</li><li>Save 20% off the Samsung 32in 4K Q50 Smart TV</li><li>Save up to 15% on select Quartet products</li><li>Save up to 40% off select Video Games, including Just Dance 2021</li></ul><p>Major Appliances, Lawn &amp; Garden and Tools</p><ul><li>Save 15% on select Walsh Appliances</li><li>Save 15% on select Cosmo Appliances</li><li>Save 15% on Midea 3.1 Cu. Ft. Compact Refrigerator</li><li>Save 15% on select NewAir Appliances</li><li>Save 15% on GE Profile Nugget Ice Maker</li><li>Save 10% on select GE Compact Refrigerators</li><li>Save 40% on Samsung AirDresser</li><li>Save up to 20% on select Shop Succulents plants</li><li>Save up to 17% on select Masterbuilt Digital Electric Smoker</li><li>Save 15% on select Pool Covers from Robelle &amp; Pool Mate</li><li>Save up to 34% on Alpine Home Christmas Decor</li><li>Save 15% or more on select Sun Joe &amp; Snow Joe products</li><li>Save up to 20% on select EGO and SKIL Outdoor Tools</li><li>Save up to 30% on select Greenworks power tools</li><li>Save up to 30% on select Renogy Solar Products</li><li>Save 15% on select Worx Chainsaws</li><li>Save 20% on select Worx Tools</li><li>Save up to 30% on select BLACK+DECKER Products</li><li>Save up to 20% on select SKIL Tools</li><li>Save up to 15% on select Fluke Tools</li><li>Save up to 20% on select Apex Tools</li></ul><p>Sports &amp; Outdoors</p><ul><li>Save up to 15% on select Intex Airbeds</li><li>Save up to 25% on select SUUNTO smartwatches</li><li>Save up to 15% on select Sunny Health &amp; Fitness gym equipment</li><li>Save up to 25% on select baseball and softball equipment</li><li>Save up to 20% on select kids bikes, adult bikes, helmets and more</li><li>Save up to 60% on select golf clubs, balls, and accessories</li><li>Save up to 25% on Joola table tennis tables and accessories</li><li>Save up to 15% on Stiga table tennis tables</li></ul><p>Audible, Music, Video, Kindle and Books</p><ul><li>Audible: Between November 1 and December 31, new members save nearly 40% on the first six months of an Audible Plus membership at just $4.95 per month.</li><li>Amazon Music: New Amazon Music Unlimited customers can get three months of the premium streaming tier free, to enjoy unlimited access to more than 70 million songs, ad-free and a wide selection of popular podcasts</li><li>Amazon Music: Current Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers can upgrade to the Family Plan free for three months, with access for up to six accounts.</li><li>Amazon Music: With purchase of select Echo devices, new Amazon Music Unlimited customers will receive six months of the premium, ad-free streaming tier for free.</li><li>Amazon Music: Today, Amazon Music announced a brand-new, three-part holiday concert series hosted by Lil Nas X titled "Amazon Music Holiday Plays," premiering December 1 with a new episode airing every Tuesday at 8pm ET through December 15. This global music moment will feature outlandish sets, playful Q&amp;As, and intimate performances from Miley Cyrus, Foo Fighters, Lil Nas X, and Amazon Music Breakthrough Artist, Kiana Ledé. Customers can watch Amazon Music Holiday Plays globally in the Amazon Music app (iOS and Android) and on the Amazon Music Twitch Channel; and in the U.S. on Prime Video and the homepage of Amazon.com beginning December 1 at 8pm ET. View a trailer for the concert series, here.</li><li>Kindle Unlimited: Enjoy 2 months of Kindle Unlimited for $0.99 - access more than 1 million books, popular magazines and thousands of books with Audible narration. Offer valid for new members only. Terms and Conditions apply.</li><li>Books: General book deals: Save up to 50% on select multi-genre books and eBooks. Need inspiration? Check out the Books Gift Guide here!</li></ul><p>Pets</p><ul><li>Save on select GloFish Aquarium Kits</li><li>Save up to 51% on Dog and Cat Food from WellPet</li></ul><p>Business, Industrial and Scientific</p><ul><li>Save 15% on AmScope microscope kits for students and kids</li><li>Save 20% on Oreck Commercial XL Upright Vacuum Cleaner</li><li>Save up to 30% on Mynt 3D Printing Pens and Accessories</li><li>Save 19% on the Flashforge Adventurer 3 Lite 3D Printer Save 16% on Dremel Digilab 3D Printer 3D45</li><li>Save 15% on Flashforge Finder 3D Printer</li><li>Save up to 15% on First Aid Only all-purpose first aid kit</li><li>Save 15% on Fluke 62 Max Thermometer and Fluke 59 Max Infrared Thermometer</li></ul><p>Automotive</p><ul><li>Save 50% on Tire Installation</li><li>Save up to 30% on Select NOCO Products</li><li>Save up to 22% on Select Chemical Guys Detailing Kits</li><li>Save up to 22% on Select Chemical Guys Foam Cannon Bundles</li><li>Save up to 20% on Select Gator ETX Roll Up Truck Bed Tonneau Covers</li><li>Additionally, customers can enter our Holiday Vehicle Sweepstakes for a chance to win a 2021 Hyundai Santa Fe from December 1-31, 2020. To enter, customers need to visit one of the following pages: 1) Automotive Storefront, 2) Sweepstakes Landing Page, 3) Hyundai Santa Fe Vehicle Detail Page, and 4) Hyundai Virtual Showroom. A winner will be notified on January 15, 2021.</li></ul><p>Baby</p><ul><li>30% off Evenflo Pivot Explore Wagon</li></ul><p>Amazon Gift Cards</p><ul><li>November 26 through November 30, save 20% or more on select gift card brands including Gap, H&amp;M, Petco and more.</li><li>Now through December 31, customers using Amazon Reload to replenish their Amazon Gift Card balance for the first time will receive a $10 bonus with their reload of $100 or more.</li><li>Now through December 20, first-time Amazon Gift Card shoppers will receive a $15 promotional credit with the purchase of $50 or more in Amazon Gift Cards. The promotional credit expires on February 6, 2021. Other restrictions apply.</li></ul><p>Amazon Credit Cards</p><ul><li>Now through December 22, with an eligible Prime membership, customers who apply and are approved for the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa Card will instantly receive a $100 Gift Card. Prime Cardmembers earn 5% back at Whole Foods Market and Amazon.com. Additionally, customers without a Prime membership can apply for the Amazon Rewards Visa Card and receive a $60 Gift Card upon approval, in addition to earning 3% back at Whole Foods Market and Amazon.com as a cardmember. Restrictions apply. For details, visit amazon.com/visa for details.</li><li>For a limited time, eligible Prime members with an Amazon Prime Rewards Visa Signature Card or Amazon Prime Store Card get 10% back on select items from the Amazon Holiday Gift Guide, including categories like Electronics, Toys, Home, Kitchen, Pets, holiday décor and more. For details, visit www.amazon.com/pcb.</li></ul><p>Whole Foods Market </p><ul><li>From November 27 to December 1, Whole Foods Market is offering deals on customer favorites including organic honeycrisp apples ($2.99/lb), Animal Welfare Certified air-chilled organic chicken wings ($2.99/lb), and all probiotic supplements (25% off). Prime members can enjoy an additional 10% off, both in-store and online.</li></ul><p>Grocery</p><ul><li>Save up to 30% on Holiday beverages on Amazon.com</li></ul><p>Woot!</p><p>Woot!: Amazon's deal site will have dozens of limited-time discounts for Black Friday and Cyber Monday with free shipping for Prime members and daily doorbuster deals. Visit woot.com or fire up the Woot! App now!</p><p>Treasure Truck</p><ul><li>Save on the RockJam 61-key keyboard piano kit from Treasure Truck</li></ul><p>Amazon Warehouse</p><ul><li>Amazon Warehouse: Save an extra 20% on select quality pre-owned and open box items for the kitchen, home, office, sports and outdoors, including major appliances, furniture, home décor and more. Visit amazon.com/amazonwarehouse.</li></ul><p>Fast, Free &amp; Convenient Delivery Options</p><p>In addition to free delivery on millions of items for all Amazon customers, Amazon offers a number of ways for customers to shop for and receive holiday gifts:</p><ul><li>Free One-Day &amp; Same-Day Delivery: Prime members in the U.S. can shop a selection of over 10 million items eligible for Prime Free One-Day Delivery with no minimum purchase, and millions of items available for Same-Day Delivery in 47 major metropolitan areas. These delivery options are not only convenient for customers but they're better for the planet because One-Day and Same-Day deliveries ship from local fulfillment centers so they travel shorter distances and generate less carbon emissions. This is just another way that Amazon is leveraging its scale for good to make investments that support communities. Learn more at amazon.com/primedelivery. Not a Prime member yet? Join Prime or start a 30-day free trial at amazon.com/prime.</li><li>Ultrafast &amp; Free Grocery Delivery &amp; Pickup: Prime members in more than 2,000 cities and towns have access to free, two-hour delivery on more than 170,000 products from Whole Foods Market and Amazon Fresh. Plus, in addition to groceries, Prime members can find toys, gifts, household products, and everyday essentials, electronics, Amazon Devices, and more available with free, two-hour delivery from Amazon Fresh. Prime members also get free one-hour pickup at all U.S. Whole Foods Market and Amazon Fresh stores.</li><li>Delivery Where it's Needed Most: Whether road-tripping to see family, staying home and need a secure delivery location, or sending a gift to a loved one or friend, there are thousands of alternative package pickup options customers can choose from via Amazon Hub. These locations are conveniently located near or in offices, convenience stores, malls, apartment buildings, and grocery stores, in more than 900 cities and towns across the country. Tens of millions of products can be easily and conveniently delivered to an Amazon Hub pickup point at Whole Foods Market, 7-11, Chase Bank, Rite-Aid, HealthMart, GNC, Stage Stores, and more. To find an Amazon Hub location, visit amazon.com/hub.</li><li>Extended Returns Window: Customers can buy gifts with confidence on Amazon knowing that millions of items are eligible for free and convenient returns at over 18,000 locations in the U.S. and this year's return window is even longer—most items shipped between October 1 and December 31, 2020 can now be returned until January 31, 2021. In addition, over 5,800 locations including Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, UPS Store locations and Kohl's—and new this year Whole Foods Market—offer label-free, box-free returns, making it even easier than ever to check returns off your list.</li></ul><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>Profitero Study Methodology</p><p>Each day, Profitero monitors prices and other data on more than 450 million product pages on hundreds of unique retailer sites. For this study, Profitero analyzed daily prices collected over an 8 week period (Aug. 24, 2020 to Oct. 18, 2020) at Amazon.com and other leading online retail sites across 20 categories. Only identical items available and in-stock in the same pack configuration were compared. Prices for the same items were collected within 24 hours of each other to ensure validity of the comparisons.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201123005689/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

Amazon Offers New Ways to Track, Receive and Pick Up Holiday Orders to Keep this Holiday Season "Spoiler Free"

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Offers-New-Ways-to-Track-Receive-and-Pick-Up-Holiday-Orders-to-Keep-this-Holiday-Season-Spoiler-Free/default.aspx

Amazon-Offers-New-Ways-to-Track-Receive-and-Pick-Up-Holiday-Orders-to-Keep-this-Holiday-Season-Spoiler-Free

11/23/2020 03:01:00

Amazon Offers New Ways to Track, Receive and Pick Up Holiday Orders to Keep this Holiday Season "Spoiler Free"

11/23/2020

2020

New this year, customers nationwide can now deliver their gifts to Amazon physical retail stores including Amazon 4-star and Amazon Books Customers can also choose from several options to track and receive their holiday orders at-home to keep them a surprise SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 23, 2020-- Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN)-- The holidays are typically overwhelming—between shopping for gifts, preparing family meals, and getting the house ready for guests—but for many, this season may look a little different. Whether customers' plans have changed or not, Amazon still wants to keep this holiday season special and help make sure those gifting moments stay ‘spoiler free' by offering options for customers to keep gifts a surprise, as well as track and receive Amazon orders. "This year many customers and their families are opting to stay home so the challenge of keeping those special gifts under wraps from family, friends or loved ones is going to be greater than ever," explains John Felton, Vice President of Amazon Global Delivery Services. "We're helping customers keep their orders a surprise this year and have a number of ways we're providing them more flexibility, control and convenience over their deliveries—whether that's ordering to an alternative pickup location, tracking their package en route to their home, or consolidating their deliveries to a single day so they can plan ahead." This holiday season, and year-round, Amazon offers customers a variety of ‘spoiler free' ways to track, pick up, and have packages delivered in and out of the home—each of which is powered by incredible employees coming together to deliver magical experiences for customers. Easily track deliveries and see where a package is delivered in-app Amazon Map Tracking lets customers view the progress of their delivery on a map in real-time when the driver is close. The feature enables customers to see the remaining number of stops a driver has before their delivery arrives. Learn more here. Amazon Share Tracking gives customers the option to send tracking information to friends or family, so they know when to expect their package and bring their delivery indoors. Once the package ships, Amazon customers can go to ‘Your Orders' on the Amazon app, select their purchased item, and tap on the ‘Share Tracking' feature on the tracking page. Once selected, customers can easily send a link to the tracking information via SMS, email, or messaging apps such as WhatsApp. If the customer marks the item as a gift at checkout, once ‘Share Tracking' is sent, the recipient can also virtually ‘unbox' the item, send a thank you email, and more—right from the Amazon app. Amazon Photo-On-Delivery provides visual delivery confirmation, showing customers that their package was delivered and where it was placed by the driver. Capturing delivery photos helps customers see that their package was safely delivered to their selected location and serves as a notification to customers who wish to minimize the time a package is left unattended. Learn more here. Amazon Estimated Delivery Windowprovides customers with a 2-4 hour estimated delivery window. By providing a delivery window, customers are able to plan their day and, if desired, ensure they will be home to receive their delivery. Learn more here. In the U.S., Amazon's Map Tracking, Share Tracking, Photo-On-Delivery, and Estimated Delivery Window features are available for packages delivered by Amazon. Customers can access these convenient features from their Amazon app by enabling shipment notifications. Consolidate your deliveries and reduce the number of boxes with Amazon Day Amazon Day is a free and convenient delivery option available to Prime members in the U.S. Prime members can choose to receive all of their orders on one day of the week, often in fewer boxes, reducing the number of packages and deliveries—and making it easier to protect holiday surprises from being discovered by your household. Eligible items can typically be ordered for Amazon Day delivery up to two days before a customer's chosen day. Learn more here. Keep gifts a surprise at-home with garage delivery via Key by Amazon Customers worried about keeping packages safe or potential weather damage from snow, heat or rain, can take advantage of Key In-Garage Delivery. This delivery option lets eligible Prime members with a myQ smart garage door opener receive packages securely inside their garage. Customers simply link their myQ app with the Key by Amazon app and then select this delivery option during checkout. Once their package is delivered, customers will receive a notification via the Key by Amazon app or the Amazon app—whichever they prefer. New this holiday season, Key by Amazon In-Garage Delivery has now expanded to Prime members in over 4,000 cities and towns across the U.S. To learn more and sign-up for Key In-Garage Delivery click here. Deliver to an alternative location to keep gifts a secret from those at-home Amazon offers customers a variety of options to have their packages delivered this holiday season including alternative delivery locations in more than 900 cities and towns across the U.S. This network of easy, convenient, and contactless package pickup options—via Amazon Hub—offers customers either an attended or unattended experience in neighborhoods, cities and college campuses. Amazon Hub is available for tens of millions of items sold on Amazon.com at no additional cost with the same fast shipping as home delivery, including FREE Prime Same-Day, One-Day and Two-Day shipping. Non-Prime members can also get FREE shipping for orders over $25; otherwise standard shipping rates apply. New this holiday season, customers can also enjoy the experience of hunting for great gifts and holiday deals while picking up their Amazon.com holiday order by selecting an Amazon 4-star or Amazon Books location as their delivery location. Prime members can also get FREE Same-Day shipping with no minimum purchase amount required this year. To deliver to an Amazon physical retail store or an Amazon Hub location, customers search and select the most convenient location for them when prompted at checkout. Once their package has been delivered, customers will receive an e-mail notification with details about how and where to pick up. Customers then simply visit their selected Amazon Hub location to collect their package. Customers have between three and 15 days to pick up their order depending on the Amazon Hub or Amazon physical retail location. To find an Amazon physical retail location click here and an Amazon Hub location click here. Alexa's lips are sealed on holiday gifts To prevent a friend, family member or loved one from spoiling their surprise, Alexa will hide the names of items that might be gifts—even if a customer asks, "Where's my stuff?" or checks their delivery update notifications. Customers can also mark an item as a gift during checkout and Alexa will not reveal the names of the items either. Customers who want to be extra cautious of keeping those gifts under wraps or are worried they might forget to mark an item as a gift during checkout can also change their settings for item names in the Alexa app to hide all titles. Click here to download b-roll and images for these features and delivery options. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201123005679/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com

<p><em>New this year, customers nationwide can now deliver their gifts to Amazon physical retail stores including Amazon 4-star and Amazon Books</em></p><p><em>Customers can also choose from several options to track and receive their holiday orders at-home to keep them a surprise</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 23, 2020-- Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN)-- The holidays are typically overwhelming—between shopping for gifts, preparing family meals, and getting the house ready for guests—but for many, this season may look a little different. Whether customers' plans have changed or not, Amazon still wants to keep this holiday season special and help make sure those gifting moments stay ‘spoiler free' by offering options for customers to keep gifts a surprise, as well as track and receive Amazon orders.</p><p>"This year many customers and their families are opting to stay home so the challenge of keeping those special gifts under wraps from family, friends or loved ones is going to be greater than ever," explains John Felton, Vice President of Amazon Global Delivery Services. "We're helping customers keep their orders a surprise this year and have a number of ways we're providing them more flexibility, control and convenience over their deliveries—whether that's ordering to an alternative pickup location, tracking their package en route to their home, or consolidating their deliveries to a single day so they can plan ahead."</p><p>This holiday season, and year-round, Amazon offers customers a variety of ‘spoiler free' ways to track, pick up, and have packages delivered in and out of the home—each of which is powered by incredible employees coming together to deliver magical experiences for customers.</p><p>Easily track deliveries and see where a package is delivered in-app</p><p>Amazon Map Tracking lets customers view the progress of their delivery on a map in real-time when the driver is close. The feature enables customers to see the remaining number of stops a driver has before their delivery arrives. Learn more here.</p><p>Amazon Share Tracking gives customers the option to send tracking information to friends or family, so they know when to expect their package and bring their delivery indoors. Once the package ships, Amazon customers can go to ‘Your Orders' on the Amazon app, select their purchased item, and tap on the ‘Share Tracking' feature on the tracking page. Once selected, customers can easily send a link to the tracking information via SMS, email, or messaging apps such as WhatsApp. If the customer marks the item as a gift at checkout, once ‘Share Tracking' is sent, the recipient can also virtually ‘unbox' the item, send a thank you email, and more—right from the Amazon app.</p><p>Amazon Photo-On-Delivery provides visual delivery confirmation, showing customers that their package was delivered and where it was placed by the driver. Capturing delivery photos helps customers see that their package was safely delivered to their selected location and serves as a notification to customers who wish to minimize the time a package is left unattended. Learn more here.</p><p>Amazon Estimated Delivery Windowprovides customers with a 2-4 hour estimated delivery window. By providing a delivery window, customers are able to plan their day and, if desired, ensure they will be home to receive their delivery. Learn more here.</p><p>In the U.S., Amazon's Map Tracking, Share Tracking, Photo-On-Delivery, and Estimated Delivery Window features are available for packages delivered by Amazon. Customers can access these convenient features from their Amazon app by enabling shipment notifications.</p><p>Consolidate your deliveries and reduce the number of boxes with Amazon Day</p><p>Amazon Day is a free and convenient delivery option available to Prime members in the U.S. Prime members can choose to receive all of their orders on one day of the week, often in fewer boxes, reducing the number of packages and deliveries—and making it easier to protect holiday surprises from being discovered by your household. Eligible items can typically be ordered for Amazon Day delivery up to two days before a customer's chosen day. Learn more here.</p><p>Keep gifts a surprise at-home with garage delivery via Key by Amazon</p><p>Customers worried about keeping packages safe or potential weather damage from snow, heat or rain, can take advantage of Key In-Garage Delivery. This delivery option lets eligible Prime members with a myQ smart garage door opener receive packages securely inside their garage. Customers simply link their myQ app with the Key by Amazon app and then select this delivery option during checkout. Once their package is delivered, customers will receive a notification via the Key by Amazon app or the Amazon app—whichever they prefer. New this holiday season, Key by Amazon In-Garage Delivery has now expanded to Prime members in over 4,000 cities and towns across the U.S. To learn more and sign-up for Key In-Garage Delivery click here.</p><p>Deliver to an alternative location to keep gifts a secret from those at-home</p><p>Amazon offers customers a variety of options to have their packages delivered this holiday season including alternative delivery locations in more than 900 cities and towns across the U.S. This network of easy, convenient, and contactless package pickup options—via Amazon Hub—offers customers either an attended or unattended experience in neighborhoods, cities and college campuses. Amazon Hub is available for tens of millions of items sold on Amazon.com at no additional cost with the same fast shipping as home delivery, including FREE Prime Same-Day, One-Day and Two-Day shipping. Non-Prime members can also get FREE shipping for orders over $25; otherwise standard shipping rates apply.</p><p>New this holiday season, customers can also enjoy the experience of hunting for great gifts and holiday deals while picking up their Amazon.com holiday order by selecting an Amazon 4-star or Amazon Books location as their delivery location. Prime members can also get FREE Same-Day shipping with no minimum purchase amount required this year.</p><p>To deliver to an Amazon physical retail store or an Amazon Hub location, customers search and select the most convenient location for them when prompted at checkout. Once their package has been delivered, customers will receive an e-mail notification with details about how and where to pick up. Customers then simply visit their selected Amazon Hub location to collect their package. Customers have between three and 15 days to pick up their order depending on the Amazon Hub or Amazon physical retail location. To find an Amazon physical retail location click here and an Amazon Hub location click here.</p><p>Alexa's lips are sealed on holiday gifts</p><p>To prevent a friend, family member or loved one from spoiling their surprise, Alexa will hide the names of items that might be gifts—even if a customer asks, "Where's my stuff?" or checks their delivery update notifications. Customers can also mark an item as a gift during checkout and Alexa will not reveal the names of the items either. Customers who want to be extra cautious of keeping those gifts under wraps or are worried they might forget to mark an item as a gift during checkout can also change their settings for item names in the Alexa app to hide all titles.</p><p>Click here to download b-roll and images for these features and delivery options.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201123005679/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com</p>

Amazon Announces 2020's Best Books of the Year

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Announces-2020s-Best-Books-of-the-Year/default.aspx

Amazon-Announces-2020s-Best-Books-of-the-Year

11/19/2020 09:00:00

Amazon Announces 2020's Best Books of the Year

11/19/2020

2020

Brittany K. Barnett's "A Knock at Midnight" named the best book of 2020 by Amazon's Books Editors The diverse, hand-curated list features top picks across genres, interests, and reading levels to help make holiday gift shopping easier SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 19, 2020-- Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN)-- Today, Amazon announced 2020's Best Books of the Year, selecting Brittany K. Barnett's "A Knock at Midnight" as the top pick. The inspiring true story is a brilliant memoir of Barnett's own journey navigating the criminal justice system, which also chronicles the stories of three of her clients. Their lives—including their crimes, their families, and their jail time—are rendered with such care and compassion that the Amazon Books Editors found it impossible to put down. The process of choosing the Best Books of the Year begins the year prior, as the Amazon Books Editors begin debating the list for January's Best Books of the Month. The editors collectively read thousands of books each year in service of creating an editorially curated list and reviews each month. These monthly lists culminate in the Best Books of the Year, which includes an overall Top 100 for 2020 as well as top lists for individual genres like literature & fiction, mystery and thriller, children's books, cookbooks, food & wine, and young adult—all to help customers find their next favorite book or thoughtful holiday gift pick. "It's been a year, and the editorial team set out to create a list that reflected what we've collectively been experiencing, hearing and seeing in 2020, and also the books that gave us a welcome respite from the anxieties of the world," said Sarah Gelman, Editorial Director, Amazon Books. "Our number one book practically chose itself. Brittany K. Barnett's empathetic and genre-bending ‘A Knock at Midnight' provides a glimpse into the criminal justice system and the seemingly impossible path to freedom. This book is timely and powerful." Brittany K. Barnett adds, "I am deeply grateful and honored that ‘A Knock at Midnight' was chosen Best of the Year. This life has taken me on a remarkable journey – one that continues to transform my understanding of justice and the very definition of freedom itself. There are hundreds of thousands of Americans buried alive under unjust laws, and I hope this book draws attention to their plight and inspires people to take action to push for impactful change." For Kindle readers, the most highlighted passage echoed Brittany's sentiment on how race and class impact our societal norms: "On the very first day of class, this dynamic, poised Black professor – my very first – laid out in the first moments as an inarguable premise something that by now I knew in my very bones: that race shaped all of our lives, brown, white, or Black, in both visible and invisible ways, and that our legal systems were inseparable from our sordid racial past." "A Knock At Midnight" joins other incredible titles from the last few years to receive the Best of the Year accolade, including Margaret Atwood's "The Testaments," David Grann's "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI," and Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad." The Amazon Books Editors Top 10 picks of 2020 are: A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom by Brittany K. Barnett: At times, Barnett's memoir reads like page-turning crime fiction; at others, a galvanizing and redemptive portrait of a lawyer trying to defend Black lives that were never protected in the first place. Urgent, necessary, hopeful—and a knockout read. Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy: Teeming with adventure, darkness, love, and loss, Migrations is a novel that's impossible to put down as you learn about the life of Franny Stone—a sharp, flawed, and determined woman who will stop at nothing to regain what she's lost. Blacktop Wasteland: A Novel by S.A. Cosby: A pedal to the metal thriller about a retired getaway driver, caught between the rock of poverty and the hard place of Southern racism, who gambles on one last heist to get him ahead. Toggling between high-stakes action, and quiet—even tender—family scenes, this is Southern noir with heart. Group by Christie Tate: Tate was a summer intern at a law firm and top of her class, and yet her memoir opens with her sitting in her car alone, wishing someone would shoot her. Written with the gift of hindsight, Group is an honest, heart-breaking and hilarious look at reaching rock bottom and climbing your way back to life. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett: Ideal for book clubs, The Vanishing Half examines sisterhood, personal identity, starting fresh, and what it means to be Black (and white) in America. Bennett is known for creating taut family dramas, and like her brilliant debut, The Mothers, this novel shows just how strong the bonds of sisters are, even at their weakest. Fifty Words for Rain by Asha Lemmie: Set in post WWII Japan, this sweeping story about a love child left with her scandalized, and brutal, grandparents will have you rooting for its resilient heroine, Nori, who must summon the courage to assert her own identity and live life on her own terms. This is a debut you don't want to miss. Caste by Isabel Wilkerson: Ten years after her award-winning The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson argues that our entire social structure is built upon an unrecognized caste system. White people—whether their ancestors were slave owners or abolitionists—have been able to live and thrive under these set assumptions of inequality. This is a mind-expanding book. The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré: In this rousing tale of courage and pluck, a 14-year-old Nigerian girl is sold into servitude by her father when her mother—a proponent of education—passes away. You will root for Adunni as she endeavors to escape her sorry—and often harrowing—lot, and applaud the kind strangers who buoy her efforts, and her spirits. Memorial by Bryan Washington: Memorial unfolds with depth, humor, and telling detail. Mike is a Japanese-American chef. His partner, Benson, is a Black daycare teacher. When Mike leaves Houston to visit his ailing father in Osaka, his mother comes to live with Benson. You will laugh, cry, and ask yourself: What makes a family? Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker: A medical mystery story—with twists and reveals to rival any thriller—that shows how an all-American family was ravaged as an elusive, centuries-old mental illness caught and kept them in its crosshairs for decades. Authors of the top three books—Brittany K. Barnett, Charlotte McConaghy, and S.A. Cosby—will come together for an Amazon Live Author Series conversation in celebration of the Best Books of the Year selection on November 19, 2020 at 12 PM PT. To tune in, visit Amazon Live. For more information on the books featured on the Best Books of the Year list, as well as insightful reviews on new books, author interviews, and hand-curated roundups in popular categories, visit the Amazon Book Review at www.amazon.com/amazonbookreview, and subscribe to the Amazon Book Review Podcast on Amazon Music, Apple or TuneIn. You can also follow the Books Editors recommendations and conversations @amazonbooks on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201119005144/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com

<p><em>Brittany K. Barnett's "A Knock at Midnight" named the best book of 2020 by Amazon's Books Editors</em></p><p><em>The diverse, hand-curated list features top picks across genres, interests, and reading levels to help make holiday gift shopping easier</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 19, 2020-- Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN)-- Today, Amazon announced 2020's Best Books of the Year, selecting Brittany K. Barnett's "A Knock at Midnight" as the top pick. The inspiring true story is a brilliant memoir of Barnett's own journey navigating the criminal justice system, which also chronicles the stories of three of her clients. Their lives—including their crimes, their families, and their jail time—are rendered with such care and compassion that the Amazon Books Editors found it impossible to put down.</p><p>The process of choosing the Best Books of the Year begins the year prior, as the Amazon Books Editors begin debating the list for January's Best Books of the Month. The editors collectively read thousands of books each year in service of creating an editorially curated list and reviews each month. These monthly lists culminate in the Best Books of the Year, which includes an overall Top 100 for 2020 as well as top lists for individual genres like literature &amp; fiction, mystery and thriller, children's books, cookbooks, food &amp; wine, and young adult—all to help customers find their next favorite book or thoughtful holiday gift pick.</p><p>"It's been a year, and the editorial team set out to create a list that reflected what we've collectively been experiencing, hearing and seeing in 2020, and also the books that gave us a welcome respite from the anxieties of the world," said Sarah Gelman, Editorial Director, Amazon Books. "Our number one book practically chose itself. Brittany K. Barnett's empathetic and genre-bending ‘A Knock at Midnight' provides a glimpse into the criminal justice system and the seemingly impossible path to freedom. This book is timely and powerful."</p><p>Brittany K. Barnett adds, "I am deeply grateful and honored that ‘A Knock at Midnight' was chosen Best of the Year. This life has taken me on a remarkable journey – one that continues to transform my understanding of justice and the very definition of freedom itself. There are hundreds of thousands of Americans buried alive under unjust laws, and I hope this book draws attention to their plight and inspires people to take action to push for impactful change."</p><p>For Kindle readers, the most highlighted passage echoed Brittany's sentiment on how race and class impact our societal norms: "On the very first day of class, this dynamic, poised Black professor – my very first – laid out in the first moments as an inarguable premise something that by now I knew in my very bones: that race shaped all of our lives, brown, white, or Black, in both visible and invisible ways, and that our legal systems were inseparable from our sordid racial past."</p><p>"A Knock At Midnight" joins other incredible titles from the last few years to receive the Best of the Year accolade, including Margaret Atwood's "The Testaments," David Grann's "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI," and Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad."</p><p>The Amazon Books Editors Top 10 picks of 2020 are:</p><ol><li>A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom by Brittany K. Barnett: At times, Barnett's memoir reads like page-turning crime fiction; at others, a galvanizing and redemptive portrait of a lawyer trying to defend Black lives that were never protected in the first place. Urgent, necessary, hopeful—and a knockout read.</li><li>Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy: Teeming with adventure, darkness, love, and loss, Migrations is a novel that's impossible to put down as you learn about the life of Franny Stone—a sharp, flawed, and determined woman who will stop at nothing to regain what she's lost.</li><li>Blacktop Wasteland: A Novel by S.A. Cosby: A pedal to the metal thriller about a retired getaway driver, caught between the rock of poverty and the hard place of Southern racism, who gambles on one last heist to get him ahead. Toggling between high-stakes action, and quiet—even tender—family scenes, this is Southern noir with heart.</li><li>Group by Christie Tate: Tate was a summer intern at a law firm and top of her class, and yet her memoir opens with her sitting in her car alone, wishing someone would shoot her. Written with the gift of hindsight, Group is an honest, heart-breaking and hilarious look at reaching rock bottom and climbing your way back to life.</li><li>The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett: Ideal for book clubs, The Vanishing Half examines sisterhood, personal identity, starting fresh, and what it means to be Black (and white) in America. Bennett is known for creating taut family dramas, and like her brilliant debut, The Mothers, this novel shows just how strong the bonds of sisters are, even at their weakest.</li><li>Fifty Words for Rain by Asha Lemmie: Set in post WWII Japan, this sweeping story about a love child left with her scandalized, and brutal, grandparents will have you rooting for its resilient heroine, Nori, who must summon the courage to assert her own identity and live life on her own terms. This is a debut you don't want to miss.</li><li>Caste by Isabel Wilkerson: Ten years after her award-winning The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson argues that our entire social structure is built upon an unrecognized caste system. White people—whether their ancestors were slave owners or abolitionists—have been able to live and thrive under these set assumptions of inequality. This is a mind-expanding book.</li><li>The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré: In this rousing tale of courage and pluck, a 14-year-old Nigerian girl is sold into servitude by her father when her mother—a proponent of education—passes away. You will root for Adunni as she endeavors to escape her sorry—and often harrowing—lot, and applaud the kind strangers who buoy her efforts, and her spirits.</li><li>Memorial by Bryan Washington: Memorial unfolds with depth, humor, and telling detail. Mike is a Japanese-American chef. His partner, Benson, is a Black daycare teacher. When Mike leaves Houston to visit his ailing father in Osaka, his mother comes to live with Benson. You will laugh, cry, and ask yourself: What makes a family?</li><li>Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker: A medical mystery story—with twists and reveals to rival any thriller—that shows how an all-American family was ravaged as an elusive, centuries-old mental illness caught and kept them in its crosshairs for decades.</li></ol><p>Authors of the top three books—Brittany K. Barnett, Charlotte McConaghy, and S.A. Cosby—will come together for an Amazon Live Author Series conversation in celebration of the Best Books of the Year selection on November 19, 2020 at 12 PM PT. To tune in, visit Amazon Live.</p><p>For more information on the books featured on the Best Books of the Year list, as well as insightful reviews on new books, author interviews, and hand-curated roundups in popular categories, visit the Amazon Book Review at www.amazon.com/amazonbookreview, and subscribe to the Amazon Book Review Podcast on Amazon Music, Apple or TuneIn. You can also follow the Books Editors recommendations and conversations @amazonbooks on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201119005144/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com</p>

Amazon and Global Optimism Welcome Henkel and Signify to The Climate Pledge

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-and-Global-Optimism-Welcome-Henkel-and-Signify-to-The-Climate-Pledge/default.aspx

Amazon-and-Global-Optimism-Welcome-Henkel-and-Signify-to-The-Climate-Pledge

11/18/2020 03:01:00

Amazon and Global Optimism Welcome Henkel and Signify to The Climate Pledge

11/18/2020

2020

Henkel is taking real, science-based, high-impact actions, including deploying renewable energy, investing in sustainable buildings, and mobilizing supply chains to tackle climate change Signify, which already achieved carbon neutrality earlier this year, is joining The Climate Pledge to collaborate with other signatories and share best practices The Climate Pledge, a commitment co-founded by Amazon and Global Optimism, calls on signatories to take urgent action to meet the Paris Agreement 10 years early SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 18, 2020-- Today, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Global Optimism announced that Henkel has joined The Climate Pledge, a commitment to be net-zero carbon by 2040—a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement's goal of 2050. Signify, which already achieved carbon neutrality earlier this year, is also joining The Climate Pledge to collaborate with other signatories and share best practices. Signatories to The Climate Pledge agree to: Measure and report greenhouse gas emissions on a regular basis; Implement decarbonization strategies in line with the Paris Agreement through real business changes and innovations, including efficiency improvements, renewable energy, materials reductions, and other carbon emission elimination strategies; Neutralize any remaining emissions with additional, quantifiable, real, permanent, and socially-beneficial offsets to achieve net-zero annual carbon emissions by 2040. "By signing The Climate Pledge, companies around the world are taking collective action to protect our planet from the catastrophic impacts of climate change," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. "We welcome Henkel as they join us in our commitment to be net-zero carbon by 2040, a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement. We are also excited for Signify, which achieved carbon neutrality earlier this year, to join The Climate Pledge with the goal of collaborating with other signatories and sharing best practices. These companies are demonstrating important leadership as they help us accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy and protect the planet for future generations." Henkel's commitment to leadership in sustainability has been embedded in its corporate culture for decades. The company has been working closely with Amazon to promote sustainable innovation—for example, to enhance customer experience through new and sustainable packaging. Henkel's long-term goal is to become climate-positive by 2040. In the near term, the company plans to reduce the carbon footprint of its production by 65% by 2025 and 75% by 2030. By 2030, 100% of the electricity Henkel uses to power its operations will come from renewable sources. And by 2040, Henkel aims to have converted all remaining fossil fuels used in production to climate-neutral alternatives and supply surplus carbon-neutral energy to third parties. In addition, Henkel wants to leverage its brands and technologies to help customers, consumers, and suppliers save 100 million tons of CO2 in a ten-year period from 2016 to 2025. "Climate change is a global challenge, which requires our collective action. At Henkel, we want to make a positive contribution to protecting the climate. Based on our achievements to date and in line with our ambitions for the coming years, we are pleased to join and support The Climate Pledge," said Henkel CEO Carsten Knobel. "Together with Amazon, Global Optimism, and the other signatories, we are committed to drive tangible progress and jointly take action to limit global warming." Signify, the world leader in lighting, is another new member of The Climate Pledge. At the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21), in Paris, in December 2015, Signify committed to achieve carbon neutral operations in 2020. Last September, it announced that it had reached this milestone and plans to double its positive impact on the environment and society by 2025. Signify will join The Climate Pledge to share its experience, and to help and encourage other signatories to advance their own carbon reduction programs. "We are pleased to join The Climate Pledge community as it mobilizes companies to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement 10 years early," said Harry Verhaar, Signify Head of Global Public and Government Affairs. "We are committed to sharing best practices with other companies from our own journey to carbon neutrality in 2020, and to ramp up our positive impact on the environment and society." "The Paris Agreement set out a unifying roadmap for all countries, all companies, and all people to address the climate crisis by taking actions to ensure we do not exceed 1.5C in global warming," said Christiana Figueres, the UN's former climate change chief, now founding partner of Global Optimism. "By joining The Climate Pledge, these companies are demonstrating both their ambitions for the future and for recovery now. Their actions and investments are creating sorely needed jobs, spurring innovation, regenerating the natural environment, and helping their consumers to buy more sustainable products. The growing collective of companies joining The Climate Pledge, acting in accordance with science, is cause for optimism." Last year, Amazon and Global Optimism co-founded The Climate Pledge, a commitment to reach the Paris Agreement 10 years early and be net-zero carbon by 2040. Amazon was the first signatory and thirteen organizations have now signed The Climate Pledge including: Amazon, Best Buy, Henkel, Infosys, McKinstry, Mercedes-Benz, Oak View Group, Real Betis, Reckitt Benckiser, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Signify, and Verizon—sending an important signal that there will be rapid growth in demand for products and services that help reduce carbon emissions. About Henkel Henkel operates globally with a well-balanced and diversified portfolio. The company holds leading positions with its three business units in both industrial and consumer businesses thanks to strong brands, innovations and technologies. Henkel Adhesive Technologies is the global leader in the adhesives market – across all industry segments worldwide. In its Laundry & Home Care and Beauty Care businesses, Henkel holds leading positions in many markets and categories around the world. Founded in 1876, Henkel looks back on more than 140 years of success. In 2019, Henkel reported sales of more than 20 billion euros and adjusted operating profit of more than 3.2 billion euros. Henkel employs more than 52,000 people globally – a passionate and highly diverse team, united by a strong company culture, a common purpose to create sustainable value, and shared values. As a recognized leader in sustainability, Henkel holds top positions in many international indices and rankings. Henkel's preferred shares are listed in the German stock index DAX. For more information, please visit www.henkel.com. About Signify Signify (Euronext: LIGHT) is the world leader in lighting for professionals and consumers and lighting for the Internet of Things. Our Philips products, Interact connected lighting systems and data-enabled services, deliver business value and transform life in homes, buildings and public spaces. With 2019 sales of EUR 6.2 billion, we have approximately 37,000 employees and are present in over 70 countries. We unlock the extraordinary potential of light for brighter lives and a better world. We achieved carbon neutrality in 2020 and have been named Industry Leader in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for three years in a row. News from Signify is located at the Newsroom, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Information for investors can be found on the Investor Relations page. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201118005386/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>Henkel is taking real, science-based, high-impact actions, including deploying renewable energy, investing in sustainable buildings, and mobilizing supply chains to tackle climate change</em></p><p><em>Signify, which already achieved carbon neutrality earlier this year, is joining The Climate Pledge to collaborate with other signatories and share best practices</em></p><p><em>The Climate Pledge, a commitment co-founded by Amazon and Global Optimism, calls on signatories to take urgent action to meet the Paris Agreement 10 years early</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 18, 2020-- Today, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Global Optimism announced that Henkel has joined The Climate Pledge, a commitment to be net-zero carbon by 2040—a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement's goal of 2050. Signify, which already achieved carbon neutrality earlier this year, is also joining The Climate Pledge to collaborate with other signatories and share best practices.</p><p>Signatories to The Climate Pledge agree to:</p><ul><li>Measure and report greenhouse gas emissions on a regular basis;</li><li>Implement decarbonization strategies in line with the Paris Agreement through real business changes and innovations, including efficiency improvements, renewable energy, materials reductions, and other carbon emission elimination strategies;</li><li>Neutralize any remaining emissions with additional, quantifiable, real, permanent, and socially-beneficial offsets to achieve net-zero annual carbon emissions by 2040.</li></ul><p>"By signing The Climate Pledge, companies around the world are taking collective action to protect our planet from the catastrophic impacts of climate change," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. "We welcome Henkel as they join us in our commitment to be net-zero carbon by 2040, a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement. We are also excited for Signify, which achieved carbon neutrality earlier this year, to join The Climate Pledge with the goal of collaborating with other signatories and sharing best practices. These companies are demonstrating important leadership as they help us accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy and protect the planet for future generations."</p><p>Henkel's commitment to leadership in sustainability has been embedded in its corporate culture for decades. The company has been working closely with Amazon to promote sustainable innovation—for example, to enhance customer experience through new and sustainable packaging. Henkel's long-term goal is to become climate-positive by 2040. In the near term, the company plans to reduce the carbon footprint of its production by 65% by 2025 and 75% by 2030. By 2030, 100% of the electricity Henkel uses to power its operations will come from renewable sources. And by 2040, Henkel aims to have converted all remaining fossil fuels used in production to climate-neutral alternatives and supply surplus carbon-neutral energy to third parties. In addition, Henkel wants to leverage its brands and technologies to help customers, consumers, and suppliers save 100 million tons of CO2 in a ten-year period from 2016 to 2025.</p><p>"Climate change is a global challenge, which requires our collective action. At Henkel, we want to make a positive contribution to protecting the climate. Based on our achievements to date and in line with our ambitions for the coming years, we are pleased to join and support The Climate Pledge," said Henkel CEO Carsten Knobel. "Together with Amazon, Global Optimism, and the other signatories, we are committed to drive tangible progress and jointly take action to limit global warming."</p><p>Signify, the world leader in lighting, is another new member of The Climate Pledge. At the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21), in Paris, in December 2015, Signify committed to achieve carbon neutral operations in 2020. Last September, it announced that it had reached this milestone and plans to double its positive impact on the environment and society by 2025. Signify will join The Climate Pledge to share its experience, and to help and encourage other signatories to advance their own carbon reduction programs.</p><p>"We are pleased to join The Climate Pledge community as it mobilizes companies to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement 10 years early," said Harry Verhaar, Signify Head of Global Public and Government Affairs. "We are committed to sharing best practices with other companies from our own journey to carbon neutrality in 2020, and to ramp up our positive impact on the environment and society."</p><p>"The Paris Agreement set out a unifying roadmap for all countries, all companies, and all people to address the climate crisis by taking actions to ensure we do not exceed 1.5C in global warming," said Christiana Figueres, the UN's former climate change chief, now founding partner of Global Optimism. "By joining The Climate Pledge, these companies are demonstrating both their ambitions for the future and for recovery now. Their actions and investments are creating sorely needed jobs, spurring innovation, regenerating the natural environment, and helping their consumers to buy more sustainable products. The growing collective of companies joining The Climate Pledge, acting in accordance with science, is cause for optimism."</p><p>Last year, Amazon and Global Optimism co-founded The Climate Pledge, a commitment to reach the Paris Agreement 10 years early and be net-zero carbon by 2040. Amazon was the first signatory and thirteen organizations have now signed The Climate Pledge including: Amazon, Best Buy, Henkel, Infosys, McKinstry, Mercedes-Benz, Oak View Group, Real Betis, Reckitt Benckiser, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Signify, and Verizon—sending an important signal that there will be rapid growth in demand for products and services that help reduce carbon emissions.</p><p>About Henkel</p><p>Henkel operates globally with a well-balanced and diversified portfolio. The company holds leading positions with its three business units in both industrial and consumer businesses thanks to strong brands, innovations and technologies. Henkel Adhesive Technologies is the global leader in the adhesives market – across all industry segments worldwide. In its Laundry &amp; Home Care and Beauty Care businesses, Henkel holds leading positions in many markets and categories around the world. Founded in 1876, Henkel looks back on more than 140 years of success. In 2019, Henkel reported sales of more than 20 billion euros and adjusted operating profit of more than 3.2 billion euros. Henkel employs more than 52,000 people globally – a passionate and highly diverse team, united by a strong company culture, a common purpose to create sustainable value, and shared values. As a recognized leader in sustainability, Henkel holds top positions in many international indices and rankings. Henkel's preferred shares are listed in the German stock index DAX. For more information, please visit www.henkel.com.</p><p>About Signify</p><p>Signify (Euronext: LIGHT) is the world leader in lighting for professionals and consumers and lighting for the Internet of Things. Our Philips products, Interact connected lighting systems and data-enabled services, deliver business value and transform life in homes, buildings and public spaces. With 2019 sales of EUR 6.2 billion, we have approximately 37,000 employees and are present in over 70 countries. We unlock the extraordinary potential of light for brighter lives and a better world. We achieved carbon neutrality in 2020 and have been named Industry Leader in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for three years in a row. News from Signify is located at the Newsroom, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Information for investors can be found on the Investor Relations page.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201118005386/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

AWS Announces General Availability of AWS Network Firewall

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-General-Availability-of-AWS-Network-Firewall/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-General-Availability-of-AWS-Network-Firewall

11/17/2020 20:17:00

AWS Announces General Availability of AWS Network Firewall

11/17/2020

2020

New high-availability firewall service gives customers added visibility and control to easily secure their virtual networks running on AWS GE and the U.S. Navy among the customers using AWS Network Firewall SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 17, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services Inc., an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of AWS Network Firewall, a new managed security service that makes it easier for customers to enable network protections across all of their AWS workloads. Customers can enable AWS Network Firewall in their desired Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) environments with just a few clicks in the AWS Console, and the service automatically scales with network traffic to provide high availability protections without the need to set up or maintain the underlying infrastructure. AWS Network Firewall's flexible rules engine gives customers granular control to define their own custom rules or integrate with their existing security ecosystem by importing rules from leading AWS Partner Network (APN) security partners like AlertLogic, CrowdStrike, Fortinet, and Trend Micro. There are no additional charges or upfront commitments required to use AWS Network Firewall, and customers pay only by hours deployed and gigabytes processed. To get started with AWS Network Firewall, visit https://aws.amazon.com/network-firewall/. AWS provides comprehensive protections to help customers secure their networks, such as AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect internet-facing web applications, AWS Shield to safeguard against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, and AWS Firewall Manager which provides central management and visibility across all firewall controls on AWS. While these and other protections combine to provide highly secure and flexible layers of defense, many customers also want a simple way to apply and manage blanket network protections across all of their workloads (e.g., domain-based access controls, monitoring to identify malicious traffic patterns, and unified traffic inspection spanning from the network layer to the application layer). Customers also want to customize these protections based on their organization's specific security needs, import rules from other trusted providers that they already use, and easily integrate collected logs and network data into their existing security workflows. Customers are seeking easy-to-use and customizable network protections, without having to manually patch and maintain servers, handle failover, and provision capacity. With AWS Network Firewall, customers can easily deploy granular network protections across their entire AWS environment, without the need to configure and manage additional security infrastructure. AWS Network Firewall provides essential protections against common network threats, including dynamic packet filtering, intrusion prevention and detection, and web filtering. Customers can also implement customized Snort and Suricata rules (two widely used open source formats) to further tailor protections like preventing their VPCs from accessing unauthorized domains, blocking thousands of known bad IP addresses, or defending against common exploits by identifying patterns and behaviors associated with known threats. Customers can monitor firewall activity in real time via Amazon CloudWatch metrics, and can have AWS Network Firewall automatically send network traffic logs to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Cloudwatch, and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose for additional visibility and auditing purposes. "When we talk to customers about what they want in a cloud network firewall they tell us that they want network protections that work with their existing security systems and without the headache of managing the underlying infrastructure," said Steve Schmidt, CISO, AWS. "AWS Network Firewall provides scalable network protections that allow customers to deploy highly customizable rules for their entire AWS infrastructure, and integrates with many of the APN partner services that customers already use. Best of all, there's no need to configure or maintain additional infrastructure." AWS Network Firewall integrates with AWS Firewall Manager, allowing customers to build policies based on AWS Network Firewall rules and centrally apply those policies across their VPCs and accounts through the AWS Firewall Manager Console and API. Leading providers, including Accenture, Alert Logic, Check Point Software Technologies, CrowdStrike, Datadog, Fortinet, Hashicorp, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, Rackspace, Splunk, SumoLogic, Trend Micro, and Tufin have built integrations with AWS Network Firewall, with more coming soon. These integrations allow customers to easily incorporate AWS Network Firewall into their existing security workflows for orchestration, automation, and threat detection and response. AWS Network Firewall is available today in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Dublin) regions, with more regions coming soon. For more than 125 years, GE has invented the future of industry. "We have a high bar for security at GE, which means we dedicate a considerable amount of time and resources to network protection across our sizeable cloud footprint," said Matthew Green, Sr. Director of Cloud Architecture, GE. "AWS Network Firewall will continue to keep GE on the bleeding edge of cloud technology and afford us the opportunity to utilize best-in-class firewalling and threat detection to protect our egress traffic across all our workloads." The U.S. Navy Sea Warrior Program's mission is to rapidly identify and implement affordable IT solutions. After testing AWS Network Firewall's scalability and functionality, the US Navy agrees that the service meets the needs of the program. "The U.S. Navy Sea Warrior Program (PMW 240) has a requirement for cybersecurity as a service and is testing options within an Other Transaction Authority (OTA) contract vehicle awarded to AWS via the IWRP OTA," said a representative from Navy PMW 240 Sea Warrior. "PMW 240 requires a cybersecurity solution that automates firewall infrastructure, scale, and performance to allow it to better focus on cyber alerts and protection of Navy data." Fortinet secures the largest enterprise, service provider, and government organizations around the world. "Fortinet's work with cloud customers of all shapes and sizes gives us broad visibility into the most critical components of network security in the cloud," said John Maddison, EVP of Products and CMO at Fortinet. "We've made this expertise available to all AWS Network Firewall customers in the form of managed rules based on threat intelligence from FortiGuard Labs. Our collaboration with AWS will make it easy for customers to seamlessly integrate Fortinet threat intelligence with AWS Network Firewall as an additional layer of protection alongside their existing security." Rackspace Technology is a leading end-to-end multicloud technology services company. "At Rackspace we have a long history of supporting small and midsize businesses in their journey to the cloud, and one of the most common challenges these customers face is finding a simple and accessible way to secure their network and web applications," said Aaron Hackney, Principal Architect of Network Security, Rackspace Technology. "Existing solutions are often either exclusively aimed at big enterprises and thus too costly and complex, or too bare bones to be truly effective without a lot of customization and additional development. AWS Network Firewall gives these customers powerful protections against common network threats without requiring existing security expertise or piles of money just to get started." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

<p><em>New high-availability firewall service gives customers added visibility and control to easily secure their virtual networks running on AWS</em></p><p><em>GE and the U.S. Navy among the customers using AWS Network Firewall</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 17, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services Inc., an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of AWS Network Firewall, a new managed security service that makes it easier for customers to enable network protections across all of their AWS workloads. Customers can enable AWS Network Firewall in their desired Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) environments with just a few clicks in the AWS Console, and the service automatically scales with network traffic to provide high availability protections without the need to set up or maintain the underlying infrastructure. AWS Network Firewall's flexible rules engine gives customers granular control to define their own custom rules or integrate with their existing security ecosystem by importing rules from leading AWS Partner Network (APN) security partners like AlertLogic, CrowdStrike, Fortinet, and Trend Micro. There are no additional charges or upfront commitments required to use AWS Network Firewall, and customers pay only by hours deployed and gigabytes processed. To get started with AWS Network Firewall, visit https://aws.amazon.com/network-firewall/.</p><p>AWS provides comprehensive protections to help customers secure their networks, such as AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect internet-facing web applications, AWS Shield to safeguard against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, and AWS Firewall Manager which provides central management and visibility across all firewall controls on AWS. While these and other protections combine to provide highly secure and flexible layers of defense, many customers also want a simple way to apply and manage blanket network protections across all of their workloads (e.g., domain-based access controls, monitoring to identify malicious traffic patterns, and unified traffic inspection spanning from the network layer to the application layer). Customers also want to customize these protections based on their organization's specific security needs, import rules from other trusted providers that they already use, and easily integrate collected logs and network data into their existing security workflows. Customers are seeking easy-to-use and customizable network protections, without having to manually patch and maintain servers, handle failover, and provision capacity.</p><p>With AWS Network Firewall, customers can easily deploy granular network protections across their entire AWS environment, without the need to configure and manage additional security infrastructure. AWS Network Firewall provides essential protections against common network threats, including dynamic packet filtering, intrusion prevention and detection, and web filtering. Customers can also implement customized Snort and Suricata rules (two widely used open source formats) to further tailor protections like preventing their VPCs from accessing unauthorized domains, blocking thousands of known bad IP addresses, or defending against common exploits by identifying patterns and behaviors associated with known threats. Customers can monitor firewall activity in real time via Amazon CloudWatch metrics, and can have AWS Network Firewall automatically send network traffic logs to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Cloudwatch, and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose for additional visibility and auditing purposes.</p><p>"When we talk to customers about what they want in a cloud network firewall they tell us that they want network protections that work with their existing security systems and without the headache of managing the underlying infrastructure," said Steve Schmidt, CISO, AWS. "AWS Network Firewall provides scalable network protections that allow customers to deploy highly customizable rules for their entire AWS infrastructure, and integrates with many of the APN partner services that customers already use. Best of all, there's no need to configure or maintain additional infrastructure."</p><p>AWS Network Firewall integrates with AWS Firewall Manager, allowing customers to build policies based on AWS Network Firewall rules and centrally apply those policies across their VPCs and accounts through the AWS Firewall Manager Console and API. Leading providers, including Accenture, Alert Logic, Check Point Software Technologies, CrowdStrike, Datadog, Fortinet, Hashicorp, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, Rackspace, Splunk, SumoLogic, Trend Micro, and Tufin have built integrations with AWS Network Firewall, with more coming soon. These integrations allow customers to easily incorporate AWS Network Firewall into their existing security workflows for orchestration, automation, and threat detection and response. AWS Network Firewall is available today in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Dublin) regions, with more regions coming soon.</p><p>For more than 125 years, GE has invented the future of industry. "We have a high bar for security at GE, which means we dedicate a considerable amount of time and resources to network protection across our sizeable cloud footprint," said Matthew Green, Sr. Director of Cloud Architecture, GE. "AWS Network Firewall will continue to keep GE on the bleeding edge of cloud technology and afford us the opportunity to utilize best-in-class firewalling and threat detection to protect our egress traffic across all our workloads."</p><p>The U.S. Navy Sea Warrior Program's mission is to rapidly identify and implement affordable IT solutions. After testing AWS Network Firewall's scalability and functionality, the US Navy agrees that the service meets the needs of the program. "The U.S. Navy Sea Warrior Program (PMW 240) has a requirement for cybersecurity as a service and is testing options within an Other Transaction Authority (OTA) contract vehicle awarded to AWS via the IWRP OTA," said a representative from Navy PMW 240 Sea Warrior. "PMW 240 requires a cybersecurity solution that automates firewall infrastructure, scale, and performance to allow it to better focus on cyber alerts and protection of Navy data."</p><p>Fortinet secures the largest enterprise, service provider, and government organizations around the world. "Fortinet's work with cloud customers of all shapes and sizes gives us broad visibility into the most critical components of network security in the cloud," said John Maddison, EVP of Products and CMO at Fortinet. "We've made this expertise available to all AWS Network Firewall customers in the form of managed rules based on threat intelligence from FortiGuard Labs. Our collaboration with AWS will make it easy for customers to seamlessly integrate Fortinet threat intelligence with AWS Network Firewall as an additional layer of protection alongside their existing security."</p><p>Rackspace Technology is a leading end-to-end multicloud technology services company. "At Rackspace we have a long history of supporting small and midsize businesses in their journey to the cloud, and one of the most common challenges these customers face is finding a simple and accessible way to secure their network and web applications," said Aaron Hackney, Principal Architect of Network Security, Rackspace Technology. "Existing solutions are often either exclusively aimed at big enterprises and thus too costly and complex, or too bare bones to be truly effective without a lot of customization and additional development. AWS Network Firewall gives these customers powerful protections against common network threats without requiring existing security expertise or piles of money just to get started."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p>

Price Gougers Caught by Amazon are Prosecuted by New York Attorney General

/news/news-details/2020/Price-Gougers-Caught-by-Amazon-are-Prosecuted-by-New-York-Attorney-General/default.aspx

Price-Gougers-Caught-by-Amazon-are-Prosecuted-by-New-York-Attorney-General

11/17/2020 14:00:00

Price Gougers Caught by Amazon are Prosecuted by New York Attorney General

11/17/2020

2020

What:Amazon has zero tolerance for bad actors. Amazon caught three bad actors attempting to sell products at egregious prices, immediately closed their accounts and referred them to the New York Attorney General's office. In partnership with Amazon, the New York Attorney General's office picked up the investigation and pursued the bad actors. Today, the New York Attorney General announced that she has reached a settlement that protects customers and holds the bad actors accountable. You can see the indictment and press release here: https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2020/attorney-general-james-stops-three-amazon-sellers-price-gouging-hand-sanitizer Statement from Amazon:Amazon does not allow price gouging in our store. We refer the most egregious bad actors to relevant state attorneys general and we are grateful that the New York Attorney General has continued to pursue this case and hold these bad actors accountable. Our teams monitor our store 24/7, remove offers and suspend selling accounts that violate our policies, and report bad actors to law enforcement. We will continue to fight against bad actors who attempt to take advantage of this global health crisis. You can read more about how Amazon protects customers from price gouging, below: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/price-gouging-has-no-place-in-our-stores https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/its-time-for-congress-to-establish-a-federal-price-gouging-law

<p>What:Amazon has zero tolerance for bad actors. Amazon caught three bad actors attempting to sell products at egregious prices, immediately closed their accounts and referred them to the New York Attorney General's office. In partnership with Amazon, the New York Attorney General's office picked up the investigation and pursued the bad actors. Today, the New York Attorney General announced that she has reached a settlement that protects customers and holds the bad actors accountable.</p><p>You can see the indictment and press release here: https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2020/attorney-general-james-stops-three-amazon-sellers-price-gouging-hand-sanitizer</p><p>Statement from Amazon:Amazon does not allow price gouging in our store. We refer the most egregious bad actors to relevant state attorneys general and we are grateful that the New York Attorney General has continued to pursue this case and hold these bad actors accountable. Our teams monitor our store 24/7, remove offers and suspend selling accounts that violate our policies, and report bad actors to law enforcement. We will continue to fight against bad actors who attempt to take advantage of this global health crisis.</p><p>You can read more about how Amazon protects customers from price gouging, below:</p><ul><li>https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/price-gouging-has-no-place-in-our-stores</li><li>https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/its-time-for-congress-to-establish-a-federal-price-gouging-law</li></ul>

Introducing Amazon Pharmacy: Prescription Medications Delivered

/news/news-details/2020/Introducing-Amazon-Pharmacy-Prescription-Medications-Delivered/default.aspx

Introducing-Amazon-Pharmacy-Prescription-Medications-Delivered

11/17/2020 06:00:00

Introducing Amazon Pharmacy: Prescription Medications Delivered

11/17/2020

2020

Customers can now purchase prescription medications through the Amazon online store – convenient and reliable access, without leaving home Amazon Prime members receive free two-day delivery and up to 80% savings when paying without insurance, with new prescription savings benefit SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 17, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN)today announced two new pharmacy offerings to help customers conveniently purchase their prescription medications. Amazon Pharmacy, a new store on Amazon, allows customers to complete an entire pharmacy transaction on their desktop or mobile device through the Amazon App. Using a secure pharmacy profile, customers can add their insurance information, manage prescriptions, and choose payment options before checking out. Prime members receive unlimited, free two-day delivery on orders from Amazon Pharmacy included with their membership. To learn more and get started, visit amazon.com/pharmacy. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201117005429/en/ Customers can now purchase prescription medications through Amazon Pharmacy – convenient and reliable access, without leaving home. (Photo: Business Wire) Also new today, Prime members can access savings on medications at Amazon Pharmacy when paying without insurance, as well as at over 50,000 other participating pharmacies nationwide. The Amazon Prime prescription savings benefit saves members up to 80% off generic and 40% off brand name medications when paying without insurance. Prime members will have access to their prescription savings at checkout on Amazon Pharmacy, or can learn more at amazon.com/primerx. Together the Amazon Prime prescription savings benefit and Amazon Pharmacy make it simple for customers to compare prices and purchase medications for home delivery, all in one place. Now, filling prescriptions is as convenient as any other purchase on Amazon's online store: Research Medications and Order Confidently: The same browsing experience customers are familiar with from Amazon makes it easy to discover what medications – including branded and generic versions, and different forms or dosages – are available through Amazon Pharmacy. Before checking out customers can compare their insurance co-pay, the price without insurance, or the available savings with the new Prime prescription savings benefit to choose their lowest price option. Seamless Transactions: Customers can add insurance information and ask their prescriber to send new or existing prescriptions directly to Amazon Pharmacy for fulfilment. Purchase is as simple as confirming the request on the Amazon App or website. Access Fully Digital, Personalized Quality Care: Customers haveonline self-service help options combined with phone access to customer care at any time. Friendly and knowledgeable pharmacists are available 24/7 to answer questions about medications. "We designed Amazon Pharmacy to put customers first – bringing Amazon's customer obsession to an industry that can be inconvenient and confusing," said TJ Parker, Vice President, Amazon Pharmacy. "We work hard behind the scenes to handle complications seamlessly so anyone who needs a prescription can understand their options, place their order for the lowest available price, and have their medication delivered quickly." "As more and more people look to complete everyday errands from home, pharmacy is an important and needed addition to the Amazon online store," commented Doug Herrington, Senior Vice President of North American Consumer at Amazon. "PillPack has provided exceptional pharmacy service for individuals with chronic health conditions for over six years. Now, we're expanding our pharmacy offering to Amazon.com, which will help more customers save time, save money, simplify their lives, and feel healthier." "We understand the importance of access to affordable medication, and we believe Prime members will find tremendous value with the new Amazon Prime prescription savings benefit," said Jamil Ghani, Vice President, Amazon Prime. "Our goal is for Prime to make members' lives easier and more convenient every day, and we're excited to extend the incredible savings, seamless shopping experience, and fast, free delivery members know and love with Prime to Amazon Pharmacy." About Our Pharmacy Services Amazon Pharmacy on Amazon.com allows customers to order prescription medications for home delivery. Orders are delivered in discreet packaging to the customer's preferred address. Medications require a prescription from a licensed health care provider. Amazon Pharmacy securely manages customer information in compliance with HIPAA, and does not share Protected Health Information outside of the pharmacy for advertising or marketing purposes without clear permission from the customer. We do not deliver Schedule II controlled medications, which includes most opioids. Learn more at amazon.com/pharmacy. PillPack by Amazon Pharmacy is part of Amazon Pharmacy and remains a distinct service for customers managing multiple daily medications for chronic conditions. Customers who take multiple daily medications and prefer pre-sorted dose packaging should continue to choose PillPack. Learn more at pillpack.com. The Amazon Prime prescription savings benefit gives Prime members access to low prices on many brand name and generic prescription medications when paying without insurance. It can be used for discounts up to 80% off generic and 40% off brand name medications at over 50,000 participating pharmacies nationwide, including Amazon Pharmacy and the PillPack by Amazon Pharmacy service. The savings benefit is administered by Inside Rx, a subsidiary of Evernorth, providing affordable access to medication for self-paying consumers. Learn more and start saving today at amazon.com/primerx. Not a Prime member? Learn more or sign up for a free 30-day trial at amazon.com/prime. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201117005429/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>Customers can now purchase prescription medications through the Amazon online store – convenient and reliable access, without leaving home</em></p><p><em>Amazon Prime members receive free two-day delivery and up to 80% savings when paying without insurance, with new prescription savings benefit</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 17, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN)today announced two new pharmacy offerings to help customers conveniently purchase their prescription medications. Amazon Pharmacy, a new store on Amazon, allows customers to complete an entire pharmacy transaction on their desktop or mobile device through the Amazon App. Using a secure pharmacy profile, customers can add their insurance information, manage prescriptions, and choose payment options before checking out. Prime members receive unlimited, free two-day delivery on orders from Amazon Pharmacy included with their membership. To learn more and get started, visit amazon.com/pharmacy.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201117005429/en/</p><div><p>Customers can now purchase prescription medications through Amazon Pharmacy – convenient and reliable access, without leaving home. (Photo: Business Wire)</p></div><p>Also new today, Prime members can access savings on medications at Amazon Pharmacy when paying without insurance, as well as at over 50,000 other participating pharmacies nationwide. The Amazon Prime prescription savings benefit saves members up to 80% off generic and 40% off brand name medications when paying without insurance. Prime members will have access to their prescription savings at checkout on Amazon Pharmacy, or can learn more at amazon.com/primerx.</p><p>Together the Amazon Prime prescription savings benefit and Amazon Pharmacy make it simple for customers to compare prices and purchase medications for home delivery, all in one place. Now, filling prescriptions is as convenient as any other purchase on Amazon's online store:</p><ul><li>Research Medications and Order Confidently: The same browsing experience customers are familiar with from Amazon makes it easy to discover what medications – including branded and generic versions, and different forms or dosages – are available through Amazon Pharmacy. Before checking out customers can compare their insurance co-pay, the price without insurance, or the available savings with the new Prime prescription savings benefit to choose their lowest price option.</li><li>Seamless Transactions: Customers can add insurance information and ask their prescriber to send new or existing prescriptions directly to Amazon Pharmacy for fulfilment. Purchase is as simple as confirming the request on the Amazon App or website.</li><li>Access Fully Digital, Personalized Quality Care: Customers haveonline self-service help options combined with phone access to customer care at any time. Friendly and knowledgeable pharmacists are available 24/7 to answer questions about medications.</li></ul><p>"We designed Amazon Pharmacy to put customers first – bringing Amazon's customer obsession to an industry that can be inconvenient and confusing," said TJ Parker, Vice President, Amazon Pharmacy. "We work hard behind the scenes to handle complications seamlessly so anyone who needs a prescription can understand their options, place their order for the lowest available price, and have their medication delivered quickly."</p><p>"As more and more people look to complete everyday errands from home, pharmacy is an important and needed addition to the Amazon online store," commented Doug Herrington, Senior Vice President of North American Consumer at Amazon. "PillPack has provided exceptional pharmacy service for individuals with chronic health conditions for over six years. Now, we're expanding our pharmacy offering to Amazon.com, which will help more customers save time, save money, simplify their lives, and feel healthier."</p><p>"We understand the importance of access to affordable medication, and we believe Prime members will find tremendous value with the new Amazon Prime prescription savings benefit," said Jamil Ghani, Vice President, Amazon Prime. "Our goal is for Prime to make members' lives easier and more convenient every day, and we're excited to extend the incredible savings, seamless shopping experience, and fast, free delivery members know and love with Prime to Amazon Pharmacy."</p><p>About Our Pharmacy Services</p><p>Amazon Pharmacy on Amazon.com allows customers to order prescription medications for home delivery. Orders are delivered in discreet packaging to the customer's preferred address. Medications require a prescription from a licensed health care provider. Amazon Pharmacy securely manages customer information in compliance with HIPAA, and does not share Protected Health Information outside of the pharmacy for advertising or marketing purposes without clear permission from the customer. We do not deliver Schedule II controlled medications, which includes most opioids. Learn more at amazon.com/pharmacy.</p><p>PillPack by Amazon Pharmacy is part of Amazon Pharmacy and remains a distinct service for customers managing multiple daily medications for chronic conditions. Customers who take multiple daily medications and prefer pre-sorted dose packaging should continue to choose PillPack. Learn more at pillpack.com.</p><p>The Amazon Prime prescription savings benefit gives Prime members access to low prices on many brand name and generic prescription medications when paying without insurance. It can be used for discounts up to 80% off generic and 40% off brand name medications at over 50,000 participating pharmacies nationwide, including Amazon Pharmacy and the PillPack by Amazon Pharmacy service. The savings benefit is administered by Inside Rx, a subsidiary of Evernorth, providing affordable access to medication for self-paying consumers. Learn more and start saving today at amazon.com/primerx. Not a Prime member? Learn more or sign up for a free 30-day trial at amazon.com/prime.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201117005429/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

Amazon Named "Low Price Leader" in New Study

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Named-Low-Price-Leader-in-New-Study/default.aspx

Amazon-Named-Low-Price-Leader-in-New-Study

11/17/2020 03:30:00

Amazon Named "Low Price Leader" in New Study

11/17/2020

2020

Amazon has best prices across 21 product categories important to customers SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 17, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) was named the low price leader in Profitero's annual "Price Wars" study. The comprehensive analysis, now in its fourth year, compares prices on over 18,400 products at Amazon, Walmart, Target, Staples, Home Depot, Wayfair, Macy's, Walgreen's, CVS, Kroger, Nordstrom, Best Buy, Lowes, and Chewy, and found Amazon offered customers the lowest prices most often and most consistently. The study compared products in 21 categories important to customers, including household supplies, health and personal care, office supplies, home furniture, electronics, appliances and more. Amazon proved to be the lowest priced option in all categories, with the largest potential customer savings, on average, in Home Furniture (35% more affordable than other options in the category), Vitamins and Supplements (34%), Health and Personal Care (26%) and Beauty (22%). The full study is available here: https://insights.profitero.com/rs/476-BCC-343/images/Profitero%20-%20Pandemic%20Price%20Wars%202020.pdf Customers expect to find low prices in our store, and we work hard to provide the best available price across the hundreds of millions of products in our store for all customers, every day. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201117005503/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>Amazon has best prices across 21 product categories important to customers</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 17, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) was named the low price leader in Profitero's annual "Price Wars" study. The comprehensive analysis, now in its fourth year, compares prices on over 18,400 products at Amazon, Walmart, Target, Staples, Home Depot, Wayfair, Macy's, Walgreen's, CVS, Kroger, Nordstrom, Best Buy, Lowes, and Chewy, and found Amazon offered customers the lowest prices most often and most consistently.</p><p>The study compared products in 21 categories important to customers, including household supplies, health and personal care, office supplies, home furniture, electronics, appliances and more. Amazon proved to be the lowest priced option in all categories, with the largest potential customer savings, on average, in Home Furniture (35% more affordable than other options in the category), Vitamins and Supplements (34%), Health and Personal Care (26%) and Beauty (22%).</p><p>The full study is available here: https://insights.profitero.com/rs/476-BCC-343/images/Profitero%20-%20Pandemic%20Price%20Wars%202020.pdf</p><p>Customers expect to find low prices in our store, and we work hard to provide the best available price across the hundreds of millions of products in our store for all customers, every day.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201117005503/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

Amazon Black Friday Deals Week Starts Friday, November 20—Score Epic Deals While They Last!

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Black-Friday-Deals-Week-Starts-Friday-November-20Score-Epic-Deals-While-They-Last/default.aspx

Amazon-Black-Friday-Deals-Week-Starts-Friday-November-20Score-Epic-Deals-While-They-Last

11/16/2020 09:00:00

Amazon Black Friday Deals Week Starts Friday, November 20—Score Epic Deals While They Last!

11/16/2020

2020

Starting Friday, November 20 through Black Friday on November 27, Amazon will release tens of thousands of deals with deep discounts and incredibly low prices, including thousands of holiday deals from small businesses Customers can secure buzzworthy gifts and trending products across toys, beauty, home, fashion, Amazon Devices and more at amazon.com/blackfriday— find deals on brands including Samsung, Sony, Cuisinart, iRobot, Rivet, Belei, Mario Badescu, DEWALT and Tommy Hilfiger SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 16, 2020-- (NASDAQ:AMZN) – Amazon's Black Friday Deals Week is almost here! Starting this Friday, November 20, through November 27 (Black Friday), customers can score tens of thousands of amazing Black Friday deals and low prices on top gifts at amazon.com/blackfriday or on the Amazon App. Plus, new Black Friday deals will be dropping daily all week—don't miss out, many of these deals only last 24 hours. From new gadgets and electronics, to kid-favorite toys, must-have home and kitchen items, seasonal fashion finds and beauty favorites, customers will find a wide selection of deals to secure before they sell out. Customers can also shop on smile.amazon.com/blackfriday to find the same amazing deals and Amazon shopping experience, with the added bonus that AmazonSmile will donate a portion of the purchase price of eligible products to a charity of their choice. Amazon continues to support small business selling partners this holiday season; in addition to shopping top deals from small businesses, customers can easily support small businesses through recently launched collections at amazon.com/supportsmall. More customers than ever are shopping early for their holiday gifts this year, with popular categories including home, toys and Amazon Devices, as well as shopping from small and medium sized businesses at record levels. For customers who still have gifts to check off the list, Amazon is continuing its season of epic deals and savings with tens of thousands of Black Friday deals starting on Friday, November 20. Customers can also shop deals and popular products within Amazon's collection of holiday gift guides, including the recently-launched Oprah's Favorite Things list, all at amazon.com/gifts. Amazon is committed to making it easy to save this holiday season, in fact, a recent study by ecommerce analytics firm Profitero found that Amazon has the lowest prices. Plus, with Amazon's extended returns window, customers can shop with confidence knowing that most items shipped now through December 31, 2020 can be returned for free until January 31, 2021 at over 18,000 convenient locations across the U.S. At Amazon, incredible employees come together to deliver magical experiences for customers—every day and throughout the holiday season—and that includes offering fast, free and convenient delivery options for customers. With more than 150 new process improvements and safety measures implemented over the last several months, approximately $10 billion expected to be invested this year to help keep employees safe and deliver products to customers, and hundreds of thousands of employees working across Amazon's network, customers can rely on fast and efficient delivery throughout the holiday season and beyond. Black Friday Deals Week Preview: The deals included below—and many more—will be available on various dates and times between November 20 and November 27 (Black Friday), while supplies last, at amazon.com/blackfriday and the Amazon App. Starting November 20, discover Alexa-exclusive deals and more by simply asking "Alexa, what are my deals?" Customers can also simply look for the "Black Friday Deal" badge to spot top deals. Get your gift list ready and shop these deals while they last! Support Small Businesses on Amazon Save on thousands of Small Business Holiday Deals from November 26 – November 30. Customers can also shop for gifts exclusively from small businesses in the Small Business Gift Guide. Save up to 20% on gifts and décor from Amazon Handmade Makers, such as Hereafter You + Me Puzzle Piece Wood Ornaments and Melanie Golden Topaz Stud Earrings. Customers can also support small businesses and Makers by browsing unique, handcrafted items in the Handmade Holiday Gift Guide. Save from small brands on Amazon Launchpad, such as up to 50% on Ubeesize Cell Phone Ring Lights and Tripods, 35% on JavaPresse Manual Coffee Grinder, 15% on MOKOQI Star Projector Night Lights for Kids and 20% on OVAL Smart Home. Customers can discover new, unique, and unexpected products from today's emerging brands in the Launchpad Holiday Gift Guide. Save on a new service called Amazon Explore that lets customers take live, customized virtual experiences to shop for unique gifts at boutiques and markets all around the world. Amazon Explore is a way for customers to support small businesses and even get to know shop owners and hosts while virtually browsing items, asking questions, and purchasing gifts instantly. Amazon Devices Get the Ring Video Doorbell 3 and an Echo Show 5 for just $149.99 Ring Video Doorbell Pro is $80 off – just $169.99 Kindle is $30 off – just $59.99 The all-new Echo Dot is $21 off – just $28.99 The all-new Echo Dot with Clock is $21 off – just $38.99 The all-new Echo is $30 off – just $69.99 Get the all-new Echo Dot and a Sengled Smart Bulb for just $28.99 Fire HD 10 tablet is $70 off – just $79.99 Fire HD 10 Kids Edition tablet is $70 off – just $129.99 The Fire 7 Kids Edition tablet is $40 off – just $59.99 The all-new eero 6 Wi-Fi 6 system (3-pack) is $56 off – just $223.00 The all-new Blink Outdoor camera kits are up to $130 off Get an Echo Show 5 and Blink Mini for just $49.99 The all-new Fire TV Stick Lite is $12 off – just $17.99 The all-new Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote is $12 off – just $27.99 Fire TV Stick 4K with Alexa Voice Remote is $20 off – just $29.99 The all-new Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote Accessories Essential Bundle is $12.98 off – just $59.99 The all-new Fire TV Stick Lite Accessories Essential Bundle is $12.98 off – just $49.99 Amazon Brands Save up to 20% on gaming accessories from AmazonBasics Save up to 20% on office products from AmazonBasics Save up to 20% on mattresses from Rivet and AmazonBasics Save up to 20% on select furniture and décor from Rivet Save 40% on Wag dog food and treats Save 20% on Belei skincare Save 20% on nutrition and wellness products from Amazon Elements and Revly Save 20% on coffee, snacks, and other grocery essentials from Solimo, Happy Belly, and Amazon Fresh Save up to 30% on select men's and women's fashion from our brands including fleeces and puffers in bright colors, neutrals, and animal prints Fashion Save up to 30% on select seasonal fashion trends including animal prints, plaids, and cozy loungewear Save up to 20% on select Fall fashion from Shopbop including Rag & Bone, Frame, and Free People Save up to 30% on select C9 Champion Save up to 30% on select most loved Men's clothing, shoes, and watches Save up to 40% on select Calvin Klein underwear Save up to 50% on select top watch brands from Citizen, Bulova, Anne Klein, and more Save up to 30% on select adidas active wear, backpacks, and more Save up to 40% on select apparel from Tommy Hilfiger Save up to 50% on select Samsonite and American Tourister luggage Beauty, Health and Personal Care Save up to 40% on premium beauty and professional beauty appliances Save up to 50% on Premium Beauty from Mario Badescu, Elemis, Oribe Save up to 40% on Gillette and Venus razors, refills and more Save up to 40% on Waterpik Aquarius Save up to 47% on toothbrush and toothpaste from Oral-B, Crest and more Save 50% on 23andMe Health + Ancestry Personal Genetic Service Kit Toys & Games Save up to 30% on games from Exploding Kittens and more Save up to 30% on preschool toys from Melissa & Doug, PAW Patrol, Hape, Jazwares and more Save up to 30% on STEM toys from Learning Resources Save up to 55% on the Monster Jam Grim Takedown Playset Save up to 40% on the KidKraft Super Vortex Racing Tower Save on select Princess toys and accessories Save on select Star Wars toys and accessories Save on select Marvel toys and accessories Save on select LEGO toys Household, Kitchen, Office, Smart Home and Home Improvement Save up to 40% on select Ninja Kitchen Products Save on select BlendTec products Save on select Cuisinart products Save up to 33% on select Instant Pot Ultras Save on select Cosori air fryers and accessories Save up to 20% on select Molekule air purifiers Save 15% on Winix A230 air purifier Save up to 45% on select Shark vacuums Save up to 20% on select Samsung Cube smart air purifier Save 30% or more on select Samsung vacuums Save on select iRobot products Save 20% on select Fraser Hill Farm Christmas Trees Save 33% on select Ecovacs Ozmo T5 Save on select Bissell products Save on select Levoit products Save up to 20% on Moen showerheads and faucets Save 20% on Bio Bidet Supreme elongated bidet toilet seat Save on Kasa TP Link Smart Plug Save up to 25% on Broan ventilation fans Save up to 25% on select Hansgrohe kitchen and bathroom products Buy a myQ Smart Garage Hub and connect to Key by Amazon to receive a $30 Credit (Terms and Conditions apply) Save up to 25% on select Hunter fans Save up to 30% on select Sengled lightbulbs Save up to 25% on select Yale Assure locks Save 40% on select Simplisafe security systems Save up to 30% on Zmodo security cameras Save 15% or more on home office and bedroom furniture from Modway, Serta, Safco, and more Save up to 15% on select rugs from Safavieh, nuLOOM, and more Save up to 20% on select Lucid Gel Memory Foam mattresses Save up to 30% on select Zinus Furniture Save on the new Rocketbook Panda Planner from Treasure Truck Save up to 30% on Rocketbook reusable notebooks Save up to 50% on markers and pencils from Prismacolor, Sharpie and more Electronics Save up to 30% on Kodak Instant cameras and printers Save up to 30% on Tile trackers Save up to 50% on Olympus cameras Save up to 33% on Bose QC35 II Noise Cancelling Headphones Save up to 50% on Skullcandy Indy True and XT earbuds Save up to 70% on Norton security software Save 40% on Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements Save $50 on Microsoft Office Home and Student Save up to 25% on select PlayStation subscriptions Save up to $10 on select Xbox One controllers Save up to 50% on Square Enix games Save 16% on Nintendo Switch + Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Save $15 on Game Pass Ultimate 3 Months Save on Samsung TVs Save on Sony 4K Ultra HD TVs Save on Sony BRAVIA OLED TVs Save on TVs under $1000 Save up to 25% on TVs 75 inches and larger Save up to 30% off Wireless Chargers and Accessories Save up to $10 off select Xbox One controllers Tools, Lawn & Garden and Major Appliances Save 15% on select Walsh appliances Save 15% on select Cosmo appliances Save 15% on Midea 3.1 Cu. Ft. compact refrigerator Save 15% on select NewAir appliances Save 15% on GE Profile Nugget Ice Maker Save 10% on select GE compact refrigerators Save 40% on Samsung AirDresser Save up to 20% on select Shop Succulents plants Save up to 17% on select Masterbuilt digital electric smoker Save 15% on select pool covers from Robelle & Pool Mate Save up to 30% off select Snow Joe snow removal equipment Save 15% or more on select Sun Joe & Snow Joe products Save up to 20% on select EGO and SKIL outdoor tools Save up to 30% on select Greenworks power tools Save up to 30% on select Renogy Solar products Save 15% on select Worx chainsaws Save 20% on select Worx tools Save up to 30% on select DEWALT tools Save up to 20% on select SKIL tools Save up to 31% on select Gerber tools & knives Save up to 15% on select Fluke tools Save up to 20% on select Apex tools Sports & Outdoors Save up to 15% on select Intex Airbeds Save up to 25% on select SUUNTO smartwatches Save up to 15% on select Sunny Health & Fitness gym equipment Save up to 25% on select baseball and softball equipment Save up to 20% on select kids bikes, adult bikes, helmets and more Save up to 60% on select golf clubs, balls, and accessories Save up to 25% on Joola table tennis tables and accessories Save up to 15% on Stiga table tennis tables Save up to 30% on adidas shoes, apparel and accessories Audible, Music, Prime Video, Kindle and Books Audible: through December 31, new members save nearly 40% on the first six months of an Audible Plus membership at just $4.95 per month. Amazon Music: New Amazon Music Unlimited customers can get three months of the premium streaming tier free, to enjoy unlimited access to more than 70 million songs, ad-free and a wide selection of popular podcasts. Amazon Music: Current Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers can upgrade to the Family Plan free for three months, with access for up to six accounts. Amazon Music: With purchase of select Echo devices, New Amazon Music Unlimited customers will receive six months of the premium, ad-free streaming tier for free. Prime Video: For a limited time, eligible Prime Video customers who are not already subscribed to Noggin via Prime Video Channels will be able to subscribe for $0.99 per month for up to two months. Kindle: Enjoy 2 months of Kindle Unlimited for $0.99 - access more than 1 million books, popular magazines and thousands of books with Audible narration. Offer valid for new members only. Terms and Conditions apply. Books: Save up to 50% with discounts and flash deals on select multi-genre books and eBooks. Looking for gifts for everyone on your list? Check out the new Books Gift Guide here! Pets Up to 51% off Dog and Cat Food from Wellpet Save up to 30% on Greenies and Dentastix treats Save on Hill's Science Diet Dog and Cat Food Save up to 20% on Frontline Plus Flea and Tick Treatment Business, Industrial and Scientific Save 15% on AmScope microscope kits for students and kids Save 20% on Oreck Commercial XL Upright Vacuum Cleaner Save up to 40% on Mynt 3D Printing Pens and Accessories Save 15% on Flashforge Creator Pro 3D Printer Save 16% on Dremel Digilab 3D Printer 3D45 Save 19% on Flashforge Finder 3D Printer Save up to 15% on First Aid Only all-purpose first aid kit Save 15% on Fluke 62 Max Thermometer and Fluke 59 Max Infrared Thermometer Save up to 20% off on 3M Littmann stethoscopes Automotive Save up to 15% on Gold Eagle All Surface Interior Cleaner Save up to 30% on Meguiar's Gold Class Car Wash Save up to 15% on Turtle Wax Seal N Shine with Premium Microfiber Towel and ICE Spray Wax Save up to 25% on Gold Eagle Spray Wax and Quick Detailer with UV Protectant Save 50% on Tire Installation Save up to 20% on Select Gator ETX Tri-Fold Truck Bed Tonneau Covers Additionally, customers can enter our Holiday Vehicle Sweepstakes for a chance to win a 2021 Hyundai Santa Fe from December 1-31, 2020. To enter, customers need to visit one of the following pages: 1) Automotive Storefront, 2) Sweepstakes Landing Page, 3) Hyundai Santa Fe Vehicle Detail Page, and 4) Hyundai Virtual Showroom. A winner will be notified on January 15, 2021. Amazon Gift Cards November 26 through November 30, save 20% or more on select gift card brands including Gap, H&M, Petco and more. Now through December 31, customers using Amazon Reload to replenish their Amazon Gift Card balance for the first time will receive a $10 bonus with their reload of $100 or more. Now through December 20, first-time Amazon Gift Card shoppers will receive a $15 promotional credit with the purchase of $50 or more in Amazon Gift Cards. The promotional credit expires on February 6, 2021. Other restrictions apply. Amazon Credit Cards Now through December 22, with an eligible Prime membership, customers who apply and are approved for the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa Card will instantly receive a $100 Gift Card. Prime Cardmembers earn 5% back at Whole Foods Market and Amazon.com. Additionally, customers without a Prime membership can apply for the Amazon Rewards Visa Card and receive a $60 Gift Card upon approval, in addition to earning 3% back at Whole Foods Market and Amazon.com as a cardmember. Restrictions apply. Visit amazon.com/visa for details. Whole Foods Market  Whole Foods Market: Both in-store and online, Prime members can receive exclusive discounts on customer favorites including candles (30% off) and all reusable water bottles and accessories (30% off) from November 18 to December 1. From November 27 to December 1, all customers can get 25% off on all probiotic supplements, with Prime members getting an additional 10% off the sale price. Woot! and Amazon Warehouse Woot!: Amazon's deal site will have dozens of limited-time discounts for Black Friday and Cyber Monday with free shipping for Prime members and daily doorbuster deals. Visit woot.com or fire up the Woot! App starting Sunday, November 22nd! Amazon Warehouse: Customers save an extra 20% on select quality pre-owned and open box items for the kitchen, home, office, sports and outdoors, including major appliances, furniture, home décor and more. Visit amazon.com/amazonwarehouse. More Ways to Shop This Season Gift Guides: Wrap up your holiday shopping with Amazon's biggest-ever selection of gift guides and exclusive storefronts at amazon.com/gifts. Customers can shop gift guides from Small Businesses, Books, Beauty, Fashion, Toys, Home, Electronics, Amazon Launchpad, Amazon Handmade, Curated by Ciara, Amazon Hometown Heroes, as well as products that give back with (RED). Oprah's Favorite Things: For the sixth year in a row, Oprah's Favorite Things will be available for purchase at amazon.com/oprahsfavoritethings. This year's list celebrates Black-owned businesses and features an array of decadent desserts, ingenious gadgets, fashionable sustainable goods and unique finds in home, fashion, and beauty. Amazon.com in Spanish: Customers can visit Amazon.com/espanol or use the Amazon App to shop, browse and search for millions of products, view their carts, and place orders in Spanish. On the mobile App customers can go to Settings and tap on "Country and Language" to select Spanish. Amazon.com in Spanish gives customers the same convenient shopping experience in their preferred language. Alexa Shopping: Alexa makes it easy to find the best holiday deals. Just ask, "Alexa, what are my deals?" Amazon Live: Throughout the holiday season, tune-in to amazon.com/live for shoppable livestreams featuring holiday inspiration, gift guides, and live demonstrations of this season's top deals and gift ideas from influencers and celebrities. Amazon Coupons: Discover more ways to save with Amazon Coupons. Find discounts on everyday essentials, as well as gifts, electronics, clothing, and more. Simply clip the coupon and the discount will be applied at checkout. Explore the most popular coupons on amazon.com/Coupons. Climate Pledge Friendly: Customers can discover and shop for products that have one or more of 19 different sustainability certifications, which help preserve the natural world. Get details at amazon.com/ClimatePledgeFriendly. Shop In-Store: Customers can visit Amazon's retail locations, including Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, Amazon Pop Up, Amazon Fresh, and Whole Foods Market to find incredible deals and amazing savings this holiday season.Find your nearest store at amazon.com/stores or wholefoodsmarket.com/stores. Give Back This Season AmazonSmile: Customers can visit smile.amazon.com and find the exact same Amazon experience—amazing deals, wide selection, fast and free delivery options—with the added bonus that AmazonSmile will donate a portion of the purchase price on eligible products to a charity of their choice. Customers can shop with AmazonSmile via the Amazon app on iPhones and Android phones, or by starting at smile.amazon.com on a web browser. Alexa Donations: Simply say, "Alexa, I want to make a donation," and you can make a monetary donation to the organization of your choice. For more information and charities to support, visit pay.amazon.com/alexadonations. Charity Lists: AmazonSmile Charity Lists give charitable organizations an easy way to create wish lists of needed products while providing customers a convenient way to donate items directly to these causes. Customers can shop thousands of Charity Lists this holiday season by visiting smile.amazon.com/charitylists, with new charities joining all the time. Plus, you can join Amazon in Delivering Smiles to more than a thousand AmazonSmile Charity Lists this holiday season, supporting the communities hit hardest by the events of this year. Fast, Free & Convenient Delivery Options In addition to free delivery on millions of items for all Amazon customers, Amazon offers a number of ways for customers to shop for and receive holiday gifts: Free One-Day & Same-Day Delivery: Prime members in the U.S. can shop a selection of over 10 million items eligible for Prime Free One-Day Delivery with no minimum purchase, and millions of items available for Same-Day Delivery in 47 major metropolitan areas. These delivery options are not only convenient for customers but they're better for the planet because One-Day and Same-Day deliveries ship from local fulfillment centers so they travel shorter distances and generate less carbon emissions. This is just another way that Amazon is leveraging its scale for good to make investments that support communities. Learn more at amazon.com/primedelivery. Not a Prime member yet? Join Prime or start a 30-day free trial at amazon.com/prime. Ultrafast & Free Grocery Delivery & Pickup: Prime members in more than 2,000 cities and towns have access to free, two-hour delivery on more than 170,000 products from Whole Foods Market and Amazon Fresh. Plus, in addition to groceries, Prime members can find toys, gifts, household products, and everyday essentials, electronics, Amazon Devices, and more available with free, two-hour delivery from Amazon Fresh. Prime members also get free one-hour pickup at all U.S. Whole Foods Market and Amazon Fresh stores. Delivery Where it's Needed Most: Whether road-tripping to see family, staying home and need a secure delivery location, or sending a gift to a loved one or friend, there are thousands of alternative package pickup options customers can choose from via Amazon Hub. These locations are conveniently located near or in offices, convenience stores, malls, apartment buildings, and grocery stores, in more than 900 cities and towns across the country. Tens of millions of products can be easily and conveniently delivered to an Amazon Hub pickup point at Whole Foods Market, 7-11, Chase Bank, Rite-Aid, HealthMart, GNC, Stage Stores, and more. To find an Amazon Hub location, visit amazon.com/hub. Extended Returns Window: Customers can buy gifts with confidence on Amazon knowing that millions of items are eligible for free and convenient returns at over 18,000 locations in the U.S. and this year's return window is even longer—most items shipped between October 1 and December 31, 2020 can now be returned until January 31, 2021. In addition, over 5,800 locations including Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, UPS Store locations and Kohl's—and new this year Whole Foods Market—offer label-free, box-free returns, making it even easier than ever to check returns off your list. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. Profitero Study Methodology Each day, Profitero monitors prices and other data on more than 450 million product pages on hundreds of unique retailer sites. For this study, Profitero analyzed daily prices collected over an 8 week period (Aug. 24, 2020 to Oct. 18, 2020) at Amazon.com and other leading online retail sites across 20 categories. Only identical items available and in-stock in the same pack configuration were compared. Prices for the same items were collected within 24 hours of each other to ensure validity of the comparisons. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201116005581/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>Starting Friday, November 20 through Black Friday on November 27, Amazon will release tens of thousands of deals with deep discounts and incredibly low prices, including thousands of holiday deals from small businesses</em></p><p><em>Customers can secure buzzworthy gifts and trending products across toys, beauty, home, fashion, Amazon Devices and more at amazon.com/blackfriday— find deals on brands including</em> <em>Samsung, Sony, Cuisinart, iRobot, Rivet, Belei, Mario Badescu, DEWALT and Tommy Hilfiger</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 16, 2020-- (NASDAQ:AMZN) – Amazon's Black Friday Deals Week is almost here! Starting this Friday, November 20, through November 27 (Black Friday), customers can score tens of thousands of amazing Black Friday deals and low prices on top gifts at amazon.com/blackfriday or on the Amazon App. Plus, new Black Friday deals will be dropping daily all week—don't miss out, many of these deals only last 24 hours. From new gadgets and electronics, to kid-favorite toys, must-have home and kitchen items, seasonal fashion finds and beauty favorites, customers will find a wide selection of deals to secure before they sell out. Customers can also shop on smile.amazon.com/blackfriday to find the same amazing deals and Amazon shopping experience, with the added bonus that AmazonSmile will donate a portion of the purchase price of eligible products to a charity of their choice. Amazon continues to support small business selling partners this holiday season; in addition to shopping top deals from small businesses, customers can easily support small businesses through recently launched collections at amazon.com/supportsmall.</p><p>More customers than ever are shopping early for their holiday gifts this year, with popular categories including home, toys and Amazon Devices, as well as shopping from small and medium sized businesses at record levels. For customers who still have gifts to check off the list, Amazon is continuing its season of epic deals and savings with tens of thousands of Black Friday deals starting on Friday, November 20. Customers can also shop deals and popular products within Amazon's collection of holiday gift guides, including the recently-launched Oprah's Favorite Things list, all at amazon.com/gifts. Amazon is committed to making it easy to save this holiday season, in fact, a recent study by ecommerce analytics firm Profitero found that Amazon has the lowest prices. Plus, with Amazon's extended returns window, customers can shop with confidence knowing that most items shipped now through December 31, 2020 can be returned for free until January 31, 2021 at over 18,000 convenient locations across the U.S.</p><p>At Amazon, incredible employees come together to deliver magical experiences for customers—every day and throughout the holiday season—and that includes offering fast, free and convenient delivery options for customers. With more than 150 new process improvements and safety measures implemented over the last several months, approximately $10 billion expected to be invested this year to help keep employees safe and deliver products to customers, and hundreds of thousands of employees working across Amazon's network, customers can rely on fast and efficient delivery throughout the holiday season and beyond.</p><p>Black Friday Deals Week Preview:</p><p>The deals included below—and many more—will be available on various dates and times between November 20 and November 27 (Black Friday), while supplies last, at amazon.com/blackfriday and the Amazon App.</p><p>Starting November 20, discover Alexa-exclusive deals and more by simply asking "Alexa, what are my deals?" Customers can also simply look for the "Black Friday Deal" badge to spot top deals. Get your gift list ready and shop these deals while they last!</p><p>Support Small Businesses on Amazon</p><ul><li>Save on thousands of Small Business Holiday Deals from November 26 – November 30. Customers can also shop for gifts exclusively from small businesses in the Small Business Gift Guide.</li><li>Save up to 20% on gifts and décor from Amazon Handmade Makers, such as Hereafter You + Me Puzzle Piece Wood Ornaments and Melanie Golden Topaz Stud Earrings. Customers can also support small businesses and Makers by browsing unique, handcrafted items in the Handmade Holiday Gift Guide.</li><li>Save from small brands on Amazon Launchpad, such as up to 50% on Ubeesize Cell Phone Ring Lights and Tripods, 35% on JavaPresse Manual Coffee Grinder, 15% on MOKOQI Star Projector Night Lights for Kids and 20% on OVAL Smart Home. Customers can discover new, unique, and unexpected products from today's emerging brands in the Launchpad Holiday Gift Guide.</li><li>Save on a new service called Amazon Explore that lets customers take live, customized virtual experiences to shop for unique gifts at boutiques and markets all around the world. Amazon Explore is a way for customers to support small businesses and even get to know shop owners and hosts while virtually browsing items, asking questions, and purchasing gifts instantly.</li></ul><p>Amazon Devices</p><ul><li>Get the Ring Video Doorbell 3 and an Echo Show 5 for just $149.99</li><li>Ring Video Doorbell Pro is $80 off – just $169.99</li><li>Kindle is $30 off – just $59.99</li><li>The all-new Echo Dot is $21 off – just $28.99</li><li>The all-new Echo Dot with Clock is $21 off – just $38.99</li><li>The all-new Echo is $30 off – just $69.99</li><li>Get the all-new Echo Dot and a Sengled Smart Bulb for just $28.99</li><li>Fire HD 10 tablet is $70 off – just $79.99</li><li>Fire HD 10 Kids Edition tablet is $70 off – just $129.99</li><li>The Fire 7 Kids Edition tablet is $40 off – just $59.99</li><li>The all-new eero 6 Wi-Fi 6 system (3-pack) is $56 off – just $223.00</li><li>The all-new Blink Outdoor camera kits are up to $130 off</li><li>Get an Echo Show 5 and Blink Mini for just $49.99</li><li>The all-new Fire TV Stick Lite is $12 off – just $17.99</li><li>The all-new Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote is $12 off – just $27.99</li><li>Fire TV Stick 4K with Alexa Voice Remote is $20 off – just $29.99</li><li>The all-new Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote Accessories Essential Bundle is $12.98 off – just $59.99</li><li>The all-new Fire TV Stick Lite Accessories Essential Bundle is $12.98 off – just $49.99</li></ul><p>Amazon Brands</p><ul><li>Save up to 20% on gaming accessories from AmazonBasics</li><li>Save up to 20% on office products from AmazonBasics</li><li>Save up to 20% on mattresses from Rivet and AmazonBasics</li><li>Save up to 20% on select furniture and décor from Rivet</li><li>Save 40% on Wag dog food and treats</li><li>Save 20% on Belei skincare</li><li>Save 20% on nutrition and wellness products from Amazon Elements and Revly</li><li>Save 20% on coffee, snacks, and other grocery essentials from Solimo, Happy Belly, and Amazon Fresh</li><li>Save up to 30% on select men's and women's fashion from our brands including fleeces and puffers in bright colors, neutrals, and animal prints</li></ul><p>Fashion</p><ul><li>Save up to 30% on select seasonal fashion trends including animal prints, plaids, and cozy loungewear</li><li>Save up to 20% on select Fall fashion from Shopbop including Rag &amp; Bone, Frame, and Free People</li><li>Save up to 30% on select C9 Champion</li><li>Save up to 30% on select most loved Men's clothing, shoes, and watches</li><li>Save up to 40% on select Calvin Klein underwear</li><li>Save up to 50% on select top watch brands from Citizen, Bulova, Anne Klein, and more</li><li>Save up to 30% on select adidas active wear, backpacks, and more</li><li>Save up to 40% on select apparel from Tommy Hilfiger</li><li>Save up to 50% on select Samsonite and American Tourister luggage</li></ul><p>Beauty, Health and Personal Care</p><ul><li>Save up to 40% on premium beauty and professional beauty appliances</li><li>Save up to 50% on Premium Beauty from Mario Badescu, Elemis, Oribe</li><li>Save up to 40% on Gillette and Venus razors, refills and more</li><li>Save up to 40% on Waterpik Aquarius</li><li>Save up to 47% on toothbrush and toothpaste from Oral-B, Crest and more</li><li>Save 50% on 23andMe Health + Ancestry Personal Genetic Service Kit</li></ul><p>Toys &amp; Games</p><ul><li>Save up to 30% on games from Exploding Kittens and more</li><li>Save up to 30% on preschool toys from Melissa &amp; Doug, PAW Patrol, Hape, Jazwares and more</li><li>Save up to 30% on STEM toys from Learning Resources</li><li>Save up to 55% on the Monster Jam Grim Takedown Playset</li><li>Save up to 40% on the KidKraft Super Vortex Racing Tower</li><li>Save on select Princess toys and accessories</li><li>Save on select Star Wars toys and accessories</li><li>Save on select Marvel toys and accessories</li><li>Save on select LEGO toys</li></ul><p>Household, Kitchen, Office, Smart Home and Home Improvement</p><ul><li>Save up to 40% on select Ninja Kitchen Products</li><li>Save on select BlendTec products</li><li>Save on select Cuisinart products</li><li>Save up to 33% on select Instant Pot Ultras</li><li>Save on select Cosori air fryers and accessories</li><li>Save up to 20% on select Molekule air purifiers</li><li>Save 15% on Winix A230 air purifier</li><li>Save up to 45% on select Shark vacuums</li><li>Save up to 20% on select Samsung Cube smart air purifier</li><li>Save 30% or more on select Samsung vacuums</li><li>Save on select iRobot products</li><li>Save 20% on select Fraser Hill Farm Christmas Trees</li><li>Save 33% on select Ecovacs Ozmo T5</li><li>Save on select Bissell products</li><li>Save on select Levoit products</li><li>Save up to 20% on Moen showerheads and faucets</li><li>Save 20% on Bio Bidet Supreme elongated bidet toilet seat</li><li>Save on Kasa TP Link Smart Plug</li><li>Save up to 25% on Broan ventilation fans</li><li>Save up to 25% on select Hansgrohe kitchen and bathroom products</li><li>Buy a myQ Smart Garage Hub and connect to Key by Amazon to receive a $30 Credit (Terms and Conditions apply)</li><li>Save up to 25% on select Hunter fans</li><li>Save up to 30% on select Sengled lightbulbs</li><li>Save up to 25% on select Yale Assure locks</li><li>Save 40% on select Simplisafe security systems</li><li>Save up to 30% on Zmodo security cameras</li><li>Save 15% or more on home office and bedroom furniture from Modway, Serta, Safco, and more</li><li>Save up to 15% on select rugs from Safavieh, nuLOOM, and more</li><li>Save up to 20% on select Lucid Gel Memory Foam mattresses</li><li>Save up to 30% on select Zinus Furniture</li><li>Save on the new Rocketbook Panda Planner from Treasure Truck</li><li>Save up to 30% on Rocketbook reusable notebooks</li><li>Save up to 50% on markers and pencils from Prismacolor, Sharpie and more</li></ul><p>Electronics</p><ul><li>Save up to 30% on Kodak Instant cameras and printers</li><li>Save up to 30% on Tile trackers</li><li>Save up to 50% on Olympus cameras</li><li>Save up to 33% on Bose QC35 II Noise Cancelling Headphones</li><li>Save up to 50% on Skullcandy Indy True and XT earbuds</li><li>Save up to 70% on Norton security software</li><li>Save 40% on Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements</li><li>Save $50 on Microsoft Office Home and Student</li><li>Save up to 25% on select PlayStation subscriptions</li><li>Save up to $10 on select Xbox One controllers</li><li>Save up to 50% on Square Enix games</li><li>Save 16% on Nintendo Switch + Mario Kart 8 Deluxe</li><li>Save $15 on Game Pass Ultimate 3 Months</li><li>Save on Samsung TVs</li><li>Save on Sony 4K Ultra HD TVs</li><li>Save on Sony BRAVIA OLED TVs</li><li>Save on TVs under $1000</li><li>Save up to 25% on TVs 75 inches and larger</li><li>Save up to 30% off Wireless Chargers and Accessories</li><li>Save up to $10 off select Xbox One controllers</li></ul><p>Tools, Lawn &amp; Garden and Major Appliances</p><ul><li>Save 15% on select Walsh appliances</li><li>Save 15% on select Cosmo appliances</li><li>Save 15% on Midea 3.1 Cu. Ft. compact refrigerator</li><li>Save 15% on select NewAir appliances</li><li>Save 15% on GE Profile Nugget Ice Maker</li><li>Save 10% on select GE compact refrigerators</li><li>Save 40% on Samsung AirDresser</li><li>Save up to 20% on select Shop Succulents plants</li><li>Save up to 17% on select Masterbuilt digital electric smoker</li><li>Save 15% on select pool covers from Robelle &amp; Pool Mate</li><li>Save up to 30% off select Snow Joe snow removal equipment</li><li>Save 15% or more on select Sun Joe &amp; Snow Joe products</li><li>Save up to 20% on select EGO and SKIL outdoor tools</li><li>Save up to 30% on select Greenworks power tools</li><li>Save up to 30% on select Renogy Solar products</li><li>Save 15% on select Worx chainsaws</li><li>Save 20% on select Worx tools</li><li>Save up to 30% on select DEWALT tools</li><li>Save up to 20% on select SKIL tools</li><li>Save up to 31% on select Gerber tools &amp; knives</li><li>Save up to 15% on select Fluke tools</li><li>Save up to 20% on select Apex tools</li></ul><p>Sports &amp; Outdoors</p><ul><li>Save up to 15% on select Intex Airbeds</li><li>Save up to 25% on select SUUNTO smartwatches</li><li>Save up to 15% on select Sunny Health &amp; Fitness gym equipment</li><li>Save up to 25% on select baseball and softball equipment</li><li>Save up to 20% on select kids bikes, adult bikes, helmets and more</li><li>Save up to 60% on select golf clubs, balls, and accessories</li><li>Save up to 25% on Joola table tennis tables and accessories</li><li>Save up to 15% on Stiga table tennis tables</li><li>Save up to 30% on adidas shoes, apparel and accessories</li></ul><p>Audible, Music, Prime Video, Kindle and Books</p><ul><li>Audible: through December 31, new members save nearly 40% on the first six months of an Audible Plus membership at just $4.95 per month.</li><li>Amazon Music: New Amazon Music Unlimited customers can get three months of the premium streaming tier free, to enjoy unlimited access to more than 70 million songs, ad-free and a wide selection of popular podcasts.</li><li>Amazon Music: Current Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers can upgrade to the Family Plan free for three months, with access for up to six accounts.</li><li>Amazon Music: With purchase of select Echo devices, New Amazon Music Unlimited customers will receive six months of the premium, ad-free streaming tier for free.</li><li>Prime Video: For a limited time, eligible Prime Video customers who are not already subscribed to Noggin via Prime Video Channels will be able to subscribe for $0.99 per month for up to two months.</li><li>Kindle: Enjoy 2 months of Kindle Unlimited for $0.99 - access more than 1 million books, popular magazines and thousands of books with Audible narration. Offer valid for new members only. Terms and Conditions apply.</li><li>Books: Save up to 50% with discounts and flash deals on select multi-genre books and eBooks. Looking for gifts for everyone on your list? Check out the new Books Gift Guide here!</li></ul><p>Pets</p><ul><li>Up to 51% off Dog and Cat Food from Wellpet</li><li>Save up to 30% on Greenies and Dentastix treats</li><li>Save on Hill's Science Diet Dog and Cat Food</li><li>Save up to 20% on Frontline Plus Flea and Tick Treatment</li></ul><p>Business, Industrial and Scientific</p><ul><li>Save 15% on AmScope microscope kits for students and kids</li><li>Save 20% on Oreck Commercial XL Upright Vacuum Cleaner</li><li>Save up to 40% on Mynt 3D Printing Pens and Accessories</li><li>Save 15% on Flashforge Creator Pro 3D Printer</li><li>Save 16% on Dremel Digilab 3D Printer 3D45</li><li>Save 19% on Flashforge Finder 3D Printer</li><li>Save up to 15% on First Aid Only all-purpose first aid kit</li><li>Save 15% on Fluke 62 Max Thermometer and Fluke 59 Max Infrared Thermometer</li><li>Save up to 20% off on 3M Littmann stethoscopes</li></ul><p>Automotive</p><ul><li>Save up to 15% on Gold Eagle All Surface Interior Cleaner</li><li>Save up to 30% on Meguiar's Gold Class Car Wash</li><li>Save up to 15% on Turtle Wax Seal N Shine with Premium Microfiber Towel and ICE Spray Wax</li><li>Save up to 25% on Gold Eagle Spray Wax and Quick Detailer with UV Protectant</li><li>Save 50% on Tire Installation</li><li>Save up to 20% on Select Gator ETX Tri-Fold Truck Bed Tonneau Covers</li><li>Additionally, customers can enter our Holiday Vehicle Sweepstakes for a chance to win a 2021 Hyundai Santa Fe from December 1-31, 2020. To enter, customers need to visit one of the following pages: 1) Automotive Storefront, 2) Sweepstakes Landing Page, 3) Hyundai Santa Fe Vehicle Detail Page, and 4) Hyundai Virtual Showroom. A winner will be notified on January 15, 2021.</li></ul><p>Amazon Gift Cards</p><ul><li>November 26 through November 30, save 20% or more on select gift card brands including Gap, H&amp;M, Petco and more.</li><li>Now through December 31, customers using Amazon Reload to replenish their Amazon Gift Card balance for the first time will receive a $10 bonus with their reload of $100 or more.</li><li>Now through December 20, first-time Amazon Gift Card shoppers will receive a $15 promotional credit with the purchase of $50 or more in Amazon Gift Cards. The promotional credit expires on February 6, 2021. Other restrictions apply.</li></ul><p>Amazon Credit Cards</p><ul><li>Now through December 22, with an eligible Prime membership, customers who apply and are approved for the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa Card will instantly receive a $100 Gift Card. Prime Cardmembers earn 5% back at Whole Foods Market and Amazon.com. Additionally, customers without a Prime membership can apply for the Amazon Rewards Visa Card and receive a $60 Gift Card upon approval, in addition to earning 3% back at Whole Foods Market and Amazon.com as a cardmember. Restrictions apply. Visit amazon.com/visa for details.</li></ul><p>Whole Foods Market </p><ul><li>Whole Foods Market: Both in-store and online, Prime members can receive exclusive discounts on customer favorites including candles (30% off) and all reusable water bottles and accessories (30% off) from November 18 to December 1. From November 27 to December 1, all customers can get 25% off on all probiotic supplements, with Prime members getting an additional 10% off the sale price.</li></ul><p>Woot! and Amazon Warehouse</p><ul><li>Woot!: Amazon's deal site will have dozens of limited-time discounts for Black Friday and Cyber Monday with free shipping for Prime members and daily doorbuster deals. Visit woot.com or fire up the Woot! App starting Sunday, November 22nd!</li><li>Amazon Warehouse: Customers save an extra 20% on select quality pre-owned and open box items for the kitchen, home, office, sports and outdoors, including major appliances, furniture, home décor and more. Visit amazon.com/amazonwarehouse.</li></ul><p>More Ways to Shop This Season</p><ul><li>Gift Guides: Wrap up your holiday shopping with Amazon's biggest-ever selection of gift guides and exclusive storefronts at amazon.com/gifts. Customers can shop gift guides from Small Businesses, Books, Beauty, Fashion, Toys, Home, Electronics, Amazon Launchpad, Amazon Handmade, Curated by Ciara, Amazon Hometown Heroes, as well as products that give back with (RED).</li><li>Oprah's Favorite Things: For the sixth year in a row, Oprah's Favorite Things will be available for purchase at amazon.com/oprahsfavoritethings. This year's list celebrates Black-owned businesses and features an array of decadent desserts, ingenious gadgets, fashionable sustainable goods and unique finds in home, fashion, and beauty.</li><li>Amazon.com in Spanish: Customers can visit Amazon.com/espanol or use the Amazon App to shop, browse and search for millions of products, view their carts, and place orders in Spanish. On the mobile App customers can go to Settings and tap on "Country and Language" to select Spanish. Amazon.com in Spanish gives customers the same convenient shopping experience in their preferred language.</li><li>Alexa Shopping: Alexa makes it easy to find the best holiday deals. Just ask, "Alexa, what are my deals?"</li><li>Amazon Live: Throughout the holiday season, tune-in to amazon.com/live for shoppable livestreams featuring holiday inspiration, gift guides, and live demonstrations of this season's top deals and gift ideas from influencers and celebrities.</li><li>Amazon Coupons: Discover more ways to save with Amazon Coupons. Find discounts on everyday essentials, as well as gifts, electronics, clothing, and more. Simply clip the coupon and the discount will be applied at checkout. Explore the most popular coupons on amazon.com/Coupons.</li><li>Climate Pledge Friendly: Customers can discover and shop for products that have one or more of 19 different sustainability certifications, which help preserve the natural world. Get details at amazon.com/ClimatePledgeFriendly.</li><li>Shop In-Store: Customers can visit Amazon's retail locations, including Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, Amazon Pop Up, Amazon Fresh, and Whole Foods Market to find incredible deals and amazing savings this holiday season.Find your nearest store at amazon.com/stores or wholefoodsmarket.com/stores.</li></ul><p>Give Back This Season</p><ul><li>AmazonSmile: Customers can visit smile.amazon.com and find the exact same Amazon experience—amazing deals, wide selection, fast and free delivery options—with the added bonus that AmazonSmile will donate a portion of the purchase price on eligible products to a charity of their choice. Customers can shop with AmazonSmile via the Amazon app on iPhones and Android phones, or by starting at smile.amazon.com on a web browser.</li><li>Alexa Donations: Simply say, "Alexa, I want to make a donation," and you can make a monetary donation to the organization of your choice. For more information and charities to support, visit pay.amazon.com/alexadonations.</li><li>Charity Lists: AmazonSmile Charity Lists give charitable organizations an easy way to create wish lists of needed products while providing customers a convenient way to donate items directly to these causes. Customers can shop thousands of Charity Lists this holiday season by visiting smile.amazon.com/charitylists, with new charities joining all the time. Plus, you can join Amazon in Delivering Smiles to more than a thousand AmazonSmile Charity Lists this holiday season, supporting the communities hit hardest by the events of this year.</li></ul><p>Fast, Free &amp; Convenient Delivery Options</p><p>In addition to free delivery on millions of items for all Amazon customers, Amazon offers a number of ways for customers to shop for and receive holiday gifts:</p><ul><li>Free One-Day &amp; Same-Day Delivery: Prime members in the U.S. can shop a selection of over 10 million items eligible for Prime Free One-Day Delivery with no minimum purchase, and millions of items available for Same-Day Delivery in 47 major metropolitan areas. These delivery options are not only convenient for customers but they're better for the planet because One-Day and Same-Day deliveries ship from local fulfillment centers so they travel shorter distances and generate less carbon emissions. This is just another way that Amazon is leveraging its scale for good to make investments that support communities. Learn more at amazon.com/primedelivery. Not a Prime member yet? Join Prime or start a 30-day free trial at amazon.com/prime.</li><li>Ultrafast &amp; Free Grocery Delivery &amp; Pickup: Prime members in more than 2,000 cities and towns have access to free, two-hour delivery on more than 170,000 products from Whole Foods Market and Amazon Fresh. Plus, in addition to groceries, Prime members can find toys, gifts, household products, and everyday essentials, electronics, Amazon Devices, and more available with free, two-hour delivery from Amazon Fresh. Prime members also get free one-hour pickup at all U.S. Whole Foods Market and Amazon Fresh stores.</li><li>Delivery Where it's Needed Most: Whether road-tripping to see family, staying home and need a secure delivery location, or sending a gift to a loved one or friend, there are thousands of alternative package pickup options customers can choose from via Amazon Hub. These locations are conveniently located near or in offices, convenience stores, malls, apartment buildings, and grocery stores, in more than 900 cities and towns across the country. Tens of millions of products can be easily and conveniently delivered to an Amazon Hub pickup point at Whole Foods Market, 7-11, Chase Bank, Rite-Aid, HealthMart, GNC, Stage Stores, and more. To find an Amazon Hub location, visit amazon.com/hub.</li><li>Extended Returns Window: Customers can buy gifts with confidence on Amazon knowing that millions of items are eligible for free and convenient returns at over 18,000 locations in the U.S. and this year's return window is even longer—most items shipped between October 1 and December 31, 2020 can now be returned until January 31, 2021. In addition, over 5,800 locations including Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, UPS Store locations and Kohl's—and new this year Whole Foods Market—offer label-free, box-free returns, making it even easier than ever to check returns off your list.</li></ul><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>Profitero Study Methodology</p><p>Each day, Profitero monitors prices and other data on more than 450 million product pages on hundreds of unique retailer sites. For this study, Profitero analyzed daily prices collected over an 8 week period (Aug. 24, 2020 to Oct. 18, 2020) at Amazon.com and other leading online retail sites across 20 categories. Only identical items available and in-stock in the same pack configuration were compared. Prices for the same items were collected within 24 hours of each other to ensure validity of the comparisons.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201116005581/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

Amazon Announces New, State-of-the-Art Fulfillment Center to be Built in Mississippi

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Announces-New-State-of-the-Art-Fulfillment-Center-to-be-Built-in-Mississippi/default.aspx

Amazon-Announces-New-State-of-the-Art-Fulfillment-Center-to-be-Built-in-Mississippi

11/12/2020 11:00:00

Amazon Announces New, State-of-the-Art Fulfillment Center to be Built in Mississippi

11/12/2020

2020

New 700,000 square-foot site to create over 1,000 new, full-time jobs SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 12, 2020-- Today Amazon announced plans to launch a new, state-of-the-art fulfillment center in Madison County, creating more than 1,000 new, full-time jobs, with industry-leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one. This fulfillment center will be the first facility located in the Magnolia State to feature Amazon's innovative robotics technology. The company launched its first facility in Mississippi in Byhalia in 2019, and a new fulfilment center this August in Olive Branch. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201112005805/en/ Amazon announces new, state-of-the-art fulfillment center in Madison County, MS (Photo: Business Wire) "Mississippi is a great state for business and gives us the opportunity to better serve our customers in the region," said Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon's vice president of global customer fulfillment. "We are excited for our future in the magnolia state, and for what this means for our customers as we continue to grow. We'd also like to thank local and state leaders for their strong support in making this project possible." Every day at Amazon, incredible associates and drivers come together to deliver smiles for customers. In the 700,000 square-foot robotics fulfillment center, Amazon associates will pick, pack and ship small items to customers such as books, electronics and toys. "The fact that Amazon has chosen to invest in Mississippi again is a testament to the unmatched work ethic and dedication Mississippians exhibit each day," said Governor Tate Reeves. "We are well-positioned to be a leader in logistics, and I want to thank the leadership in Madison County and at Amazon for bringing more than 1,000 jobs to the area." In addition to Amazon's industry-leading minimum $15 per hour wage, the company offers full-time employees comprehensive benefits including full medical, vision, and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) plan with a 50 percent match starting on the first day of employment. Amazon prioritizes the safety and health of its employees and has invested millions of dollars to provide a safe workplace. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families. Amazon is a great place to work with highly competitive pay, benefits from day one, and training programs for in-demand jobs. The company has also pledged to invest over $700 million to provide upskilling training for 100,000 U.S. employees for in-demand jobs. These programs will help Amazonians from all backgrounds access training to move into highly skilled roles across the company's corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and transportation network, or pursue career paths outside of Amazon. "Madison County is elated that Amazon chose our community for its state-of-the-art fulfillment center. Amazon is a globally recognized brand that will further strengthen the business-friendly environment and promote economic diversification," said Karl Banks, Madison County Supervisor. "Madison County welcomes Amazon as it newest corporate citizen and looks forward to the tremendous economic benefit and employment opportunities it brings." Amazon's fulfillment network supports millions of businesses of all sizes worldwide through its Fulfillment by Amazon offering, and many of those local businesses are based in Mississippi. There are more than 7,500 authors, small and medium-sized businesses, and developers in Mississippi growing their companies and reaching new customers with Amazon products and services. The project is being developed by Trammell Crow Company. Additional Resources: See an Amazon Fulfillment Center In Action Amazon Job Creation and Investment U.S. U.S. Investment Map About Amazon: Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/ and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201112005805/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc

<p><em>New 700,000 square-foot site to create over 1,000 new, full-time jobs</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 12, 2020-- Today Amazon announced plans to launch a new, state-of-the-art fulfillment center in Madison County, creating more than 1,000 new, full-time jobs, with industry-leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one. This fulfillment center will be the first facility located in the Magnolia State to feature Amazon's innovative robotics technology. The company launched its first facility in Mississippi in Byhalia in 2019, and a new fulfilment center this August in Olive Branch.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201112005805/en/</p><div><p>Amazon announces new, state-of-the-art fulfillment center in Madison County, MS (Photo: Business Wire)</p></div><p>"Mississippi is a great state for business and gives us the opportunity to better serve our customers in the region," said Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon's vice president of global customer fulfillment. "We are excited for our future in the magnolia state, and for what this means for our customers as we continue to grow. We'd also like to thank local and state leaders for their strong support in making this project possible."</p><p>Every day at Amazon, incredible associates and drivers come together to deliver smiles for customers. In the 700,000 square-foot robotics fulfillment center, Amazon associates will pick, pack and ship small items to customers such as books, electronics and toys.</p><p>"The fact that Amazon has chosen to invest in Mississippi again is a testament to the unmatched work ethic and dedication Mississippians exhibit each day," said Governor Tate Reeves. "We are well-positioned to be a leader in logistics, and I want to thank the leadership in Madison County and at Amazon for bringing more than 1,000 jobs to the area."</p><p>In addition to Amazon's industry-leading minimum $15 per hour wage, the company offers full-time employees comprehensive benefits including full medical, vision, and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) plan with a 50 percent match starting on the first day of employment. Amazon prioritizes the safety and health of its employees and has invested millions of dollars to provide a safe workplace. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families.</p><p>Amazon is a great place to work with highly competitive pay, benefits from day one, and training programs for in-demand jobs. The company has also pledged to invest over $700 million to provide upskilling training for 100,000 U.S. employees for in-demand jobs. These programs will help Amazonians from all backgrounds access training to move into highly skilled roles across the company's corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and transportation network, or pursue career paths outside of Amazon.</p><p>"Madison County is elated that Amazon chose our community for its state-of-the-art fulfillment center. Amazon is a globally recognized brand that will further strengthen the business-friendly environment and promote economic diversification," said Karl Banks, Madison County Supervisor. "Madison County welcomes Amazon as it newest corporate citizen and looks forward to the tremendous economic benefit and employment opportunities it brings."</p><p>Amazon's fulfillment network supports millions of businesses of all sizes worldwide through its Fulfillment by Amazon offering, and many of those local businesses are based in Mississippi. There are more than 7,500 authors, small and medium-sized businesses, and developers in Mississippi growing their companies and reaching new customers with Amazon products and services.</p><p>The project is being developed by Trammell Crow Company.</p><p>Additional Resources:</p><ul><li>See an Amazon Fulfillment Center In Action</li><li>Amazon Job Creation and Investment U.S.</li><li>U.S. Investment Map</li></ul><p>About Amazon: Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/ and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201112005805/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc</p>

Amazon Music Kicks Off the Holidays with New Amazon Original Songs from Justin Bieber, Mary J. Blige, José Feliciano, Carrie Underwood and More

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Music-Kicks-Off-the-Holidays-with-New-Amazon-Original-Songs-from-Justin-Bieber-Mary-J.-Blige-Jos-Feliciano-Carrie-Underwood-and-More/default.aspx

Amazon-Music-Kicks-Off-the-Holidays-with-New-Amazon-Original-Songs-from-Justin-Bieber-Mary-J.-Blige-Jos-Feliciano-Carrie-Underwood-and-More

11/12/2020 09:00:00

Amazon Music Kicks Off the Holidays with New Amazon Original Songs from Justin Bieber, Mary J. Blige, José Feliciano, Carrie Underwood and More

11/12/2020

2020

Artists including Bieber, Blige, Katy Perry, and Underwood, have also collaborated with Amazon to Deliver Smiles by fulfilling AmazonSmile Charity Lists for organizations including LIFT, Inner-City Arts, Alexandria House, The WJCS Mary J. Blige Center for Women and Girls, Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt, and Boys & Girls Clubs of America, which will result in tens of thousands of items donated SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 12, 2020-- (NASDAQ:AMZN)—Amazon Music today announced its kickoff to the holiday season with a slate of brand-new holiday content for listeners, including new exclusive music from chart-topping artists, hundreds of holiday playlists and stations, and much more. Starting today, Amazon Music listeners around the world can hear new, Amazon Original holiday songs from artists including Justin Bieber and his rendition of Brenda Lee's classic holiday song, "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree;" Mary J. Blige today releases her own version of WHAM's "Last Christmas;" Carrie Underwood and her new, original composition titled "Favorite Time of Year," which now appears as a bonus track on Amazon Music for her new album, My Gift; UK sensation Jess Glynne shares her take on Donny Hathaway's "This Christmas;" and José Feliciano will soon release a reimagined version of his song "Feliz Navidad," to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the crossover hit. To stream these new holiday songs and more, click here. Images are available to download here "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree' has always been one of my favorite songs to celebrate the holidays, and I'm excited to team up with Amazon Music to share my own version, with my fans," said Justin Bieber. "I'm so thankful to be able to spend the season with loved ones, and to also use this opportunity to give back to LIFT, Inner-City Arts and Alexandria House: three incredible organizations that I've supported in the past. I hope my fans join me in reaching out to the communities and organizations they care about, to help spread joy to those who need it most." To spread holiday cheer even further, artists including Justin Bieber, Mary J. Blige, Katy Perry, and Carrie Underwood have teamed up with Amazon and its "Delivering Smiles" holiday campaign, to give back to charitable organizations and the communities they serve this season. These artists have identified non-profits including Alexandria House, Inner-City Arts, LIFT, Westchester Jewish Community Services' Mary J. Blige Center for Women and Girls, Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt, and Boys & Girls Clubs of America, to fulfill each organization's AmazonSmile Charity Lists and donate tens of thousands of items. This is part of a larger Delivering Smiles holiday campaign recently announced, with Amazon donating millions of items through product and monetary donations to over one thousand charities worldwide. "I've always loved how ‘Last Christmas' walks the line between being upbeat and heartbroken — all while still remaining one of the catchiest holiday songs," said Mary J. Blige. "It's one of the most unique holiday songs, and I'm excited for my fans to hear my take on it this holiday season on Amazon Music." "'Favorite Time of Year' is a joyful, super happy and fun Christmas song because it is about all of the things that make you happy this time of year, and it puts you in the mood to celebrate," said Carrie Underwood. "I can't help but smile when I sing it, it just brightens my day and I'm thrilled to share it today only on Amazon Music." Amazon Music releases Amazon Original songs from a wide range of artists year-round, and continues to enlist both emerging artists and chart toppers to create special holiday songs only for Amazon Music listeners. In addition to new songs from Bieber, Blige and Underwood, this holiday season Amazon Music listeners can now stream a reimagined version of "In The Bleak Midwinter" by Jamie Cullum; a cover of "Merry Christmas Darling" by Lennon Stella; for King & Country's version of "Do You Hear What I Hear?"; a new holiday original titled "Pub Crawl" from Canada's top rock outfit, Arkells; and "Zuhause (Christmas Time)" by German singer, Vanessa Mai. In the coming weeks, Amazon Music will release even more Amazon Original songs including a Spanglish rendition of "Let It Snow (Navidad, Navidad, Navidad)," by Lele Pons; "Have Yourself a Merry Christmas (Te Deseo Muy Felices Fiestas)" in Spanglish by Jesse & Joy; as well as a cover of "The Christmas Song" from Amazon Music Breakthrough artist, Kiana Ledé. "This holiday season, it's important for us to bring our customers more reasons to smile, and to create ways for them to connect with their favorite artists while at home with family," said Ryan Redington, VP of Music Industry at Amazon Music. "Our customers are requesting holiday music more and more each year. In the days leading up to Christmas last year, Amazon Music listeners requested holiday music more than 11 million times per day, and nearly 8,000 times per minute worldwide, and we can't wait to see that trend continue." Continuing the holiday celebrations throughout December, Amazon Music will launch a new episodic video series as part of the [Re]Discover initiative on Amazon Music, the global brand developed to support artist catalogs across all music genres. The [Re]Discover series will explore the untold stories behind lasting holiday hits including, "This Christmas" by Donny Hathaway, "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" by Darlene Love and "Feliz Navidad" by José Feliciano. Kicking off in December, the new content series will unveil never-before-heard details with a mix of archival footage, animations and interviews with the star subjects or those closest to them. Additionally, Amazon Music will feature Darlene Love as the [Re]Discover Artist of the Month for December, launching a new playlist for customers to explore her music beyond her holiday mainstay on December 1.Love will also be featured in a special holiday episode of the Amazon Original podcast, Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums, debuting on December 8. The episode will focus on the remarkable true story of 1963's A Christmas Gift to You from Phil Spector, and feature original interviews with Love, the Crystals' La La Brooks, and more. In addition, Dolly Parton fans can catch, "Dolly Parton's Comin' Home for Christmas",an exclusive holiday experience featuring a performance and Q&A for fans with the country music icon at 10am PT/12pm CT on November 13 via the Amazon Music channel on Twitch and Amazon.com/live. To get started on holiday listening, simply ask "Alexa, play holiday music" in the Amazon Music app for iOS and Android or on enabled devices, for a mix of the new singles and classic hits, or check out popular playlists such as Christmas Present and Christmas Past. For a limited time, new Amazon Music Unlimited customers can get three months of the premium streaming tier free to enjoy unlimited access to more than 70 million songs, ad-free and a wide selection of podcasts. To learn more, visit amazonmusic.com. About Amazon Music Amazon Music reimagines music listening by enabling customers to unlock millions of songs and thousands of curated playlists and stations with their voice. Amazon Music provides unlimited access to new releases and classic hits across iOS and Android mobile devices, PC, Mac, Echo, and Alexa-enabled devices including Fire TV and more. With Amazon Music, Prime members have access to ad-free listening of 2 million songs at no additional cost to their membership. Listeners can also enjoy the premium subscription service, Amazon Music Unlimited, which provides access to more than 70 million songs and the latest new releases. And with Amazon Music HD, customers have access to the highest-quality listening experience available, with more than 70 million songs available in High Definition (HD), millions of songs in Ultra HD, and a growing catalog of 3D Audio. Customers also have free access to an ad-supported selection of top playlists and stations on Amazon Music. All Amazon Music tiers now offer a wide selection of podcasts at no additional cost, and live streaming in partnership with Twitch. Engaging with music and culture has never been more natural, simple, and fun. For more information, visit amazonmusic.com or download the Amazon Music app. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201112005372/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon

<p><em>Artists including Bieber, Blige, Katy Perry, and Underwood, have also collaborated with Amazon to Deliver Smiles by fulfilling AmazonSmile Charity Lists for organizations including LIFT, Inner-City Arts, Alexandria House, The WJCS Mary J. Blige Center for Women and Girls, Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt, and Boys &amp; Girls Clubs of America, which will result in tens of thousands of items donated</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 12, 2020-- (NASDAQ:AMZN)—Amazon Music today announced its kickoff to the holiday season with a slate of brand-new holiday content for listeners, including new exclusive music from chart-topping artists, hundreds of holiday playlists and stations, and much more. Starting today, Amazon Music listeners around the world can hear new, Amazon Original holiday songs from artists including Justin Bieber and his rendition of Brenda Lee's classic holiday song, "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree;" Mary J. Blige today releases her own version of WHAM's "Last Christmas;" Carrie Underwood and her new, original composition titled "Favorite Time of Year," which now appears as a bonus track on Amazon Music for her new album, <em>My Gift</em>; UK sensation Jess Glynne shares her take on Donny Hathaway's "This Christmas;" and José Feliciano will soon release a reimagined version of his song "Feliz Navidad," to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the crossover hit. To stream these new holiday songs and more, click here.</p><p><em>Images are available to download here</em></p><p><em>"Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree' has always been one of my favorite songs to celebrate the holidays, and I'm excited to team up with Amazon Music to share my own version, with my fans," said Justin Bieber. "I'm so thankful to be able to spend the season with loved ones, and to also use this opportunity to give back to LIFT, Inner-City Arts and Alexandria House: three incredible organizations that I've supported in the past. I hope my fans join me in reaching out to the communities and organizations they care about, to help spread joy to those who need it most."</em></p><p>To spread holiday cheer even further, artists including Justin Bieber, Mary J. Blige, Katy Perry, and Carrie Underwood have teamed up with Amazon and its "Delivering Smiles" holiday campaign, to give back to charitable organizations and the communities they serve this season. These artists have identified non-profits including Alexandria House, Inner-City Arts, LIFT, Westchester Jewish Community Services' Mary J. Blige Center for Women and Girls, Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt, and Boys &amp; Girls Clubs of America, to fulfill each organization's AmazonSmile Charity Lists and donate tens of thousands of items. This is part of a larger Delivering Smiles holiday campaign recently announced, with Amazon donating millions of items through product and monetary donations to over one thousand charities worldwide.</p><p><em>"I've always loved how ‘Last Christmas' walks the line between being upbeat and heartbroken — all while still remaining one of the catchiest holiday songs," </em>said Mary J. Blige.<em> "It's one of the most unique holiday songs, and I'm excited for my fans to hear my take on it this holiday season on Amazon Music."</em></p><p><em>"'Favorite Time of Year' is a joyful, super happy and fun Christmas song because it is about all of the things that make you happy this time of year, and it puts you in the mood to celebrate," </em>said Carrie Underwood.<em> "I can't help but smile when I sing it, it just brightens my day and I'm thrilled to share it today only on Amazon Music."</em></p><p>Amazon Music releases Amazon Original songs from a wide range of artists year-round, and continues to enlist both emerging artists and chart toppers to create special holiday songs only for Amazon Music listeners. In addition to new songs from Bieber, Blige and Underwood, this holiday season Amazon Music listeners can now stream a reimagined version of "In The Bleak Midwinter" by Jamie Cullum; a cover of "Merry Christmas Darling" by Lennon Stella; for King &amp; Country's version of "Do You Hear What I Hear?"; a new holiday original titled "Pub Crawl" from Canada's top rock outfit, Arkells; and "Zuhause (Christmas Time)" by German singer, Vanessa Mai. In the coming weeks, Amazon Music will release even more Amazon Original songs including a Spanglish rendition of "Let It Snow (Navidad, Navidad, Navidad)," by Lele Pons; "Have Yourself a Merry Christmas (Te Deseo Muy Felices Fiestas)" in Spanglish by Jesse &amp; Joy; as well as a cover of "The Christmas Song" from Amazon Music Breakthrough artist, Kiana Ledé.</p><p><em>"This holiday season, it's important for us to bring our customers more reasons to smile, and to create ways for them to connect with their favorite artists while at home with family,"</em> said Ryan Redington, VP of Music Industry at Amazon Music. <em>"Our customers are requesting holiday music more and more each year. In the days leading up to Christmas last year, Amazon Music listeners requested holiday music more than 11 million times per day, and nearly 8,000 times per minute worldwide, and we can't wait to see that trend continue."</em></p><p>Continuing the holiday celebrations throughout December, Amazon Music will launch a new episodic video series as part of the [Re]Discover initiative on Amazon Music, the global brand developed to support artist catalogs across all music genres. The [Re]Discover series will explore the untold stories behind lasting holiday hits including, "This Christmas" by Donny Hathaway, "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" by Darlene Love and "Feliz Navidad" by José Feliciano. Kicking off in December, the new content series will unveil never-before-heard details with a mix of archival footage, animations and interviews with the star subjects or those closest to them. Additionally, Amazon Music will feature Darlene Love as the [Re]Discover Artist of the Month for December, launching a new playlist for customers to explore her music beyond her holiday mainstay on December 1.Love will also be featured in a special holiday episode of the Amazon Original podcast, <em>Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums</em>, debuting on December 8. The episode will focus on the remarkable true story of 1963's <em>A Christmas Gift to You</em> from Phil Spector, and feature original interviews with Love, the Crystals' La La Brooks, and more. In addition, Dolly Parton fans can catch, "Dolly Parton's Comin' Home for Christmas",an exclusive holiday experience featuring a performance and Q&amp;A for fans with the country music icon at 10am PT/12pm CT on November 13 via the Amazon Music channel on Twitch and Amazon.com/live.</p><p>To get started on holiday listening, simply ask "Alexa, play holiday music" in the Amazon Music app for iOS and Android or on enabled devices, for a mix of the new singles and classic hits, or check out popular playlists such as Christmas Present and Christmas Past. For a limited time, new Amazon Music Unlimited customers can get three months of the premium streaming tier free to enjoy unlimited access to more than 70 million songs, ad-free and a wide selection of podcasts. To learn more, visit amazonmusic.com.</p><p>About Amazon Music</p><p>Amazon Music reimagines music listening by enabling customers to unlock millions of songs and thousands of curated playlists and stations with their voice. Amazon Music provides unlimited access to new releases and classic hits across iOS and Android mobile devices, PC, Mac, Echo, and Alexa-enabled devices including Fire TV and more. With Amazon Music, Prime members have access to ad-free listening of 2 million songs at no additional cost to their membership. Listeners can also enjoy the premium subscription service, Amazon Music Unlimited, which provides access to more than 70 million songs and the latest new releases. And with Amazon Music HD, customers have access to the highest-quality listening experience available, with more than 70 million songs available in High Definition (HD), millions of songs in Ultra HD, and a growing catalog of 3D Audio. Customers also have free access to an ad-supported selection of top playlists and stations on Amazon Music. All Amazon Music tiers now offer a wide selection of podcasts at no additional cost, and live streaming in partnership with Twitch. Engaging with music and culture has never been more natural, simple, and fun. For more information, visit amazonmusic.com or download the Amazon Music app.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201112005372/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon</p>

Amazon Files Lawsuit Against Counterfeiters Using Social Media to Promote Sales

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Files-Lawsuit-Against-Counterfeiters-Using-Social-Media-to-Promote-Sales/default.aspx

Amazon-Files-Lawsuit-Against-Counterfeiters-Using-Social-Media-to-Promote-Sales

11/12/2020 09:00:00

Amazon Files Lawsuit Against Counterfeiters Using Social Media to Promote Sales

11/12/2020

2020

Bad Actors Attempted to Bypass Amazon's Protections by Listing Generic Products while Purposefully Promoting Counterfeits to their Social Media Followers SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 12, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced a lawsuit against 13 individuals and businesses (collectively, the "defendants") for advertising, promoting, and facilitating the sale of counterfeit luxury goods in Amazon's store, in violation of Amazon's policies and the law. The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington and alleges the defendants operated in concert with each other to sell counterfeit products and engage in false advertising. Among the 13 defendants, the lawsuit alleges that Kelly Fitzpatrick and Sabrina Kelly-Krejci conspired with sellers to evade Amazon's anti-counterfeiting protections by promoting counterfeit products on Instagram and TikTok as well as their own websites. Fitzpatrick and Kelly-Krejci posted side-by-side photos of a generic, non-branded product and a luxury counterfeit product with the text, "Order this/Get this." "Order this" referred to the generic product falsely advertised on Amazon, and "Get this" referred to the counterfeit luxury product. By posting only generic products on Amazon, Fitzpatrick and Kelly-Krejci – and the sellers they coordinated with – attempted to evade our anti-counterfeit protections while using social media to promote the true nature of these counterfeit products. Fitzpatrick and Kelly-Krejci also posted numerous videos describing the alleged high quality of the counterfeits they promoted. "These defendants were brazen about promoting counterfeits on social media and undermined the work of legitimate influencers," said Cristina Posa, Associate General Counsel and Director, Amazon Counterfeit Crimes Unit. "This case demonstrates the need for cross-industry collaboration in order to drive counterfeiters out of business. Amazon continues to invest tremendous resources to stop bad actors before they enter our store and social media sites must similarly vet, monitor, and take action on bad actors that are using their services to facilitate illegal behavior." Fitzpatrick was previously a member of the Amazon Influencer Program, but after Amazon detected her counterfeiting activities, she was removed from the program. She continued to advertise counterfeits using social media sites and directed followers to her own website. Amazon also detected and blocked Kelly-Krejci's scheme and she similarly began to direct her followers to purchase counterfeits on her own website. The defendants also began directing their followers to other e-commerce websites: "[N]ow as most of you know amazon [sic] has really cracked down on dupes … now they're [sic] are barely any [dupes on Amazon]," said Fitzpatrick. "Our very trusted seller of the last year has moved to DH Gate … I know it's a big change to switch from Amazon to DH Gate but this guarantees that the links do not get reported and shut down sometimes cancelling our orders." Amazon strictly prohibits counterfeit products in its stores, and in 2019 alone, invested more than $500 million to protect customers and brands from fraud, abuse, and counterfeit. Amazon's proactive investments in preventing counterfeit include robust seller vetting, advanced machine-learning based technologies, and industry-leading brand protection tools like Project Zero, Brand Registry, and Transparency. As a result of Amazon's efforts, 99.9% of all products viewed by customers on Amazon have not received a valid counterfeit complaint. In June 2020, Amazon launched its Counterfeit Crimes Unit, a global team with specialized experience in investigating and bringing legal action against bad actors. Amazon has filed a series of lawsuits against counterfeiters, including a joint lawsuit with Italian luxury fashion house Valentino, cosmetics retailer KF Beauty, and seller of travel products for parents JL Childress.  You can see the court filing here: Case: 2:20-cv-01662, United States District Court for the Western District of Washington Amazon has a number of tools to ensure customers receive authentic products and to protect brands' intellectual property. Amazon Brand Registry, a free service that gives brand owners access to a powerful set of tools that help them deliver an accurate and trusted customer experience on Amazon while protecting a brand's IP. More than 350,000 brands are enrolled. To enroll and learn more: https://brandservices.amazon.com/ Transparency, a product serialization service that allows brands to uniquely identify each unit they produce through the application of unique codes on the product or its packaging. These codes allow Amazon to inspect and authenticate every unit enrolled in Transparency proactively, detecting and stopping counterfeits before they reach customers. Amazon's Project Zero, which empowers brands to drive counterfeits to zero. Project Zero uses automated protections to proactively and continuously scan more than 5 billion attempted product listing updates daily to look for suspicious listings, provides a self-service tool for brands with an unprecedented ability to directly remove listings from Amazon's stores, and leverages product serialization as an optional service. To join the more than 10,000 enrolled brands, learn more at: http://www.projectzero.com. Amazon's Counterfeit Crime Unit (CCU), a global team that investigates and brings legal action against bad actors, protecting customers, brands, and Amazon's selling partners. To learn more: https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazon-establishes-counterfeit-crimes-unit-bring-counterfeiters About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201112005660/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>Bad Actors Attempted to Bypass Amazon's Protections by Listing Generic Products while Purposefully Promoting Counterfeits to their Social Media Followers</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 12, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced a lawsuit against 13 individuals and businesses (collectively, the "defendants") for advertising, promoting, and facilitating the sale of counterfeit luxury goods in Amazon's store, in violation of Amazon's policies and the law.</p><p>The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington and alleges the defendants operated in concert with each other to sell counterfeit products and engage in false advertising.</p><p>Among the 13 defendants, the lawsuit alleges that Kelly Fitzpatrick and Sabrina Kelly-Krejci conspired with sellers to evade Amazon's anti-counterfeiting protections by promoting counterfeit products on Instagram and TikTok as well as their own websites. Fitzpatrick and Kelly-Krejci posted side-by-side photos of a generic, non-branded product and a luxury counterfeit product with the text, "Order this/Get this." "Order this" referred to the generic product falsely advertised on Amazon, and "Get this" referred to the counterfeit luxury product. By posting only generic products on Amazon, Fitzpatrick and Kelly-Krejci – and the sellers they coordinated with – attempted to evade our anti-counterfeit protections while using social media to promote the true nature of these counterfeit products. Fitzpatrick and Kelly-Krejci also posted numerous videos describing the alleged high quality of the counterfeits they promoted.</p><p>"These defendants were brazen about promoting counterfeits on social media and undermined the work of legitimate influencers," said Cristina Posa, Associate General Counsel and Director, Amazon Counterfeit Crimes Unit. "This case demonstrates the need for cross-industry collaboration in order to drive counterfeiters out of business. Amazon continues to invest tremendous resources to stop bad actors before they enter our store and social media sites must similarly vet, monitor, and take action on bad actors that are using their services to facilitate illegal behavior."</p><p>Fitzpatrick was previously a member of the Amazon Influencer Program, but after Amazon detected her counterfeiting activities, she was removed from the program. She continued to advertise counterfeits using social media sites and directed followers to her own website. Amazon also detected and blocked Kelly-Krejci's scheme and she similarly began to direct her followers to purchase counterfeits on her own website. The defendants also began directing their followers to other e-commerce websites:</p><p>"[N]ow as most of you know amazon [sic] has really cracked down on dupes … now they're [sic] are barely any [dupes on Amazon]," said Fitzpatrick. "Our very trusted seller of the last year has moved to DH Gate … I know it's a big change to switch from Amazon to DH Gate but this guarantees that the links do not get reported and shut down sometimes cancelling our orders."</p><p>Amazon strictly prohibits counterfeit products in its stores, and in 2019 alone, invested more than $500 million to protect customers and brands from fraud, abuse, and counterfeit. Amazon's proactive investments in preventing counterfeit include robust seller vetting, advanced machine-learning based technologies, and industry-leading brand protection tools like Project Zero, Brand Registry, and Transparency. As a result of Amazon's efforts, 99.9% of all products viewed by customers on Amazon have not received a valid counterfeit complaint. In June 2020, Amazon launched its Counterfeit Crimes Unit, a global team with specialized experience in investigating and bringing legal action against bad actors.</p><p>Amazon has filed a series of lawsuits against counterfeiters, including a joint lawsuit with Italian luxury fashion house Valentino, cosmetics retailer KF Beauty, and seller of travel products for parents JL Childress. </p><p>You can see the court filing here:</p><ul><li>Case: 2:20-cv-01662, United States District Court for the Western District of Washington</li></ul><p>Amazon has a number of tools to ensure customers receive authentic products and to protect brands' intellectual property.</p><ul><li>Amazon Brand Registry, a free service that gives brand owners access to a powerful set of tools that help them deliver an accurate and trusted customer experience on Amazon while protecting a brand's IP. More than 350,000 brands are enrolled. To enroll and learn more: https://brandservices.amazon.com/</li><li>Transparency, a product serialization service that allows brands to uniquely identify each unit they produce through the application of unique codes on the product or its packaging. These codes allow Amazon to inspect and authenticate every unit enrolled in Transparency proactively, detecting and stopping counterfeits before they reach customers.</li><li>Amazon's Project Zero, which empowers brands to drive counterfeits to zero. Project Zero uses automated protections to proactively and continuously scan more than 5 billion attempted product listing updates daily to look for suspicious listings, provides a self-service tool for brands with an unprecedented ability to directly remove listings from Amazon's stores, and leverages product serialization as an optional service. To join the more than 10,000 enrolled brands, learn more at: http://www.projectzero.com.</li><li>Amazon's Counterfeit Crime Unit (CCU), a global team that investigates and brings legal action against bad actors, protecting customers, brands, and Amazon's selling partners. To learn more: https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazon-establishes-counterfeit-crimes-unit-bring-counterfeiters</li></ul><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201112005660/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

Amazon In-Garage Delivery Expands to Millions More Prime Members in Over 4,000 Cities

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-In-Garage-Delivery-Expands-to-Millions-More-Prime-Members-in-Over-4000-Cities/default.aspx

Amazon-In-Garage-Delivery-Expands-to-Millions-More-Prime-Members-in-Over-4000-Cities

11/12/2020 09:00:00

Amazon In-Garage Delivery Expands to Millions More Prime Members in Over 4,000 Cities

11/12/2020

2020

Originally launched in 50 cities, Key by Amazon's secure, convenient, and contactless In-Garage Delivery service is expanding to tens of millions of Prime members in over 4,000 cities across the U.S. Key by Amazon is also launching Key In-Garage Grocery Delivery, allowing eligible Prime members to have grocery orders from Whole Foods Market or Amazon Fresh delivered securely inside their garage SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 12, 2020-- (NASDAQ:AMZN)— Today, Amazon announced that tens of millions of Amazon Prime members will now have access to Key by Amazon's In-Garage Delivery service in more than 4,000 cities across the United States. Key In-Garage Delivery lets eligible Prime members enjoy contactless package delivery securely inside their garage, and offers convenient delivery confirmation for customers using the Key by Amazon app. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201112005630/en/ Originally launched in 50 cities, the Key In-Garage Delivery service is expanding to Prime members in over 4,000 cities and towns across the U.S. including: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Washington D.C., Houston, Boston, Atlanta and Phoenix; and thousands of surrounding areas. (Photo: Business Wire) "Customers tell us they appreciate the convenience and peace of mind that in-garage delivery offers, and we're happy to expand the service to thousands of additional cities," said Pete Gerstberger, Head of Key by Amazon. "With this latest expansion, Amazon customers in thousands of big cities and small towns across the U.S. can now enjoy another Prime benefit with convenient, contactless deliveries right in their garage, all backed by the Key by Amazon Happiness Guarantee." Key In-Garage Delivery lets eligible Prime members with a myQ smart garage door opener receive packages securely inside their garage. Once they link their myQ app with Key, customers simply select "FREE In-Garage Delivery" at checkout on Amazon.com. Packages are securely delivered by a delivery service professional, and customers can easily use the Key by Amazon app or the Amazon mobile shopping app to be notified when their package is delivered. To view videos of their delivery, customers can also use a compatible Ring smart home camera with their Ring Protect Plan, or LiftMaster Smart Garage Camera powered by myQ with a myQ Video Storage Subscription. Originally launched in 50 cities, the Key In-Garage Delivery service is expanding to Prime members in over 4,000 cities and towns across the U.S. including: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Washington D.C., Houston, Boston, Atlanta and Phoenix; and thousands of surrounding areas such as Astoria, NY; Valencia, CA; Oswego, IL; Elverson, PA; Farmersville, TX; Frederick, MD; Magnolia, TX; Salisbury, MA; Peachtree City, GA; and Casa Grande, AZ, among many others. In addition to expanding in-garage delivery, Amazon is also launching Key In-Garage Grocery Delivery. Beginning today in five cities, this new service enables eligible Prime members to have their grocery orders from Whole Foods Market or Amazon Fresh delivered securely into their garage. The service will be available in select areas of Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle before expanding to other cities in the U.S. For more information, customers can visit www.amazon.com/keygrocery to check their eligibility and enjoy a limited-time offer of a $20 Amazon credit after their first in-garage grocery order. 1 To learn more about delivery options for their zip code and how to sign up for Key In-Garage Delivery, customers can visit www.amazon.com/keypromo. For a limited time, new Key by Amazon customers can receive $30 in Amazon credits after their first in-garage delivery.2 About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. 1 Terms and conditions apply. Find them at www.amazon.com/keygrocery to learn more.2 Terms and conditions apply. Find them at amazon.com/keypromo to learn more. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201112005630/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon

<p><em>Originally launched in 50 cities, Key by Amazon's secure, convenient, and contactless In-Garage Delivery service is expanding to tens of millions of Prime members in over 4,000 cities across the U.S.</em></p><p><em>Key by Amazon is also launching Key In-Garage Grocery Delivery, allowing eligible Prime members to have grocery orders from Whole Foods Market or Amazon Fresh delivered securely inside their garage</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 12, 2020-- (NASDAQ:AMZN)— Today, Amazon announced that tens of millions of Amazon Prime members will now have access to Key by Amazon's In-Garage Delivery service in more than 4,000 cities across the United States. Key In-Garage Delivery lets eligible Prime members enjoy contactless package delivery securely inside their garage, and offers convenient delivery confirmation for customers using the Key by Amazon app.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201112005630/en/</p><div><p>Originally launched in 50 cities, the Key In-Garage Delivery service is expanding to Prime members in over 4,000 cities and towns across the U.S. including: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Washington D.C., Houston, Boston, Atlanta and Phoenix; and thousands of surrounding areas. (Photo: Business Wire)</p></div><p>"Customers tell us they appreciate the convenience and peace of mind that in-garage delivery offers, and we're happy to expand the service to thousands of additional cities," said Pete Gerstberger, Head of Key by Amazon. "With this latest expansion, Amazon customers in thousands of big cities and small towns across the U.S. can now enjoy another Prime benefit with convenient, contactless deliveries right in their garage, all backed by the Key by Amazon Happiness Guarantee."</p><p>Key In-Garage Delivery lets eligible Prime members with a myQ smart garage door opener receive packages securely inside their garage. Once they link their myQ app with Key, customers simply select "FREE In-Garage Delivery" at checkout on Amazon.com. Packages are securely delivered by a delivery service professional, and customers can easily use the Key by Amazon app or the Amazon mobile shopping app to be notified when their package is delivered. To view videos of their delivery, customers can also use a compatible Ring smart home camera with their Ring Protect Plan, or LiftMaster Smart Garage Camera powered by myQ with a myQ Video Storage Subscription.</p><p>Originally launched in 50 cities, the Key In-Garage Delivery service is expanding to Prime members in over 4,000 cities and towns across the U.S. including: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Washington D.C., Houston, Boston, Atlanta and Phoenix; and thousands of surrounding areas such as Astoria, NY; Valencia, CA; Oswego, IL; Elverson, PA; Farmersville, TX; Frederick, MD; Magnolia, TX; Salisbury, MA; Peachtree City, GA; and Casa Grande, AZ, among many others.</p><p>In addition to expanding in-garage delivery, Amazon is also launching Key In-Garage Grocery Delivery. Beginning today in five cities, this new service enables eligible Prime members to have their grocery orders from Whole Foods Market or Amazon Fresh delivered securely into their garage. The service will be available in select areas of Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle before expanding to other cities in the U.S. For more information, customers can visit www.amazon.com/keygrocery to check their eligibility and enjoy a limited-time offer of a $20 Amazon credit after their first in-garage grocery order. ¹</p><p>To learn more about delivery options for their zip code and how to sign up for Key In-Garage Delivery, customers can visit www.amazon.com/keypromo. For a limited time, new Key by Amazon customers can receive $30 in Amazon credits after their first in-garage delivery.²</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>¹ Terms and conditions apply. Find them at www.amazon.com/keygrocery to learn more.² Terms and conditions apply. Find them at amazon.com/keypromo to learn more.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201112005630/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon</p>

Standard Chartered Selects AWS to Power Its Strategic Banking Systems and Workloads

/news/news-details/2020/Standard-Chartered-Selects-AWS-to-Power-Its-Strategic-Banking-Systems-and-Workloads/default.aspx

Standard-Chartered-Selects-AWS-to-Power-Its-Strategic-Banking-Systems-and-Workloads

11/11/2020 09:00:00

Standard Chartered Selects AWS to Power Its Strategic Banking Systems and Workloads

11/11/2020

2020

Leading financial institution forms strategic relationship with AWS to drive innovation and deliver new digital banking services with enhanced security and reliability SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 11, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), and Standard Chartered Bank plc (LON: STAN), a leading international banking group, announced a five year, strategic global agreement, which deepens the existing relationship between the two companies, and includes the bank running its strategic banking systems and customer facing applications on AWS. Standard Chartered Bank is collaborating with AWS to drive its digital transformation and deliver new personalized banking services in the bank's 60 markets worldwide. Using AWS's reliable infrastructure and cloud services across its entire business will enable the bank to be more responsive to customer needs and create new applications. Standard Chartered will adopt AWS to improve resiliency, security, and privacy, while meeting compliance requirements across the bank's global footprint. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201111005151/en/ Adopting a cloud-first approach, Standard Chartered will use the breadth and depth of AWS services, including database, containers, compute, networking, storage, and security, to reinvent the digital banking experience, accelerating the design and deployment of new applications and digital services for its individual and corporate clients. Standard Chartered is using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to run significant applications and quickly introduce new services with the utmost security, reliability, and scalability. For example, the bank launched its nexus banking-as-a service solution and Mox, its new virtual bank in Hong Kong, on AWS and continues to leverage AWS services to add new functionality to both. The bank's award-winning global payments system, SC Pay, and core banking system, eBBS, are cloud-native services that use Amazon Aurora, a cloud-native relational database, to store details of banking and e-commerce transactions, including micropayments, resulting in faster and more secure transfer of funds with reduced cost per transaction. Standard Chartered's Financial Market business, which includes risk management, financing, and investment services, uses AWS to run algorithms that assess market risk and leverages Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to enable the bank to flexibly scale up those workloads during peak demand. "Our continued work with AWS demonstrates our commitment to putting innovation and security at the heart of Standard Chartered's digital transformation strategy," said Dr. Michael Gorriz, Group Chief Information Officer of Standard Chartered. "A cloud-first strategy allows us to be more agile and client-focused so our customers have better experiences and faster access to innovative new products. At the same time, we are improving our operational efficiency and resilience by using the best-in-class security, privacy, and compliance delivered through cloud infrastructure. We are pleased to collaborate with AWS as a long-term strategic cloud provider and take advantage of their broad portfolio of cloud services and proven expertise to bring secure cloud solutions to the financial services industry." "Adopting a cloud-first approach makes our vision for next generation financial services – like virtual banking, next-generation payments, open banking, and banking as a service – a reality," said Bhupendra Warathe, Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Transformation, Standard Chartered. "A significant number of Standard Chartered's flagship applications, like our core banking system, eBBS, global payment system, SC Pay, as well as our new digital banking services, Mox and nexus, are already cloud-native. We look forward to our continued partnership with AWS to deliver new products and solutions to our clients across the 60 markets we serve." "Standard Chartered Bank has been a trusted financial institution for the last 160 years and we are pleased that they have selected AWS as a strategic cloud provider to drive their digital transformation, while operating more efficiently and securely in the cloud," said Frank Fallon, Vice President, Financial Services at Amazon Web Services, Inc. "With this agreement, Standard Chartered is relying upon the most secure, reliable, and flexible cloud computing environment in the world. AWS's unparalleled experience in powering global financial institutions will enable Standard Chartered to transition to the cloud with confidence and innovate faster than ever before." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfilment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. About Standard Chartered Bank  Standard Chartered is a leading international banking group, with a presence in 60 of the world's most dynamic markets, and serving clients in a further 85. Our purpose is to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, and our heritage and values are expressed in our brand promise, Here for good. Standard Chartered PLC is listed on the London and Hong Kong Stock Exchanges. For more stories and expert opinions please visit Insights at sc.com. Follow Standard Chartered on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201111005151/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>Leading financial institution forms strategic relationship with AWS to drive innovation and deliver new digital banking services with enhanced security and reliability</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 11, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), and Standard Chartered Bank plc (LON: STAN), a leading international banking group, announced a five year, strategic global agreement, which deepens the existing relationship between the two companies, and includes the bank running its strategic banking systems and customer facing applications on AWS. Standard Chartered Bank is collaborating with AWS to drive its digital transformation and deliver new personalized banking services in the bank's 60 markets worldwide. Using AWS's reliable infrastructure and cloud services across its entire business will enable the bank to be more responsive to customer needs and create new applications. Standard Chartered will adopt AWS to improve resiliency, security, and privacy, while meeting compliance requirements across the bank's global footprint.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201111005151/en/</p><p>Adopting a cloud-first approach, Standard Chartered will use the breadth and depth of AWS services, including database, containers, compute, networking, storage, and security, to reinvent the digital banking experience, accelerating the design and deployment of new applications and digital services for its individual and corporate clients. Standard Chartered is using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to run significant applications and quickly introduce new services with the utmost security, reliability, and scalability. For example, the bank launched its nexus banking-as-a service solution and Mox, its new virtual bank in Hong Kong, on AWS and continues to leverage AWS services to add new functionality to both. The bank's award-winning global payments system, SC Pay, and core banking system, eBBS, are cloud-native services that use Amazon Aurora, a cloud-native relational database, to store details of banking and e-commerce transactions, including micropayments, resulting in faster and more secure transfer of funds with reduced cost per transaction. Standard Chartered's Financial Market business, which includes risk management, financing, and investment services, uses AWS to run algorithms that assess market risk and leverages Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to enable the bank to flexibly scale up those workloads during peak demand.</p><p>"Our continued work with AWS demonstrates our commitment to putting innovation and security at the heart of Standard Chartered's digital transformation strategy," said Dr. Michael Gorriz, Group Chief Information Officer of Standard Chartered. "A cloud-first strategy allows us to be more agile and client-focused so our customers have better experiences and faster access to innovative new products. At the same time, we are improving our operational efficiency and resilience by using the best-in-class security, privacy, and compliance delivered through cloud infrastructure. We are pleased to collaborate with AWS as a long-term strategic cloud provider and take advantage of their broad portfolio of cloud services and proven expertise to bring secure cloud solutions to the financial services industry."</p><p>"Adopting a cloud-first approach makes our vision for next generation financial services – like virtual banking, next-generation payments, open banking, and banking as a service – a reality," said Bhupendra Warathe, Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Transformation, Standard Chartered. "A significant number of Standard Chartered's flagship applications, like our core banking system, eBBS, global payment system, SC Pay, as well as our new digital banking services, Mox and nexus, are already cloud-native. We look forward to our continued partnership with AWS to deliver new products and solutions to our clients across the 60 markets we serve."</p><p>"Standard Chartered Bank has been a trusted financial institution for the last 160 years and we are pleased that they have selected AWS as a strategic cloud provider to drive their digital transformation, while operating more efficiently and securely in the cloud," said Frank Fallon, Vice President, Financial Services at Amazon Web Services, Inc. "With this agreement, Standard Chartered is relying upon the most secure, reliable, and flexible cloud computing environment in the world. AWS's unparalleled experience in powering global financial institutions will enable Standard Chartered to transition to the cloud with confidence and innovate faster than ever before."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfilment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>About Standard Chartered Bank </p><p>Standard Chartered is a leading international banking group, with a presence in 60 of the world's most dynamic markets, and serving clients in a further 85. Our purpose is to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, and our heritage and values are expressed in our brand promise, Here for good.</p><p>Standard Chartered PLC is listed on the London and Hong Kong Stock Exchanges.</p><p>For more stories and expert opinions please visit Insights at sc.com. Follow Standard Chartered on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201111005151/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

AWS Announces AWS Glue DataBrew

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-AWS-Glue-DataBrew/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-AWS-Glue-DataBrew

11/11/2020 16:19:00

AWS Announces AWS Glue DataBrew

11/11/2020

2020

New visual data preparation tool for AWS Glue enables data scientists and data analysts to clean and normalize data up to 80% faster than traditional approaches to data preparation NTT DOCOMO, bp, and INVISTA among customers using AWS Glue DataBrew SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 11, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ:AMZN) announced the general availability of AWS Glue DataBrew, a new visual data preparation tool that enables customers to clean and normalize data without writing code. Since 2016, data engineers have used AWS Glue to create, run, and monitor extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs. AWS Glue provides both code-based and visual interfaces, and has dramatically simplified extracting, orchestrating, and loading data in the cloud for customers. Data analysts and data scientists have wanted an easier way to clean and transform this data, and that's what DataBrew delivers, with a service that allows data exploration and experimentation directly from AWS data lakes, data warehouses, and databases without writing code. AWS Glue DataBrew offers customers over 250 pre-built transformations to automate data preparation tasks (e.g. filtering anomalies, standardizing formats, and correcting invalid values) that would otherwise require days or weeks writing hand-coded transformations. Once the data is prepared, customers can immediately start using it with AWS and third-party analytics and machine learning services to query the data and train machine learning models. There are no upfront commitments or costs to use AWS Glue DataBrew, and customers only pay for creating and running transformations on datasets. To get started, visit https://aws.amazon.com/glue/features/databrew. Preparing data for analytics and machine learning involves several necessary and time-consuming tasks, including data extraction, cleaning, normalization, loading, and the orchestration of ETL workflows at scale. For extracting, orchestrating, and loading data at scale, data engineers and ETL developers skilled in SQL or programming languages like Python or Scala can use AWS Glue. ETL developers often prefer the visual interfaces common in modern ETL tools over writing SQL, Python, or Scala, so AWS recently introduced AWS Glue Studio, a new visual interface to help author, run, and monitor ETL jobs without having to write any code. Once the data has been reliably moved, the underlying data still needs to be cleaned and normalized by data analysts and data scientists that operate in the lines of business and understand the context of the data. To clean and normalize the data, data analysts and data scientists have to either work with small batches of the data in Excel or Jupyter Notebooks, which cannot accommodate large data sets, or rely on scarce data engineers and ETL developers to write custom code to perform cleaning and normalization transformations. In an effort to spot anomalies in the data, highly skilled data engineers and ETL developers spend days or weeks writing custom workflows to pull data from different sources, then pivot, transpose, and slice the data multiple times, before they can iterate with data analysts or data scientists to identify and fix data quality issues. After they have developed these transformations, data engineers and ETL developers still need to schedule the custom workflows to run on an ongoing basis, so new incoming data can automatically be cleaned and normalized. Each time a data analyst or data scientist wants to change or add a transformation, the data engineers and ETL developers need to extract, load, clean, normalize, and orchestrate the data preparation tasks over again. This iterative process can take several weeks to months to complete; and as a result, customers spend as much as 80% of their time cleaning and normalizing data instead of actually analyzing the data and extracting value from it. AWS Glue DataBrew is a visual data preparation tool for AWS Glue that allows data analysts and data scientists to clean and transform data with an interactive, point-and-click visual interface, without writing any code. With AWS Glue DataBrew end users can easily access and visually explore any amount of data across their organization directly from their Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) data lake, Amazon Redshift data warehouse, and Amazon Aurora and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) databases. Customers can choose from over 250 built-in functions to combine, pivot, and transpose the data without writing code. AWS Glue DataBrew recommends data cleaning and normalization steps like filtering anomalies, normalizing data to standard date and time values, generating aggregates for analyses, and correcting invalid, misclassified, or duplicative data. For complex tasks like converting words to a common base or root word (e.g. converting "yearly" and "yearlong" to "year"), AWS Glue DataBrew also provides transformations that use advanced machine learning techniques like Natural Language Processing (NLP). Users can then save these cleaning and normalization steps into a workflow (called a recipe) and apply them automatically to future incoming data. If changes need to be made to the workflow, data analysts and data scientists simply update the cleaning and normalization steps in the recipe, and they are automatically applied to new data as it arrives. AWS Glue DataBrew publishes the prepared data to Amazon S3, which makes it easy for customers to immediately use it in analytics and machine learning. AWS Glue DataBrew is serverless and fully managed, so customers never need to configure, provision, or manage any compute resources. "AWS customers are using data for analytics and machine learning at an unprecedented pace. However, these customers regularly tell us that their teams spend too much time on the undifferentiated, repetitive, and mundane tasks associated with data preparation," said Raju Gulabani, VP of Database and Analytics, AWS. "Customers love the scalability and flexibility of code-based data preparation services like AWS Glue, but they could also benefit from allowing business users, data analysts, and data scientists to visually explore and experiment with data independently, without writing code. AWS Glue DataBrew features an easy-to-use visual interface that helps data analysts and data scientists of all technical levels understand, combine, clean, and transform data." AWS Glue DataBrew is generally available today in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo), with availability in additional regions coming soon. Tokyo-based NTT DOCOMO is the largest mobile service provider in Japan, serving more than 80 million customers. "Our analysts profile and query various kinds of structured and unstructured data in order to better understand usage patterns," said Takashi Ito, General Manager of Marketing Platform Planning Department, NTT DOCOMO. "AWS Glue DataBrew provides a visual interface that enables both our technical and non-technical users to analyze data quickly and easily. Its advanced data profiling capability helps us better understand our data and monitor the data quality. AWS Glue DataBrew and other AWS analytics services have allowed us to streamline our workflow and increase productivity." bp is one of the world's largest integrated energy companies. "A data lake is a critical part of our analytics strategy. One of the challenges we face is not being able to easily explore data before ingestion into our data lake," said John Maio, Director, Data & Analytics Platforms Architecture, bp. "AWS Glue DataBrew has sophisticated data profiling functionality and a rich set of built-in transformations. This enables our data engineers to easily explore new datasets in a visual interface and make modifications in order to optimize ingestion and allow analysts to shape the data for their analytics solutions. We see AWS Glue DataBrew as a way to help us better manage our data platform and improve efficiencies in our data pipelines." INVISTA, a subsidiary of Koch Industries, is one of the world's largest integrated producers of chemical intermediates, polymers, and fibers. "Data is critical to optimizing our manufacturing processes. One of the challenges we face is ensuring we have a clean data lake that can serve as the source of truth for our analytics and machine learning applications," said Tanner Gonzalez, Analytics and Cloud leader, INVISTA. "The data ingested into our data lake often contains duplicate values, incorrect formatting and other imperfections that make it difficult to use in its raw form. Amazon AWS Glue DataBrew will allow our data analysts to visually inspect large data sets, clean and enrich data, and perform advanced transformations. AWS Glue DataBrew will empower our analysts and data scientists to perform advanced data engineering activities, giving them the freedom to explore their data and decreasing the time to derive new insights." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201111005879/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>New visual data preparation tool for AWS Glue enables data scientists and data analysts to clean and normalize data up to 80% faster than traditional approaches to data preparation</em></p><p><em>NTT DOCOMO, bp, and INVISTA among customers using AWS Glue DataBrew</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 11, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ:AMZN) announced the general availability of AWS Glue DataBrew, a new visual data preparation tool that enables customers to clean and normalize data without writing code. Since 2016, data engineers have used AWS Glue to create, run, and monitor extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs. AWS Glue provides both code-based and visual interfaces, and has dramatically simplified extracting, orchestrating, and loading data in the cloud for customers. Data analysts and data scientists have wanted an easier way to clean and transform this data, and that's what DataBrew delivers, with a service that allows data exploration and experimentation directly from AWS data lakes, data warehouses, and databases without writing code. AWS Glue DataBrew offers customers over 250 pre-built transformations to automate data preparation tasks (e.g. filtering anomalies, standardizing formats, and correcting invalid values) that would otherwise require days or weeks writing hand-coded transformations. Once the data is prepared, customers can immediately start using it with AWS and third-party analytics and machine learning services to query the data and train machine learning models. There are no upfront commitments or costs to use AWS Glue DataBrew, and customers only pay for creating and running transformations on datasets. To get started, visit https://aws.amazon.com/glue/features/databrew.</p><p>Preparing data for analytics and machine learning involves several necessary and time-consuming tasks, including data extraction, cleaning, normalization, loading, and the orchestration of ETL workflows at scale. For extracting, orchestrating, and loading data at scale, data engineers and ETL developers skilled in SQL or programming languages like Python or Scala can use AWS Glue. ETL developers often prefer the visual interfaces common in modern ETL tools over writing SQL, Python, or Scala, so AWS recently introduced AWS Glue Studio, a new visual interface to help author, run, and monitor ETL jobs without having to write any code. Once the data has been reliably moved, the underlying data still needs to be cleaned and normalized by data analysts and data scientists that operate in the lines of business and understand the context of the data. To clean and normalize the data, data analysts and data scientists have to either work with small batches of the data in Excel or Jupyter Notebooks, which cannot accommodate large data sets, or rely on scarce data engineers and ETL developers to write custom code to perform cleaning and normalization transformations. In an effort to spot anomalies in the data, highly skilled data engineers and ETL developers spend days or weeks writing custom workflows to pull data from different sources, then pivot, transpose, and slice the data multiple times, before they can iterate with data analysts or data scientists to identify and fix data quality issues. After they have developed these transformations, data engineers and ETL developers still need to schedule the custom workflows to run on an ongoing basis, so new incoming data can automatically be cleaned and normalized. Each time a data analyst or data scientist wants to change or add a transformation, the data engineers and ETL developers need to extract, load, clean, normalize, and orchestrate the data preparation tasks over again. This iterative process can take several weeks to months to complete; and as a result, customers spend as much as 80% of their time cleaning and normalizing data instead of actually analyzing the data and extracting value from it.</p><p>AWS Glue DataBrew is a visual data preparation tool for AWS Glue that allows data analysts and data scientists to clean and transform data with an interactive, point-and-click visual interface, without writing any code. With AWS Glue DataBrew end users can easily access and visually explore any amount of data across their organization directly from their Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) data lake, Amazon Redshift data warehouse, and Amazon Aurora and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) databases. Customers can choose from over 250 built-in functions to combine, pivot, and transpose the data without writing code. AWS Glue DataBrew recommends data cleaning and normalization steps like filtering anomalies, normalizing data to standard date and time values, generating aggregates for analyses, and correcting invalid, misclassified, or duplicative data. For complex tasks like converting words to a common base or root word (e.g. converting "yearly" and "yearlong" to "year"), AWS Glue DataBrew also provides transformations that use advanced machine learning techniques like Natural Language Processing (NLP). Users can then save these cleaning and normalization steps into a workflow (called a recipe) and apply them automatically to future incoming data. If changes need to be made to the workflow, data analysts and data scientists simply update the cleaning and normalization steps in the recipe, and they are automatically applied to new data as it arrives. AWS Glue DataBrew publishes the prepared data to Amazon S3, which makes it easy for customers to immediately use it in analytics and machine learning. AWS Glue DataBrew is serverless and fully managed, so customers never need to configure, provision, or manage any compute resources.</p><p>"AWS customers are using data for analytics and machine learning at an unprecedented pace. However, these customers regularly tell us that their teams spend too much time on the undifferentiated, repetitive, and mundane tasks associated with data preparation," said Raju Gulabani, VP of Database and Analytics, AWS. "Customers love the scalability and flexibility of code-based data preparation services like AWS Glue, but they could also benefit from allowing business users, data analysts, and data scientists to visually explore and experiment with data independently, without writing code. AWS Glue DataBrew features an easy-to-use visual interface that helps data analysts and data scientists of all technical levels understand, combine, clean, and transform data."</p><p>AWS Glue DataBrew is generally available today in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo), with availability in additional regions coming soon.</p><p>Tokyo-based NTT DOCOMO is the largest mobile service provider in Japan, serving more than 80 million customers. "Our analysts profile and query various kinds of structured and unstructured data in order to better understand usage patterns," said Takashi Ito, General Manager of Marketing Platform Planning Department, NTT DOCOMO. "AWS Glue DataBrew provides a visual interface that enables both our technical and non-technical users to analyze data quickly and easily. Its advanced data profiling capability helps us better understand our data and monitor the data quality. AWS Glue DataBrew and other AWS analytics services have allowed us to streamline our workflow and increase productivity."</p><p>bp is one of the world's largest integrated energy companies. "A data lake is a critical part of our analytics strategy. One of the challenges we face is not being able to easily explore data before ingestion into our data lake," said John Maio, Director, Data &amp; Analytics Platforms Architecture, bp. "AWS Glue DataBrew has sophisticated data profiling functionality and a rich set of built-in transformations. This enables our data engineers to easily explore new datasets in a visual interface and make modifications in order to optimize ingestion and allow analysts to shape the data for their analytics solutions. We see AWS Glue DataBrew as a way to help us better manage our data platform and improve efficiencies in our data pipelines."</p><p>INVISTA, a subsidiary of Koch Industries, is one of the world's largest integrated producers of chemical intermediates, polymers, and fibers. "Data is critical to optimizing our manufacturing processes. One of the challenges we face is ensuring we have a clean data lake that can serve as the source of truth for our analytics and machine learning applications," said Tanner Gonzalez, Analytics and Cloud leader, INVISTA. "The data ingested into our data lake often contains duplicate values, incorrect formatting and other imperfections that make it difficult to use in its raw form. Amazon AWS Glue DataBrew will allow our data analysts to visually inspect large data sets, clean and enrich data, and perform advanced transformations. AWS Glue DataBrew will empower our analysts and data scientists to perform advanced data engineering activities, giving them the freedom to explore their data and decreasing the time to derive new insights."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201111005879/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

AWS Announces Plans to Launch a Second Region in India

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-Plans-to-Launch-a-Second-Region-in-India/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-Plans-to-Launch-a-Second-Region-in-India

11/07/2020 00:24:00

AWS Announces Plans to Launch a Second Region in India

11/07/2020

2020

New AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will be available by mid-2022, providing customers with even greater resiliency for critical cloud workloads, lower latency, and improved compliance capabilities SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 6, 2020-- Today,Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced expansion of its services to include a second infrastructure region in India by mid-2022. The new AWS Asia Region, which will consist of three Availability Zones at launch, will join the existing eight AWS Regions and 25 Availability Zones across Asia in India, Australia, Greater China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore. Globally, AWS has 77 Availability Zones across 24 infrastructure regions, with announced plans to launch 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will enable even more developers, startups, and enterprises as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations to run their applications and serve end users from data centers located in India. For more information on AWS's global infrastructure, go to: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/. "Businesses in India are embracing cloud computing to reduce costs, increase agility, and enable rapid innovation to meet the needs of billions of customers in India and abroad," said Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, Amazon Web Services. "Together with our AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, we're providing customers with more flexibility and choice, while allowing them to architect their infrastructure for even greater fault tolerance, resiliency, and availability across geographic locations." "We are pleased that AWS has chosen Telangana as the location for its second region in India. Hyderabad is an important talent hub for IT professionals and entrepreneurs, and with the increased adoption of cloud computing, we are set to see a transformation in the way businesses in south India harness the power of IT," said K.T. Rama Rao, Minister for Information Technology, Electronics & Communications, Municipal Administration and Urban Development and Industries & Commerce Departments, Government of Telangana. "Combining the unique resources of Telangana with AWS, the world's leading cloud, will boost economic development, power digital-led innovation, and establish a cloud centre hub for the rest of the country." AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which are technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers' business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault tolerance. The launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will provide customers with even lower latency across southern India. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of Indian organizations, from startups to enterprises and the public sector, will have additional infrastructure to leverage advanced technologies from the world's leading cloud with the broadest and deepest suite of cloud services including compute, storage, analytics, artificial intelligence, database, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, mobile services, serverless, and more to drive innovation. Customers and APN Partners welcome the news of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region  Millions of active customers use AWS each month in over 190 countries around the world. Indian organizations that are moving their mission-critical workloads to AWS to drive cost savings, accelerate innovation, and increase agility include: Ashok Leyland, Aditya Birla Capital, Axis Bank, Bajaj Capital, ClearTax, Dream11, Druva, Edelweiss, Edunext, Extramarks, Freshworks, HDFC Life, Mahindra Electric, Ola, Oyo, Policybazaar, Quantela, RBL Bank, redBus, Sharda University, Swiggy, Tata Sky, YuppTV, Zerodha, and many more. National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange e-Markets Limited (NeML) is the leading national exchange in India offering web-based platforms for trading in a host of commodities to various markets and primary producers, including farmers, traders, and intermediaries. Following a fire in April 2018 in the NeML datacenter, the exchange migrated 50 applications to AWS Cloud. "We've experienced first-hand what it means to have our primary and disaster recovery workloads run on AWS Cloud and welcome the announcement of a second AWS Region in India. It will give us even greater options to build in redundancy, real-time availability, and security for our applications and data," said Ravindra Shevade, Chief Operations Officer, NeML. HDFC Life, established in 2000, is one of India's leading Life Insurance providers, offering a range of solutions for protection, pension, savings, investment, annuity and health. HDFC Life has always believed in investing early in technology and continuously thinking of making life simple for the customer. "In the past few years, we have accelerated our digital journey, and AWS has helped us migrate key applications to the cloud. We leveraged AWS capabilities in creating data platforms, and exploring disruptive technologies has enabled us to better respond to the needs of our customers. We share a common aim: focusing on addressing customer needs and using technology to address them," said Parvez Mulla, Chief Operating Officer of HDFC Life. DSP Investment Managers (DSPIM) is one of the premier asset management companies in India with a track record of over 20 years of investment excellence offering investment products across the risk—reward spectrum, including equities, exchange traded funds, and fixed income portfolios. It is part of the DSP Group—one of the oldest and most respected financial services firms in India. "The immediate benefits we realized after migrating more than 50 workloads to AWS in 2019 were a reduction in operational overhead, digital transformation, and the adoption of a data-driven culture within our business. Our investor transaction platform built on AWS now allows us to reimagine our investors' digital experience. A second AWS Region in India allows us to satisfy regulatory requirements and further improve our availability and resiliency," said Ashish Bajaj, Chief Technology Officer of DSP Investment Managers. Mumbai headquartered CEAT, the flagship company of RPG Enterprises, is one of India's leading tire manufacturers. It produces over 35 million tires a year and has a strong presence in global markets. "In 2018, we selected AWS as our platform of choice, hosting all our IT applications and deploying SAP S/4 HANA on AWS. Since then, our journey with AWS has been very smooth – no challenges and no hiccups. We were able to fully concentrate on our core IT jobs and have been able to achieve a much higher level of operational efficiency in the core function," said U. C. Singh, Chief Information Officer, CEAT. YuppTV is one of the world's largest internet-based TV and on-demand service providers of South Asian content, spread across the US, Canada, Europe, Middle East, Australia, and India. YuppTV offers more than 250 TV channels, over 5,000 movies, and more than 100 TV shows in 14 languages. "We chose AWS for our over-the-top (OTT) platform because of the global reach it provides. This helps our team seamlessly manage similar architecture set-ups across the world. AWS's presence in multiple regions across the world helps us further reduce the latency of our media-heavy workloads. With AWS, we are able to scale the platform as required for any peaks in our workloads as per the events happening around the world, thus helping us run on AWS in a cost-optimized fashion," said Anil Kumar, VP Technology YuppTV. Tens of thousands of government agencies, educational institutions, and non-profits around the world are already using AWS to address a diverse set of use cases, from complex government systems to mission-critical intelligence projects dealing with large volumes of sensitive data. Common Service Centers (CSCs) are simplifying the delivery of citizen-centric services in rural India using AWS. "We have been able to simplify the delivery of citizen-centric services and benefit from AWS's massive economies of scale, pace of innovation, global security certifications, and agility in a pay-as-you-go model without requiring complex licenses," said Rishikesh Patankar, Chief Operating Officer - Education, Skills & CSC Academy, Common Service Centers (CSC) e-Governance Services India Limited. BYJU'S is the creator of one of India's most popular K-12 learning apps that offers personalized learning programs across mobile devices using world-class teachers, proven pedagogical methods, innovative technology, and data science to engage with remote students across grades. "We require a reliable cloud environment that scales on demand as the business keeps growing. We also need to analyze valuable student feedback and capitalize on those insights quickly in order to provide a more personalized learning experience. We have more than 15 million students using BYJU'S mobile app, and we could not support that number without being on AWS. As we expand the business in India and look for new ways to reach students, an additional AWS Region in India will help support that growth," said Prakash Ramachandran Chief Technology Officer, BYJU'S. CropIn is a full-stack agri-tech organization providing smart software-as-a-solution (SaaS) solutions to agri businesses globally, to maximize productivity across the board. CropIn has built a digital solution for agri stakeholders, farmers to tackle climate change challenges and adapt faster to climate-smart agricultural practices, especially in flood and drought-prone regions. "AWS is the centre of our technology architecture, helping us build our infrastructure at scale without worrying about challenges related to set up or management in production. We were able to meet the customer growth without much change in our system, by using AWS. As we scale our platform that currently serves 6.1 million acres and 2.1 million farmers across more than 60 countries and 9,400 crop varieties, AWS's solutions will play a vital role," said Krishna Kumar, Founder and CEO, CropIn. Amazon Partner Network (APN) Partners also welcomed the arrival of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region. The APN includes tens of thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Systems Integrators (SIs) around the world. APN Partners build innovative solutions and services on AWS, and the APN helps by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support. APN ISVs and SIs working in India include Accenture, BlazeClan, BluePi, Capillary, Cloud Kinetics, Deloitte, Freshworks, Hostin, Manthan, Minfy Technologies, Powerupcloud, Progressive Infotech, Redington, and Umbrella Infocare. Blazeclan, a long-standing APN Premier Consulting Partner focused on the financial services industry, has helped customers across India, ASEAN, Australia, and New Zealand adopt AWS. With more than 300 AWS-certified resources across six AWS competencies, Blazeclan has managed more than 120 large migrations in APAC. "AWS has always believed in a long-term mindset, which is a crucial component for our customers as they embark deeper within their digital transformation initiatives. The second region in India will help our customers in regulated industries, such as banking and financial services, move ahead with confidence in their cloud migration journeys," said Varoon Rajani, Founder and CEO, Blazeclan. Minfy Technologies is an APN Premier Consulting Partner focused on SAP and has managed over 750 engagements, more than 35 SAP HANA implementations, and assisted more than 400 first-time customers adopt AWS Cloud. "The second region in India will further benefit our ERP customers who want to run their critical workloads on a cost-effective and secure platform," said Vijay Jain, Founder, Minfy Technologies. Amazon and AWS investing in India The new AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region demonstrates Amazon's continuing investment in India. AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region opened on June 27, 2016, enabling customers in India to save costs, accelerate innovation, increase speed-to-market of new products and services, and expand their geographic infrastructure footprint in minutes. In May 2019, AWS expanded its services to include a third Availability Zone in the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region to support rapid customer growth and provide more choice, flexibility, the ability to replicate workloads across more Availability Zones, and even higher availability. AWS has expanded its services through edge locations in Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, New Delhi, and Kolkata. AWS is also continuing to invest in the upskilling of local developers, students, and the next generation of IT leaders in India through programs such as AWS Academy and AWS Educate. AWS Academy provides higher education institutions with a free, ready-to-teach cloud computing curriculum that prepares students to pursue industry-recognized certifications and in-demand cloud jobs. AWS Educate provides student access to AWS services and content designed to build knowledge and skills in cloud computing, with tens of thousands of Indian students joining the program since it began. In August 2019, Amazon inaugurated its largest campus building globally in Hyderabad. Spread over 9.5 acres, the campus is built to support more than 15,000 employees and reaffirms Amazon's commitment to India. Customers and partners looking to learn more about AWS can visit: https://aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201105006288/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>New AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will be available by mid-2022, providing customers with even greater resiliency for critical cloud workloads, lower latency, and improved compliance capabilities</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 6, 2020-- Today,Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced expansion of its services to include a second infrastructure region in India by mid-2022. The new AWS Asia Region, which will consist of three Availability Zones at launch, will join the existing eight AWS Regions and 25 Availability Zones across Asia in India, Australia, Greater China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore. Globally, AWS has 77 Availability Zones across 24 infrastructure regions, with announced plans to launch 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will enable even more developers, startups, and enterprises as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations to run their applications and serve end users from data centers located in India. For more information on AWS's global infrastructure, go to: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/.</p><p>"Businesses in India are embracing cloud computing to reduce costs, increase agility, and enable rapid innovation to meet the needs of billions of customers in India and abroad," said Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, Amazon Web Services. "Together with our AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, we're providing customers with more flexibility and choice, while allowing them to architect their infrastructure for even greater fault tolerance, resiliency, and availability across geographic locations."</p><p>"We are pleased that AWS has chosen Telangana as the location for its second region in India. Hyderabad is an important talent hub for IT professionals and entrepreneurs, and with the increased adoption of cloud computing, we are set to see a transformation in the way businesses in south India harness the power of IT," said K.T. Rama Rao, Minister for Information Technology, Electronics &amp; Communications, Municipal Administration and Urban Development and Industries &amp; Commerce Departments, Government of Telangana. "Combining the unique resources of Telangana with AWS, the world's leading cloud, will boost economic development, power digital-led innovation, and establish a cloud centre hub for the rest of the country."</p><p>AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which are technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers' business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault tolerance. The launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will provide customers with even lower latency across southern India. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of Indian organizations, from startups to enterprises and the public sector, will have additional infrastructure to leverage advanced technologies from the world's leading cloud with the broadest and deepest suite of cloud services including compute, storage, analytics, artificial intelligence, database, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, mobile services, serverless, and more to drive innovation.</p><p>Customers and APN Partners welcome the news of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region </p><p>Millions of active customers use AWS each month in over 190 countries around the world. Indian organizations that are moving their mission-critical workloads to AWS to drive cost savings, accelerate innovation, and increase agility include: Ashok Leyland, Aditya Birla Capital, Axis Bank, Bajaj Capital, ClearTax, Dream11, Druva, Edelweiss, Edunext, Extramarks, Freshworks, HDFC Life, Mahindra Electric, Ola, Oyo, Policybazaar, Quantela, RBL Bank, redBus, Sharda University, Swiggy, Tata Sky, YuppTV, Zerodha, and many more.</p><p>National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange e-Markets Limited (NeML) is the leading national exchange in India offering web-based platforms for trading in a host of commodities to various markets and primary producers, including farmers, traders, and intermediaries. Following a fire in April 2018 in the NeML datacenter, the exchange migrated 50 applications to AWS Cloud. "We've experienced first-hand what it means to have our primary and disaster recovery workloads run on AWS Cloud and welcome the announcement of a second AWS Region in India. It will give us even greater options to build in redundancy, real-time availability, and security for our applications and data," said Ravindra Shevade, Chief Operations Officer, NeML.</p><p>HDFC Life, established in 2000, is one of India's leading Life Insurance providers, offering a range of solutions for protection, pension, savings, investment, annuity and health. HDFC Life has always believed in investing early in technology and continuously thinking of making life simple for the customer. "In the past few years, we have accelerated our digital journey, and AWS has helped us migrate key applications to the cloud. We leveraged AWS capabilities in creating data platforms, and exploring disruptive technologies has enabled us to better respond to the needs of our customers. We share a common aim: focusing on addressing customer needs and using technology to address them," said Parvez Mulla, Chief Operating Officer of HDFC Life.</p><p>DSP Investment Managers (DSPIM) is one of the premier asset management companies in India with a track record of over 20 years of investment excellence offering investment products across the risk—reward spectrum, including equities, exchange traded funds, and fixed income portfolios. It is part of the DSP Group—one of the oldest and most respected financial services firms in India. "The immediate benefits we realized after migrating more than 50 workloads to AWS in 2019 were a reduction in operational overhead, digital transformation, and the adoption of a data-driven culture within our business. Our investor transaction platform built on AWS now allows us to reimagine our investors' digital experience. A second AWS Region in India allows us to satisfy regulatory requirements and further improve our availability and resiliency," said Ashish Bajaj, Chief Technology Officer of DSP Investment Managers.</p><p>Mumbai headquartered CEAT, the flagship company of RPG Enterprises, is one of India's leading tire manufacturers. It produces over 35 million tires a year and has a strong presence in global markets. "In 2018, we selected AWS as our platform of choice, hosting all our IT applications and deploying SAP S/4 HANA on AWS. Since then, our journey with AWS has been very smooth – no challenges and no hiccups. We were able to fully concentrate on our core IT jobs and have been able to achieve a much higher level of operational efficiency in the core function," said U. C. Singh, Chief Information Officer, CEAT.</p><p>YuppTV is one of the world's largest internet-based TV and on-demand service providers of South Asian content, spread across the US, Canada, Europe, Middle East, Australia, and India. YuppTV offers more than 250 TV channels, over 5,000 movies, and more than 100 TV shows in 14 languages. "We chose AWS for our over-the-top (OTT) platform because of the global reach it provides. This helps our team seamlessly manage similar architecture set-ups across the world. AWS's presence in multiple regions across the world helps us further reduce the latency of our media-heavy workloads. With AWS, we are able to scale the platform as required for any peaks in our workloads as per the events happening around the world, thus helping us run on AWS in a cost-optimized fashion," said Anil Kumar, VP Technology YuppTV.</p><p>Tens of thousands of government agencies, educational institutions, and non-profits around the world are already using AWS to address a diverse set of use cases, from complex government systems to mission-critical intelligence projects dealing with large volumes of sensitive data.</p><p>Common Service Centers (CSCs) are simplifying the delivery of citizen-centric services in rural India using AWS. "We have been able to simplify the delivery of citizen-centric services and benefit from AWS's massive economies of scale, pace of innovation, global security certifications, and agility in a pay-as-you-go model without requiring complex licenses," said Rishikesh Patankar, Chief Operating Officer - Education, Skills &amp; CSC Academy, Common Service Centers (CSC) e-Governance Services India Limited.</p><p>BYJU'S is the creator of one of India's most popular K-12 learning apps that offers personalized learning programs across mobile devices using world-class teachers, proven pedagogical methods, innovative technology, and data science to engage with remote students across grades. "We require a reliable cloud environment that scales on demand as the business keeps growing. We also need to analyze valuable student feedback and capitalize on those insights quickly in order to provide a more personalized learning experience. We have more than 15 million students using BYJU'S mobile app, and we could not support that number without being on AWS. As we expand the business in India and look for new ways to reach students, an additional AWS Region in India will help support that growth," said Prakash Ramachandran Chief Technology Officer, BYJU'S.</p><p>CropIn is a full-stack agri-tech organization providing smart software-as-a-solution (SaaS) solutions to agri businesses globally, to maximize productivity across the board. CropIn has built a digital solution for agri stakeholders, farmers to tackle climate change challenges and adapt faster to climate-smart agricultural practices, especially in flood and drought-prone regions. "AWS is the centre of our technology architecture, helping us build our infrastructure at scale without worrying about challenges related to set up or management in production. We were able to meet the customer growth without much change in our system, by using AWS. As we scale our platform that currently serves 6.1 million acres and 2.1 million farmers across more than 60 countries and 9,400 crop varieties, AWS's solutions will play a vital role," said Krishna Kumar, Founder and CEO, CropIn.</p><p>Amazon Partner Network (APN) Partners also welcomed the arrival of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region. The APN includes tens of thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Systems Integrators (SIs) around the world. APN Partners build innovative solutions and services on AWS, and the APN helps by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support. APN ISVs and SIs working in India include Accenture, BlazeClan, BluePi, Capillary, Cloud Kinetics, Deloitte, Freshworks, Hostin, Manthan, Minfy Technologies, Powerupcloud, Progressive Infotech, Redington, and Umbrella Infocare.</p><p>Blazeclan, a long-standing APN Premier Consulting Partner focused on the financial services industry, has helped customers across India, ASEAN, Australia, and New Zealand adopt AWS. With more than 300 AWS-certified resources across six AWS competencies, Blazeclan has managed more than 120 large migrations in APAC. "AWS has always believed in a long-term mindset, which is a crucial component for our customers as they embark deeper within their digital transformation initiatives. The second region in India will help our customers in regulated industries, such as banking and financial services, move ahead with confidence in their cloud migration journeys," said Varoon Rajani, Founder and CEO, Blazeclan.</p><p>Minfy Technologies is an APN Premier Consulting Partner focused on SAP and has managed over 750 engagements, more than 35 SAP HANA implementations, and assisted more than 400 first-time customers adopt AWS Cloud. "The second region in India will further benefit our ERP customers who want to run their critical workloads on a cost-effective and secure platform," said Vijay Jain, Founder, Minfy Technologies.</p><p>Amazon and AWS investing in India</p><p>The new AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region demonstrates Amazon's continuing investment in India. AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region opened on June 27, 2016, enabling customers in India to save costs, accelerate innovation, increase speed-to-market of new products and services, and expand their geographic infrastructure footprint in minutes. In May 2019, AWS expanded its services to include a third Availability Zone in the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region to support rapid customer growth and provide more choice, flexibility, the ability to replicate workloads across more Availability Zones, and even higher availability. AWS has expanded its services through edge locations in Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, New Delhi, and Kolkata.</p><p>AWS is also continuing to invest in the upskilling of local developers, students, and the next generation of IT leaders in India through programs such as AWS Academy and AWS Educate. AWS Academy provides higher education institutions with a free, ready-to-teach cloud computing curriculum that prepares students to pursue industry-recognized certifications and in-demand cloud jobs. AWS Educate provides student access to AWS services and content designed to build knowledge and skills in cloud computing, with tens of thousands of Indian students joining the program since it began.</p><p>In August 2019, Amazon inaugurated its largest campus building globally in Hyderabad. Spread over 9.5 acres, the campus is built to support more than 15,000 employees and reaffirms Amazon's commitment to India.</p><p>Customers and partners looking to learn more about AWS can visit: https://aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201105006288/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

Amazon Announces First Fulfillment Center in Republic, Missouri

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Announces-First-Fulfillment-Center-in-Republic-Missouri/default.aspx

Amazon-Announces-First-Fulfillment-Center-in-Republic-Missouri

11/05/2020 12:00:00

Amazon Announces First Fulfillment Center in Republic, Missouri

11/05/2020

2020

New one million square-foot site to create over 500 new, full-time jobs SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 5, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced plans to open its first fulfillment center in Republic, Missouri. The new fulfillment center, which is anticipated to launch in 2021, will create over 500 new, full-time jobs with industry-leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one. See Our Fulfillment Centers in Action "We are proud to be bringing our newest Amazon facility to the city of Republic along with over five hundred great full-time jobs with highly competitive pay, benefits from day-one, and ongoing training," said Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon's vice president of global customer fulfillment. "We are excited for our future in Missouri and for what this means for our customers across the state as we continue to grow. We'd like to thank the community of Republic and local and state leaders for their strong support in making this project possible." Every day at Amazon, incredible employees come together to deliver magical experiences for customers. In the new one million square-foot fulfillment center Amazon associates will work to pick, pack, and ship bulky or larger-sized customer items such as patio furniture, outdoor equipment, or rugs. "Now more than ever, jobs like these are critical to Missourians and our economy," said Missouri Governor Mike Parson. "Amazon's expansion in Republic and the 500 new jobs it will create will greatly impact the local community and Missouri as a whole. We are proud to see companies like Amazon growing in our state and creating more opportunities for our citizens." On top of Amazon's industry-leading minimum $15 per hour wage, the company offers full-time employees comprehensive benefits including full medical, vision, and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) with 50 percent match starting on day one. Amazon prioritizes the safety and health of its employees and has invested millions of dollars to provide a safe workplace. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families. Amazon leverages its scale for good to support local communities. Amazon has pledged to invest over $700 million to provide upskilling training for 100,000 U.S. employees for in-demand jobs. The programs will help Amazon team members from all backgrounds access training to move into highly skilled roles across the company's corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and transportation network, or pursue career paths outside of Amazon. Amazon in Missouri: Since 2010, Amazon has created more than 4,500 jobs in Missouri and invested more than $780 million across the state, including infrastructure and compensation to our employees. Amazon's investments have contributed more than $685 million in GDP to the Missouri economy and have helped create over 3,000 indirect jobs on top of Amazon's direct hires – from jobs in construction and logistics to professional services. More than 24,500 small and medium businesses and independent authors in Missouri are selling to customers in Amazon's store, creating thousands of additional jobs across the state. Additional Resources: See an Amazon Fulfillment Center In Action Amazon Job Creation and Investment U.S. U.S. Investment Map About Amazon: Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/ and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201105005601/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>New one million square-foot site to create over 500 new, full-time jobs</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 5, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced plans to open its first fulfillment center in Republic, Missouri. The new fulfillment center, which is anticipated to launch in 2021, will create over 500 new, full-time jobs with industry-leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one.</p><p>See Our Fulfillment Centers in Action</p><p>"We are proud to be bringing our newest Amazon facility to the city of Republic along with over five hundred great full-time jobs with highly competitive pay, benefits from day-one, and ongoing training," said Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon's vice president of global customer fulfillment. "We are excited for our future in Missouri and for what this means for our customers across the state as we continue to grow. We'd like to thank the community of Republic and local and state leaders for their strong support in making this project possible."</p><p>Every day at Amazon, incredible employees come together to deliver magical experiences for customers. In the new one million square-foot fulfillment center Amazon associates will work to pick, pack, and ship bulky or larger-sized customer items such as patio furniture, outdoor equipment, or rugs.</p><p>"Now more than ever, jobs like these are critical to Missourians and our economy," said Missouri Governor Mike Parson. "Amazon's expansion in Republic and the 500 new jobs it will create will greatly impact the local community and Missouri as a whole. We are proud to see companies like Amazon growing in our state and creating more opportunities for our citizens."</p><p>On top of Amazon's industry-leading minimum $15 per hour wage, the company offers full-time employees comprehensive benefits including full medical, vision, and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) with 50 percent match starting on day one. Amazon prioritizes the safety and health of its employees and has invested millions of dollars to provide a safe workplace. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families.</p><p>Amazon leverages its scale for good to support local communities. Amazon has pledged to invest over $700 million to provide upskilling training for 100,000 U.S. employees for in-demand jobs. The programs will help Amazon team members from all backgrounds access training to move into highly skilled roles across the company's corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and transportation network, or pursue career paths outside of Amazon.</p><p>Amazon in Missouri:</p><ul><li>Since 2010, Amazon has created more than 4,500 jobs in Missouri and invested more than $780 million across the state, including infrastructure and compensation to our employees.</li><li>Amazon's investments have contributed more than $685 million in GDP to the Missouri economy and have helped create over 3,000 indirect jobs on top of Amazon's direct hires – from jobs in construction and logistics to professional services.</li><li>More than 24,500 small and medium businesses and independent authors in Missouri are selling to customers in Amazon's store, creating thousands of additional jobs across the state.</li></ul><p>Additional Resources:</p><ul><li>See an Amazon Fulfillment Center In Action</li><li>Amazon Job Creation and Investment U.S.</li><li>U.S. Investment Map</li></ul><p>About Amazon: Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/ and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201105005601/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon EC2 P4d Instances with EC2 UltraClusters Capability

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-General-Availability-of-Amazon-EC2-P4d-Instances-with-EC2-UltraClusters-Capability/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-General-Availability-of-Amazon-EC2-P4d-Instances-with-EC2-UltraClusters-Capability

11/02/2020 17:00:00

AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon EC2 P4d Instances with EC2 UltraClusters Capability

11/02/2020

2020

Next-generation accelerated computing instances powered by NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and AWS petabit-scale networking provide up to 3x faster time to train and 60% lower cost than previous generation instances for machine learning training and high-performance computing in the cloud GE Healthcare, Toyota Research Institute, and Aon among customers using P4d instances SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 2, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) P4d instances, the next generation of GPU-powered instances delivering 3x faster performance, up to 60% lower cost, and 2.5x more GPU memory for machine learning training and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads when compared to previous generation P3 instances. P4d instances feature eight NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and 400 Gbps of network bandwidth (16x more than P3 instances). Using P4d instances with AWS's Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) and NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA (remote direct memory access), customers are able to create P4d instances with EC2 UltraClusters capability. With EC2 UltraClusters, customers can scale P4d instances to over 4,000 A100 GPUs (2x as many as any other cloud provider) by making use of AWS-designed non-blocking petabit-scale networking infrastructure integrated with Amazon FSx for Lustre high performance storage, offering on-demand access to supercomputing-class performance to accelerate machine learning training and HPC. To get started with P4d instances visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/p4 Data scientists and engineers are continuing to push the boundaries of machine learning by creating larger and more-complex models that provide higher prediction accuracy for a broad range of use cases, including perception model training for autonomous vehicles, natural language processing, image classification, object detection, and predictive analytics. Training these complex models against large volumes of data is a very compute, network, and storage intensive task and often takes days or weeks. Customers not only want to cut down on the time-to-train their models, but they also want to lower their overall spend on training. Collectively, long training times and high costs limit how frequently customers can train their models, which translates into a slower pace of development and innovation for machine learning. The increased performance of P4d instances speeds up the time to train machine learning models by up to 3x (reducing training time from days to hours) and the additional GPU memory helps customers train larger, more complex models. As data becomes more abundant, customers are training models with millions and sometimes billions of parameters, like those used for natural language processing for document summarization and question answering, object detection and classification for autonomous vehicles, image classification for large-scale content moderation, recommendation engines for e-commerce websites, and ranking algorithms for intelligent search engines—all of which require increasing network throughput and GPU memory. P4d instances feature 8 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs capable of up to 2.5 petaflops of mixed-precision performance and 320 GB of high bandwidth GPU memory in one EC2 instance. P4d instances are the first in the industry to offer 400 Gbps network bandwidth with Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) and NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA network interfaces to enable direct communication between GPUs across servers for lower latency and higher scaling efficiency, helping to unblock scaling bottlenecks across multi-node distributed workloads. Each P4d instance also offers 96 Intel Xeon Scalable (Cascade Lake) vCPUs, 1.1 TB of system memory, and 8 TB of local NVMe storage to reduce single node training times. By more than doubling the performance of previous generation of P3 instances, P4d instances can lower the cost to train machine learning models by up to 60%, providing customers greater efficiency over expensive and inflexible on-premises systems. HPC customers will also benefit from P4d's increased processing performance and GPU memory for demanding workloads like seismic analysis, drug discovery, DNA sequencing, materials science, and financial and insurance risk modeling. P4d instances are also built on the AWS Nitro System, AWS-designed hardware and software that has enabled AWS to deliver an ever-broadening selection of EC2 instances and configurations to customers, while offering performance that is indistinguishable from bare metal, providing fast storage and networking, and ensuring more secure multi-tenancy. P4d instances offload networking functions to dedicated Nitro Cards that accelerate data transfer between multiple P4d instances. Nitro Cards also enable EFA and GPUDirect, which allows for direct cross-server communication between GPUs, facilitating lower latency and better scaling performance across EC2 UltraClusters of P4d instances. These Nitro-powered capabilities make it possible for customers to launch P4d in EC2 UltraClusters with on-demand and scalable access to over 4,000 GPUs for supercomputer-class performance. "The pace at which our customers have used AWS services to build, train, and deploy machine learning applications has been extraordinary. At the same time, we have heard from those customers that they want an even lower cost way to train their massive machine learning models," said Dave Brown, Vice President, EC2, AWS. "Now, with EC2 UltraClusters of P4d instances powered by NVIDIA's latest A100 GPUs and petabit-scale networking, we're making supercomputing-class performance available to virtually everyone, while reducing the time to train machine learning models by 3x, and lowering the cost to train by up to 60% compared to previous generation instances." Customers can run containerized applications on P4d instances with AWS Deep Learning Containers with libraries for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) or Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). For a more fully managed experience, customers can use P4d instances via Amazon SageMaker, providing developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly. HPC customers can leverage AWS Batch and AWS ParallelCluster with P4d instances to help orchestrate jobs and clusters efficiently. P4d instances support all major machine learning frameworks, including TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Apache MXNet, giving customers the flexibility to choose the framework that works best for their applications. P4d instances are available in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon), with availability planned for additional regions soon. P4d instances can be purchased as On-Demand, with Savings Plans, with Reserved Instances, or as Spot Instances. GE Healthcare is the $16.7 billion healthcare business of GE. As a leading global medical technology and digital solutions innovator, GE Healthcare enables clinicians to make faster, more informed decisions through intelligent devices, data analytics, applications and services, supported by its Edison intelligence platform. "At GE Healthcare, we provide clinicians with tools that help them aggregate data, apply AI and analytics to that data and uncover insights that improve patient outcomes, drive efficiency and eliminate errors," said Karley Yoder, VP & GM, Artificial Intelligence, at GE Healthcare. "Our medical imaging devices generate massive amounts of data that need to be processed by our data scientists. With previous GPU clusters, it would take days to train complex AI models, such as Progressive GANs, for simulations and view the results. Using the new P4d instances reduced processing time from days to hours. We saw two- to three-times greater speed on training models with various image sizes, while achieving better performance with increased batch size and higher productivity with a faster model development cycle." Toyota Research Institute (TRI), founded in 2015, is working to develop automated driving, robotics, and other human amplification technology for Toyota. "At TRI, we're working to build a future where everyone has the freedom to move," said Mike Garrison, Technical Lead, Infrastructure Engineering at TRI. "The previous generation P3 instances helped us reduce our time to train machine learning models from days to hours and we are looking forward to utilizing P4d instances, as the additional GPU memory and more efficient float formats will allow our machine learning team to train with more complex models at an even faster speed." Aon is a leading global professional services firm providing a broad range of risk, retirement and health solutions. Aon PathWise is a GPU-based and scalable HPC risk management solution that insurers and re-insurers, banks, and pension funds can use to address today's key challenges such as hedge strategy testing, regulatory and economic forecasting, and budgeting. "Aon PathWise allows (re)insurers and pension funds to access next generation technology to rapidly solve today's key insurance challenges such as hedge strategy testing, regulatory and economic forecasting, and budgeting," said Peter Phillips, President and CEO, PathWise. "Through the use of AWS P4d instances with 2.5 petaflops of mixed-precision performance, we are able to deliver a two-fold reduction in cost to our customers without loss of performance, and can deliver a 2.5x improvement in speed for the most demanding calculations. Speed matters and we continue to delight our customers thanks to the new instances from AWS." Comprised of radiology and AI experts, Rad AI builds products that maximize radiologist productivity, ultimately making healthcare more widely accessible and improving patient outcomes. "At Rad AI, our mission is to increase access to and quality of healthcare, for everyone. With a focus on medical imaging workflow, Rad AI saves radiologists time, reduces burnout, and enhances accuracy," said Doktor Gurson, Co-founder of Rad AI. "We use AI to automate radiology workflows and help streamline radiology reporting. With the new EC2 P4d instances, we've seen faster inference and the ability to train models 2.4x faster, with higher accuracy than on previous generation P3 instances. This allows faster, more accurate diagnosis, and greater access to high quality radiology services provided by our customers across the US." OmniSci is a pioneer in accelerated analytics. The OmniSci platform is used in business and government to find insights in data beyond the limits of mainstream analytics tools. "At OmniSci, we're working to build a future where data science and analytics converge to break down and fuse data silos. Customers are leveraging their massive amounts of data that may include location and time to build a full picture of not only what is happening, but when and where through granular visualization of spatial temporal data. Our technology enables seeing both the forest and the trees," said Ray Falcione, VP of US Public Sector, at OmniSci. "Through the use of P4d instances, we were able reduce the cost to deploy our platform significantly compared to previous generation GPU instances thus enabling us to cost-effectively scale massive data sets. The networking improvements on A100 has increased our efficiencies in how we scale to billions of rows of data and enabled our customers to glean insights even faster." Zenotech Ltd is redefining engineering online through the use of HPC Clouds delivering on demand licensing models together with extreme performance benefits by leveraging GPUs. "At Zenotech we are developing the tools to enable designers to create more efficient and environmentally friendly products. We work across industries and our tools provide greater product performance insight through the use of large scale simulation," said Jamil Appa, Director and Co-Founder, Zenotech. "The use of P4d instances enables us to reduce our simulation runtime by 65% compared to the previous generation of GPUs. This speed up cuts our time to solve significantly allowing our customers to get designs to market faster or to do higher fidelity simulations than were previously possible." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201102006034/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

<p><em>Next-generation accelerated computing instances powered by NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and AWS petabit-scale networking provide up to 3x faster time to train and 60% lower cost than previous generation instances for machine learning training and high-performance computing in the cloud</em></p><p><em>GE Healthcare, Toyota Research Institute, and Aon among customers using P4d instances</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 2, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) P4d instances, the next generation of GPU-powered instances delivering 3x faster performance, up to 60% lower cost, and 2.5x more GPU memory for machine learning training and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads when compared to previous generation P3 instances. P4d instances feature eight NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and 400 Gbps of network bandwidth (16x more than P3 instances). Using P4d instances with AWS's Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) and NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA (remote direct memory access), customers are able to create P4d instances with EC2 UltraClusters capability. With EC2 UltraClusters, customers can scale P4d instances to over 4,000 A100 GPUs (2x as many as any other cloud provider) by making use of AWS-designed non-blocking petabit-scale networking infrastructure integrated with Amazon FSx for Lustre high performance storage, offering on-demand access to supercomputing-class performance to accelerate machine learning training and HPC. To get started with P4d instances visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/p4</p><p>Data scientists and engineers are continuing to push the boundaries of machine learning by creating larger and more-complex models that provide higher prediction accuracy for a broad range of use cases, including perception model training for autonomous vehicles, natural language processing, image classification, object detection, and predictive analytics. Training these complex models against large volumes of data is a very compute, network, and storage intensive task and often takes days or weeks. Customers not only want to cut down on the time-to-train their models, but they also want to lower their overall spend on training. Collectively, long training times and high costs limit how frequently customers can train their models, which translates into a slower pace of development and innovation for machine learning.</p><p>The increased performance of P4d instances speeds up the time to train machine learning models by up to 3x (reducing training time from days to hours) and the additional GPU memory helps customers train larger, more complex models. As data becomes more abundant, customers are training models with millions and sometimes billions of parameters, like those used for natural language processing for document summarization and question answering, object detection and classification for autonomous vehicles, image classification for large-scale content moderation, recommendation engines for e-commerce websites, and ranking algorithms for intelligent search engines—all of which require increasing network throughput and GPU memory. P4d instances feature 8 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs capable of up to 2.5 petaflops of mixed-precision performance and 320 GB of high bandwidth GPU memory in one EC2 instance. P4d instances are the first in the industry to offer 400 Gbps network bandwidth with Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) and NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA network interfaces to enable direct communication between GPUs across servers for lower latency and higher scaling efficiency, helping to unblock scaling bottlenecks across multi-node distributed workloads. Each P4d instance also offers 96 Intel Xeon Scalable (Cascade Lake) vCPUs, 1.1 TB of system memory, and 8 TB of local NVMe storage to reduce single node training times. By more than doubling the performance of previous generation of P3 instances, P4d instances can lower the cost to train machine learning models by up to 60%, providing customers greater efficiency over expensive and inflexible on-premises systems. HPC customers will also benefit from P4d's increased processing performance and GPU memory for demanding workloads like seismic analysis, drug discovery, DNA sequencing, materials science, and financial and insurance risk modeling.</p><p>P4d instances are also built on the AWS Nitro System, AWS-designed hardware and software that has enabled AWS to deliver an ever-broadening selection of EC2 instances and configurations to customers, while offering performance that is indistinguishable from bare metal, providing fast storage and networking, and ensuring more secure multi-tenancy. P4d instances offload networking functions to dedicated Nitro Cards that accelerate data transfer between multiple P4d instances. Nitro Cards also enable EFA and GPUDirect, which allows for direct cross-server communication between GPUs, facilitating lower latency and better scaling performance across EC2 UltraClusters of P4d instances. These Nitro-powered capabilities make it possible for customers to launch P4d in EC2 UltraClusters with on-demand and scalable access to over 4,000 GPUs for supercomputer-class performance.</p><p>"The pace at which our customers have used AWS services to build, train, and deploy machine learning applications has been extraordinary. At the same time, we have heard from those customers that they want an even lower cost way to train their massive machine learning models," said Dave Brown, Vice President, EC2, AWS. "Now, with EC2 UltraClusters of P4d instances powered by NVIDIA's latest A100 GPUs and petabit-scale networking, we're making supercomputing-class performance available to virtually everyone, while reducing the time to train machine learning models by 3x, and lowering the cost to train by up to 60% compared to previous generation instances."</p><p>Customers can run containerized applications on P4d instances with AWS Deep Learning Containers with libraries for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) or Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). For a more fully managed experience, customers can use P4d instances via Amazon SageMaker, providing developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly. HPC customers can leverage AWS Batch and AWS ParallelCluster with P4d instances to help orchestrate jobs and clusters efficiently. P4d instances support all major machine learning frameworks, including TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Apache MXNet, giving customers the flexibility to choose the framework that works best for their applications. P4d instances are available in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon), with availability planned for additional regions soon. P4d instances can be purchased as On-Demand, with Savings Plans, with Reserved Instances, or as Spot Instances.</p><p>GE Healthcare is the $16.7 billion healthcare business of GE. As a leading global medical technology and digital solutions innovator, GE Healthcare enables clinicians to make faster, more informed decisions through intelligent devices, data analytics, applications and services, supported by its Edison intelligence platform. "At GE Healthcare, we provide clinicians with tools that help them aggregate data, apply AI and analytics to that data and uncover insights that improve patient outcomes, drive efficiency and eliminate errors," said Karley Yoder, VP &amp; GM, Artificial Intelligence, at GE Healthcare. "Our medical imaging devices generate massive amounts of data that need to be processed by our data scientists. With previous GPU clusters, it would take days to train complex AI models, such as Progressive GANs, for simulations and view the results. Using the new P4d instances reduced processing time from days to hours. We saw two- to three-times greater speed on training models with various image sizes, while achieving better performance with increased batch size and higher productivity with a faster model development cycle."</p><p>Toyota Research Institute (TRI), founded in 2015, is working to develop automated driving, robotics, and other human amplification technology for Toyota. "At TRI, we're working to build a future where everyone has the freedom to move," said Mike Garrison, Technical Lead, Infrastructure Engineering at TRI. "The previous generation P3 instances helped us reduce our time to train machine learning models from days to hours and we are looking forward to utilizing P4d instances, as the additional GPU memory and more efficient float formats will allow our machine learning team to train with more complex models at an even faster speed."</p><p>Aon is a leading global professional services firm providing a broad range of risk, retirement and health solutions. Aon PathWise is a GPU-based and scalable HPC risk management solution that insurers and re-insurers, banks, and pension funds can use to address today's key challenges such as hedge strategy testing, regulatory and economic forecasting, and budgeting. "Aon PathWise allows (re)insurers and pension funds to access next generation technology to rapidly solve today's key insurance challenges such as hedge strategy testing, regulatory and economic forecasting, and budgeting," said Peter Phillips, President and CEO, PathWise. "Through the use of AWS P4d instances with 2.5 petaflops of mixed-precision performance, we are able to deliver a two-fold reduction in cost to our customers without loss of performance, and can deliver a 2.5x improvement in speed for the most demanding calculations. Speed matters and we continue to delight our customers thanks to the new instances from AWS."</p><p>Comprised of radiology and AI experts, Rad AI builds products that maximize radiologist productivity, ultimately making healthcare more widely accessible and improving patient outcomes. "At Rad AI, our mission is to increase access to and quality of healthcare, for everyone. With a focus on medical imaging workflow, Rad AI saves radiologists time, reduces burnout, and enhances accuracy," said Doktor Gurson, Co-founder of Rad AI. "We use AI to automate radiology workflows and help streamline radiology reporting. With the new EC2 P4d instances, we've seen faster inference and the ability to train models 2.4x faster, with higher accuracy than on previous generation P3 instances. This allows faster, more accurate diagnosis, and greater access to high quality radiology services provided by our customers across the US."</p><p>OmniSci is a pioneer in accelerated analytics. The OmniSci platform is used in business and government to find insights in data beyond the limits of mainstream analytics tools. "At OmniSci, we're working to build a future where data science and analytics converge to break down and fuse data silos. Customers are leveraging their massive amounts of data that may include location and time to build a full picture of not only what is happening, but when and where through granular visualization of spatial temporal data. Our technology enables seeing both the forest and the trees," said Ray Falcione, VP of US Public Sector, at OmniSci. "Through the use of P4d instances, we were able reduce the cost to deploy our platform significantly compared to previous generation GPU instances thus enabling us to cost-effectively scale massive data sets. The networking improvements on A100 has increased our efficiencies in how we scale to billions of rows of data and enabled our customers to glean insights even faster."</p><p>Zenotech Ltd is redefining engineering online through the use of HPC Clouds delivering on demand licensing models together with extreme performance benefits by leveraging GPUs. "At Zenotech we are developing the tools to enable designers to create more efficient and environmentally friendly products. We work across industries and our tools provide greater product performance insight through the use of large scale simulation," said Jamil Appa, Director and Co-Founder, Zenotech. "The use of P4d instances enables us to reduce our simulation runtime by 65% compared to the previous generation of GPUs. This speed up cuts our time to solve significantly allowing our customers to get designs to market faster or to do higher fidelity simulations than were previously possible."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201102006034/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.</p>

AWS to Open Data Centers in Switzerland

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-to-Open-Data-Centers-in-Switzerland/default.aspx

AWS-to-Open-Data-Centers-in-Switzerland

11/02/2020 02:37:00

AWS to Open Data Centers in Switzerland

11/02/2020

2020

New AWS Infrastructure Region will arrive in the second half of 2022, enabling customers to run workloads and store data in Switzerland while serving end users with even lower latency SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 2, 2020-- Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced it will open an infrastructure region in Switzerland in the second half of 2022. The AWS Europe (Zurich) Region will comprise three Availability Zones and join existing regions in France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, and the UK. Currently, AWS provides 77 Availability Zones across 24 geographic regions globally, with announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Switzerland, Indonesia, Japan, and Spain. The new AWS Europe (Zurich) Region will enable even more developers, startups, and enterprises as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations to run their applications and serve end users from data centers located in Switzerland. For more information, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/local/switzerland. "For more than 14 years, AWS has supported organizations across almost every industry in Switzerland to speed up innovation, lower their IT costs, and transform their operations," said Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "AWS is excited to announce our upcoming region in Switzerland and help Swiss institutions, innovative startups, and world-leading pharma companies deliver cloud-powered applications to fuel economic development across the country." AWS Regions consist of Availability Zones, which are technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers' business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault tolerance. The addition of the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region will enable local customers with data residency requirements to store their data in Switzerland, with the assurance that they retain control over the location of their data, while also providing even lower latency across the country. Organizations using this region will also be able to access advanced technologies from the world's leading cloud with the broadest and deepest suite of cloud services including analytics, artificial intelligence, compute, database, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, mobile services, serverless technologies, storage, and more to drive innovation. Customers and AWS Partners welcome the news of the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region Millions of active customers are using AWS each month in over 190 countries around the world. Organizations moving their mission-critical workloads to AWS to drive cost savings, accelerate innovation, and speed time-to-market include Swiss enterprises such as adfocus, AFO Marketing, Appway, COFCO International, Crisalix, Crowdhouse, DFRC (Data Fusion Research Center), Datwyler IT Services, Dentsu Tracking, DroneAnalytics, EF Education First, Endress+Hauser, enersis, Finnova, Fisch Asset Management, GSR Zug, Hexagon Leica Geosystems, Helvetia, Hilti, IATA (International Air Transport Association), Idorsia, Isobar, iptiQ, Kempinski, Kudelski Group, Menu.app, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), Novartis, Richemont, Ringier, SCOTT Sports, Swiss Re, and TX Group. Hot startups such as 1plusX, Advanon, Archilogic, Ava, Beekeeper, Billte, Bring!, ChemAlive, Coople, flovtec, Frontify, Genedata, KNIME, Medical Informatics, Medisanté, Meteomatics, Modum, Numbrs, Onedot, OTO, Pix4D, QoQa, SecuTix, Sitasys, Smallpdf, Smartfrog, and Uepaa have built their businesses on top of AWS, enabling them to scale rapidly and expand their geographic reach in minutes. In the Swiss public sector, organizations using AWS to transform the services they deliver to the citizens of the country include Computer Vision Lab (CVL) at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zürich), Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (RSI), Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), Swiss Post, the Swiss Federal Office of Topography (swisstopo), and more. Based in Zurich, Ringier is the largest multi-national media company in Switzerland operating over 100 media brands in 19 countries. Since adopting AWS, Ringier has increased user engagement by 24 percent while tailoring content distribution, digital advertising, and marketplace strategy to their customer's needs. "A great reader experience is at the core of a successful media business model," said Zhao Wang, Head of Data Technology for Ringier. "Using AWS services, especially managed services with analytics and machine learning, we can better understand our readers' interests, improve content production, and optimize content distribution for Blick as well as many other renowned media brands – all tailored to our customers' needs. The planned opening of an AWS Region in Switzerland is great news for us as it reflects AWS's dedication to Switzerland." Dentsu Tracking, a world leader in supply chain tracking and tracing technologies headquartered in Switzerland, also relies on AWS to drive its business. Dentsu helps their customers, which include some of the world's most well respected organizations such as the European Union (EU), Breitling, and the global sports brand HEAD, to gain maximum transparency and control over their supply chains. "We are using AWS services for the operation of an EU-wide tracking and tracing system, which is used by public authorities in the EU to fight against illicit trade, thereby preventing theft, under-declaration, and fiscal evasion," explains Philippe Castella, Managing Director at Dentsu Tracking. "The EU estimates that the system can help reduce the circulation of illicit goods by up to 20 percent. With more than 32 billion products tracked and 5 billion supply chain events linked to 750 thousand registered economic operators across 28 countries, this is by far the world's largest tracking and tracing regime of its kind. Using AWS serverless technologies, we have been able to get fast data management and content delivery in one interface. We can also rapidly develop new features and functionalities thanks to AWS helping to reduce the development and delivery time of new features by 50 percent." Public sector organizations in Switzerland are also using AWS to lower the cost of their IT while speeding up innovation. One of these organizations is Swiss Post, the national postal service of Switzerland. Swiss Post has used more than 80 AWS services to modernize its IT applications and build new services for its customers. "AWS helps us stay ahead in an extremely dynamic business environment," says Christoph Siegrist, Enterprise Architect Cloud and Product Owner, Cloud Foundation at Swiss Post. "Some years ago, we handled hundreds of small parcels per day in our international small parcels business. Today, during peak times, we manage hundreds of small parcels per minute and our customers demand continuous improvement of our services. With new digital services like parcel-tracking apps to inform consumers about the status of their shipments, we're able to become far more efficient and provide a better overall experience to our customers. Our legacy applications made it difficult to meet these demands, and we could only do 1-2 new software releases per year, making quick changes impossible. Using AWS, we can now continuously integrate and deliver code changes and constantly add new features. We also automated our application management using AWS, leading to operational cost savings of more than 50 percent. We welcome the new AWS Region in Switzerland as we can only see it helping to further speed up innovation for Swiss Post and continue to lower our IT costs." Another Swiss public sector organization using AWS to innovate is the public broadcaster Radiotelevisione svizzera (RSI). RSI is responsible for all radio and television broadcasting in the Italian language in Switzerland, and since moving to AWS, has been able to deliver new content to audiences twice as fast with an improved user experience while reducing its infrastructure costs by 75 percent. Antonio Civile, Head of Digital at RSI, said, "A high speed to market is crucial for editors and journalists at RSI to get their news out first. Today, training our editors and journalists on the new platform takes only 30 minutes instead of a full day, and we were able to cut the publishing time of Video on Demand content to the web by 50 percent. Using AWS, it also took us only four months to build our cloud solution and create a web interface that allows us to run seven video and three audio channels. The news of an AWS Region in Switzerland will only further help us to get the latest information into the hands of Swiss citizens faster." Swiss startups are also using AWS to rapidly innovate and expand their businesses around the world. One example of this is Ava AG (Ava), a Swiss startup that enables women in 36 countries worldwide to get real-time information about their fertility, pregnancy, and general well-being by tracking their cycle via the Ava bracelet. Ava has been all-in on AWS since launching their business in 2014. Following the outbreak of COVID 19 this year, Ava used AWS to develop an infection detection algorithm to limit the risk of disease spread and improve prognosis for infected patients. Reto Zumbuehl, Chief Technology Officer at Ava, said, "We have always relied on AWS to scale our business as well as manage and analyze large amounts of data generated by our wearables. Every night our bracelets collect more than 3 million data points globally, including information about skin temperature, resting pulse rate, breathing rate, heart rate variability ratio, and perfusion, and we analyze more than 30 terabytes of data in just 18 hours every week. All of the information we collect is very personal to our customers, so only the highest levels of security are acceptable for us. This is why we work with AWS. The data security offered by AWS makes it possible for us to continually protect our customer's data and provide them with personalized digital healthcare services predicting the exact time of their highest fertility. AWS bringing a region to Switzerland with the same high levels of data protection, user privacy, and regulatory compliance as their other regions around the world is great news for us and all startups in Switzerland." Another rapidly growing business leveraging AWS is Beekeeper, which helps companies connect with their employees in real time and organize their work place digitally via an app that is used by more than 500 companies in 130 countries worldwide. Beekeeper has been using AWS since 2016 to run the majority of its IT infrastructure and the Beekeeper app, which offers functionality such as team chats, the management and scheduling of rosters, file sharing, analytics, and reporting. "In responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, we wanted to provide free access to our platform, introduce new features, and help our customers meet rapidly evolving challenges. Only AWS was able to help us do this," said Jason Brownbridge, Head of Operations at Beekeeper. "Using AWS allowed us to quickly develop and add features, such as a live news stream to help our customers share important information and smartFAQ chatbots to respond to employee questions faster. These new features increased usage of our platform by up to 50 percent. Using AWS's auto scaling features, we are able to keep up with this rapidly increasing demand and deliver an uptime of 99.9 percent for our customers while decreasing our service delivery costs by 40 percent. By bringing an AWS Region to Switzerland, we'll be able to maximize the benefits of the cloud for more customers, including those from the financial technology and financial services industries, and meet their requirements to keep their data in country." Swiss-based AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners also welcome the news of the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region. The APN includes tens of thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Systems Integrators (SIs) around the world. AWS Partners build innovative solutions and services on AWS, and the APN helps by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support. APN SIs, consulting partners, and ISVs working in Switzerland such as 56k.Cloud, Amanox Solutions, copebit, COREXPERT by TeamWork, dbi services, ELCA Informatique SA, Innovation Process Technology AG (ipt), isobar technologies Switzerland, Netcloud, One Step Beyond Group, SmartWave, Swisscom, ti&m, Trivadis, and Zühlke Technology Group help enterprise and public sector customers migrate to AWS, deploy mission-critical applications, and provide a full range of monitoring, automation, and management services for customers' AWS environments. One AWS Partner using AWS to move Swiss enterprise businesses to the cloud is Swisscom, Switzerland's leading telecommunications company and one of its leading IT companies. Swisscom partners with AWS to provide customers such as SeedImpulse, a provider of orthopedic and medical software, with deep technical and industry expertise, helping them to adopt advanced technologies such as blockchain, IoT, machine learning, and more while reducing their IT costs by 75 percent. Urs Lehner, Head of Swisscom Business Customers, said of the new AWS Region, "AWS has a broad and deep portfolio of cloud services and a large network of experts. Learning that AWS is bringing a new region to Switzerland is good news for us and our joint customers." Investing in Switzerland's Future The new AWS Europe (Zurich) Region continues AWS's investment in Switzerland. As the number of Swiss customers has grown, so has the size of AWS's presence in the country. In April 2016, AWS opened its first Swiss office in Zurich, which was followed by a second office in Geneva in December 2017. In March 2017, AWS established two Points of Presence (PoPs) in Zurich, which deliver Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, AWS Shield, AWS WAF, and Lambda@Edge as well as Amazon Direct Connect to the country. AWS also continues to build teams of account managers, technical account managers, partner managers, systems engineers, solutions architects, professional services, and more roles to help customers of all sizes move to AWS. For Swiss students and educators, the AWS Educate and AWS Academy programs are providing free resources to accelerate cloud-related learning and preparing today's students in Switzerland for the jobs of the future. Dozens of Swiss universities and business schools already participating in the AWS Educate program include Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH), Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zürich), HES-SO Valais-Wallis (HES-SO), Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil (HSR), University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), University of Applied Sciences and Arts South Switzerland (SUPSI), University of Basel, and Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI). Major institutions taking part in AWS Academy include University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), University of Applied Sciences OST, and International University of Geneva. AWS also offers a full range of training and certification programs to help those interested in the latest cloud computing technologies, best practices, and architectures to advance their technical skills and further support Swiss organizations in their digital transformation. To help grow the next generation of Swiss enterprises, AWS supports startups in cities across Switzerland and launched AWS Activate in 2013. This program gives startups access to guidance and one-on-one time with AWS experts as well as web-based training, self-paced labs, customer support, third-party offers, and up to $100,000 in AWS service credits – all at no charge. This is in addition to the work that AWS already does with the venture capital community, startup accelerators, and incubators to help startups grow in the cloud. In Switzerland, AWS works with accelerator organizations such as F10, A&I Kickstartaccelerator, TrustSquare, and Masschallenge as well as venture capital firms like CV VC, investiere, Venturelab, and Redalpine in order to support the rapid growth of their portfolio companies. About Amazon Web Services  For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon  Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201101005091/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>New AWS Infrastructure Region will arrive in the second half of 2022, enabling customers to run workloads and store data in Switzerland while serving end users with even lower latency</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 2, 2020-- Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced it will open an infrastructure region in Switzerland in the second half of 2022. The AWS Europe (Zurich) Region will comprise three Availability Zones and join existing regions in France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, and the UK. Currently, AWS provides 77 Availability Zones across 24 geographic regions globally, with announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Switzerland, Indonesia, Japan, and Spain. The new AWS Europe (Zurich) Region will enable even more developers, startups, and enterprises as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations to run their applications and serve end users from data centers located in Switzerland. For more information, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/local/switzerland.</p><p>"For more than 14 years, AWS has supported organizations across almost every industry in Switzerland to speed up innovation, lower their IT costs, and transform their operations," said Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "AWS is excited to announce our upcoming region in Switzerland and help Swiss institutions, innovative startups, and world-leading pharma companies deliver cloud-powered applications to fuel economic development across the country."</p><p>AWS Regions consist of Availability Zones, which are technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers' business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault tolerance. The addition of the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region will enable local customers with data residency requirements to store their data in Switzerland, with the assurance that they retain control over the location of their data, while also providing even lower latency across the country. Organizations using this region will also be able to access advanced technologies from the world's leading cloud with the broadest and deepest suite of cloud services including analytics, artificial intelligence, compute, database, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, mobile services, serverless technologies, storage, and more to drive innovation.</p><p>Customers and AWS Partners welcome the news of the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region</p><p>Millions of active customers are using AWS each month in over 190 countries around the world. Organizations moving their mission-critical workloads to AWS to drive cost savings, accelerate innovation, and speed time-to-market include Swiss enterprises such as adfocus, AFO Marketing, Appway, COFCO International, Crisalix, Crowdhouse, DFRC (Data Fusion Research Center), Datwyler IT Services, Dentsu Tracking, DroneAnalytics, EF Education First, Endress+Hauser, enersis, Finnova, Fisch Asset Management, GSR Zug, Hexagon Leica Geosystems, Helvetia, Hilti, IATA (International Air Transport Association), Idorsia, Isobar, iptiQ, Kempinski, Kudelski Group, Menu.app, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), Novartis, Richemont, Ringier, SCOTT Sports, Swiss Re, and TX Group. Hot startups such as 1plusX, Advanon, Archilogic, Ava, Beekeeper, Billte, Bring!, ChemAlive, Coople, flovtec, Frontify, Genedata, KNIME, Medical Informatics, Medisanté, Meteomatics, Modum, Numbrs, Onedot, OTO, Pix4D, QoQa, SecuTix, Sitasys, Smallpdf, Smartfrog, and Uepaa have built their businesses on top of AWS, enabling them to scale rapidly and expand their geographic reach in minutes. In the Swiss public sector, organizations using AWS to transform the services they deliver to the citizens of the country include Computer Vision Lab (CVL) at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zürich), Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (RSI), Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), Swiss Post, the Swiss Federal Office of Topography (swisstopo), and more.</p><p>Based in Zurich, Ringier is the largest multi-national media company in Switzerland operating over 100 media brands in 19 countries. Since adopting AWS, Ringier has increased user engagement by 24 percent while tailoring content distribution, digital advertising, and marketplace strategy to their customer's needs. "A great reader experience is at the core of a successful media business model," said Zhao Wang, Head of Data Technology for Ringier. "Using AWS services, especially managed services with analytics and machine learning, we can better understand our readers' interests, improve content production, and optimize content distribution for Blick as well as many other renowned media brands – all tailored to our customers' needs. The planned opening of an AWS Region in Switzerland is great news for us as it reflects AWS's dedication to Switzerland."</p><p>Dentsu Tracking, a world leader in supply chain tracking and tracing technologies headquartered in Switzerland, also relies on AWS to drive its business. Dentsu helps their customers, which include some of the world's most well respected organizations such as the European Union (EU), Breitling, and the global sports brand HEAD, to gain maximum transparency and control over their supply chains. "We are using AWS services for the operation of an EU-wide tracking and tracing system, which is used by public authorities in the EU to fight against illicit trade, thereby preventing theft, under-declaration, and fiscal evasion," explains Philippe Castella, Managing Director at Dentsu Tracking. "The EU estimates that the system can help reduce the circulation of illicit goods by up to 20 percent. With more than 32 billion products tracked and 5 billion supply chain events linked to 750 thousand registered economic operators across 28 countries, this is by far the world's largest tracking and tracing regime of its kind. Using AWS serverless technologies, we have been able to get fast data management and content delivery in one interface. We can also rapidly develop new features and functionalities thanks to AWS helping to reduce the development and delivery time of new features by 50 percent."</p><p>Public sector organizations in Switzerland are also using AWS to lower the cost of their IT while speeding up innovation. One of these organizations is Swiss Post, the national postal service of Switzerland. Swiss Post has used more than 80 AWS services to modernize its IT applications and build new services for its customers. "AWS helps us stay ahead in an extremely dynamic business environment," says Christoph Siegrist, Enterprise Architect Cloud and Product Owner, Cloud Foundation at Swiss Post. "Some years ago, we handled hundreds of small parcels per day in our international small parcels business. Today, during peak times, we manage hundreds of small parcels per minute and our customers demand continuous improvement of our services. With new digital services like parcel-tracking apps to inform consumers about the status of their shipments, we're able to become far more efficient and provide a better overall experience to our customers. Our legacy applications made it difficult to meet these demands, and we could only do 1-2 new software releases per year, making quick changes impossible. Using AWS, we can now continuously integrate and deliver code changes and constantly add new features. We also automated our application management using AWS, leading to operational cost savings of more than 50 percent. We welcome the new AWS Region in Switzerland as we can only see it helping to further speed up innovation for Swiss Post and continue to lower our IT costs."</p><p>Another Swiss public sector organization using AWS to innovate is the public broadcaster Radiotelevisione svizzera (RSI). RSI is responsible for all radio and television broadcasting in the Italian language in Switzerland, and since moving to AWS, has been able to deliver new content to audiences twice as fast with an improved user experience while reducing its infrastructure costs by 75 percent. Antonio Civile, Head of Digital at RSI, said, "A high speed to market is crucial for editors and journalists at RSI to get their news out first. Today, training our editors and journalists on the new platform takes only 30 minutes instead of a full day, and we were able to cut the publishing time of Video on Demand content to the web by 50 percent. Using AWS, it also took us only four months to build our cloud solution and create a web interface that allows us to run seven video and three audio channels. The news of an AWS Region in Switzerland will only further help us to get the latest information into the hands of Swiss citizens faster."</p><p>Swiss startups are also using AWS to rapidly innovate and expand their businesses around the world. One example of this is Ava AG (Ava), a Swiss startup that enables women in 36 countries worldwide to get real-time information about their fertility, pregnancy, and general well-being by tracking their cycle via the Ava bracelet. Ava has been all-in on AWS since launching their business in 2014. Following the outbreak of COVID 19 this year, Ava used AWS to develop an infection detection algorithm to limit the risk of disease spread and improve prognosis for infected patients. Reto Zumbuehl, Chief Technology Officer at Ava, said, "We have always relied on AWS to scale our business as well as manage and analyze large amounts of data generated by our wearables. Every night our bracelets collect more than 3 million data points globally, including information about skin temperature, resting pulse rate, breathing rate, heart rate variability ratio, and perfusion, and we analyze more than 30 terabytes of data in just 18 hours every week. All of the information we collect is very personal to our customers, so only the highest levels of security are acceptable for us. This is why we work with AWS. The data security offered by AWS makes it possible for us to continually protect our customer's data and provide them with personalized digital healthcare services predicting the exact time of their highest fertility. AWS bringing a region to Switzerland with the same high levels of data protection, user privacy, and regulatory compliance as their other regions around the world is great news for us and all startups in Switzerland."</p><p>Another rapidly growing business leveraging AWS is Beekeeper, which helps companies connect with their employees in real time and organize their work place digitally via an app that is used by more than 500 companies in 130 countries worldwide. Beekeeper has been using AWS since 2016 to run the majority of its IT infrastructure and the Beekeeper app, which offers functionality such as team chats, the management and scheduling of rosters, file sharing, analytics, and reporting. "In responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, we wanted to provide free access to our platform, introduce new features, and help our customers meet rapidly evolving challenges. Only AWS was able to help us do this," said Jason Brownbridge, Head of Operations at Beekeeper. "Using AWS allowed us to quickly develop and add features, such as a live news stream to help our customers share important information and smartFAQ chatbots to respond to employee questions faster. These new features increased usage of our platform by up to 50 percent. Using AWS's auto scaling features, we are able to keep up with this rapidly increasing demand and deliver an uptime of 99.9 percent for our customers while decreasing our service delivery costs by 40 percent. By bringing an AWS Region to Switzerland, we'll be able to maximize the benefits of the cloud for more customers, including those from the financial technology and financial services industries, and meet their requirements to keep their data in country."</p><p>Swiss-based AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners also welcome the news of the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region. The APN includes tens of thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Systems Integrators (SIs) around the world. AWS Partners build innovative solutions and services on AWS, and the APN helps by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support. APN SIs, consulting partners, and ISVs working in Switzerland such as 56k.Cloud, Amanox Solutions, copebit, COREXPERT by TeamWork, dbi services, ELCA Informatique SA, Innovation Process Technology AG (ipt), isobar technologies Switzerland, Netcloud, One Step Beyond Group, SmartWave, Swisscom, ti&amp;m, Trivadis, and Zühlke Technology Group help enterprise and public sector customers migrate to AWS, deploy mission-critical applications, and provide a full range of monitoring, automation, and management services for customers' AWS environments.</p><p>One AWS Partner using AWS to move Swiss enterprise businesses to the cloud is Swisscom, Switzerland's leading telecommunications company and one of its leading IT companies. Swisscom partners with AWS to provide customers such as SeedImpulse, a provider of orthopedic and medical software, with deep technical and industry expertise, helping them to adopt advanced technologies such as blockchain, IoT, machine learning, and more while reducing their IT costs by 75 percent. Urs Lehner, Head of Swisscom Business Customers, said of the new AWS Region, "AWS has a broad and deep portfolio of cloud services and a large network of experts. Learning that AWS is bringing a new region to Switzerland is good news for us and our joint customers."</p><p>Investing in Switzerland's Future</p><p>The new AWS Europe (Zurich) Region continues AWS's investment in Switzerland. As the number of Swiss customers has grown, so has the size of AWS's presence in the country. In April 2016, AWS opened its first Swiss office in Zurich, which was followed by a second office in Geneva in December 2017. In March 2017, AWS established two Points of Presence (PoPs) in Zurich, which deliver Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, AWS Shield, AWS WAF, and Lambda@Edge as well as Amazon Direct Connect to the country. AWS also continues to build teams of account managers, technical account managers, partner managers, systems engineers, solutions architects, professional services, and more roles to help customers of all sizes move to AWS.</p><p>For Swiss students and educators, the AWS Educate and AWS Academy programs are providing free resources to accelerate cloud-related learning and preparing today's students in Switzerland for the jobs of the future. Dozens of Swiss universities and business schools already participating in the AWS Educate program include Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH), Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zürich), HES-SO Valais-Wallis (HES-SO), Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil (HSR), University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), University of Applied Sciences and Arts South Switzerland (SUPSI), University of Basel, and Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI). Major institutions taking part in AWS Academy include University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), University of Applied Sciences OST, and International University of Geneva. AWS also offers a full range of training and certification programs to help those interested in the latest cloud computing technologies, best practices, and architectures to advance their technical skills and further support Swiss organizations in their digital transformation.</p><p>To help grow the next generation of Swiss enterprises, AWS supports startups in cities across Switzerland and launched AWS Activate in 2013. This program gives startups access to guidance and one-on-one time with AWS experts as well as web-based training, self-paced labs, customer support, third-party offers, and up to $100,000 in AWS service credits – all at no charge. This is in addition to the work that AWS already does with the venture capital community, startup accelerators, and incubators to help startups grow in the cloud. In Switzerland, AWS works with accelerator organizations such as F10, A&amp;I Kickstartaccelerator, TrustSquare, and Masschallenge as well as venture capital firms like CV VC, investiere, Venturelab, and Redalpine in order to support the rapid growth of their portfolio companies.</p><p>About Amazon Web Services </p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon </p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201101005091/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

Amazon Announces First Fulfillment Center in North Dakota

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Announces-First-Fulfillment-Center-in-North-Dakota/default.aspx

Amazon-Announces-First-Fulfillment-Center-in-North-Dakota

10/30/2020 11:45:00

Amazon Announces First Fulfillment Center in North Dakota

10/30/2020

2020

New one million square-foot site will be in Fargo and create 500 full-time jobs SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 30, 2020-- (NASDAQ: AMZN) – Amazon.com, Inc. plans to open its first fulfillment center in the state of North Dakota in Fargo. The site, which is anticipated to launch in 2021, will create 500 full-time jobs with industry leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one. At the new one million square-foot fulfillment center, employees will pack and ship large customer purchases such as sports equipment, patio furniture, fishing rods, pet food, kayaks, bicycles and other household goods. Amazon is a great place to work with highly competitive pay, benefits from day one, and training programs for in-demand jobs. On top of Amazon's industry-leading minimum starting wage of $15 per hour, full-time employees receive comprehensive benefits, including full medical, vision and dental insurance and a 401(k) with 50 percent company match, starting on day one. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families. Amazon employees have access to innovative programs like Career Choice, where Amazon will pay up to 95 percent of tuition for courses related to in-demand fields, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at Amazon. Since the program's launch, more than 25,000 employees across the globe have pursued degrees in game design and visual communications, nursing, IT programming and radiology, to name a few. Key Quotes: Alicia Boler Davis, Vice President of Global Customer Fulfillment, Amazon "Today is an exciting day for Amazon as we announce our first fulfillment center in North Dakota, bringing 500 full-time jobs with industry-leading pay and benefits to Fargo. Amazon leverages its scale for good and makes investments to support communities. We thank the local and state leaders for their support throughout the process, and we look forward to supporting the North Dakota community with great delivery options." Doug Burgum, Governor, North Dakota "We're excited and grateful for Amazon's substantial investment and the hundreds of jobs it will bring to our state. This is a testament to North Dakota's attractive business climate, appealing communities and the strong work ethic of our citizens, and we look forward to being part of the company's growth." John Hoeven, U.S. Senator, North Dakota "This is a welcome investment in Fargo and the surrounding communities, bringing approximately 500 jobs to the region. That's why we worked with the City of Fargo and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to secure the permit needed to construct the building on this property, and we look forward to its completion. Developments like this continue our state's record of growth due to the business-friendly environment we've worked to build." Dr. Tim Mahoney, Mayor, Fargo, North Dakota "Team Fargo worked expeditiously to advance this monumental project, which is a substantial win for our metro area and the entire state of North Dakota. Amazon's decision is additional proof that the greater Fargo region is one of the Midwest's best epicenters for businesses to relocate or expand. We are elated to welcome Amazon to the City of Far More!" Joe Raso, President and Chief Executive Officer, the Greater Fargo Moorhead EDC "From the beginning of this project in late spring to our announcement today, it has been a pleasure working with City of Fargo staff and leadership to support Amazon on this exciting opportunity for our region. We look forward to our continued work with Ryan Companies on the construction of this impressive facility, and with Amazon supporting their workforce development and operational needs." Amazon in North Dakota: From 2010-2019, Amazon has invested more than $239 million in North Dakota, including infrastructure and compensation to employees in the state. Amazon's investments in the state contributed an additional more than $168 million into the state's GDP over that same time period. Amazon's worldwide fulfillment network supports businesses of all sizes through its Fulfillment by Amazon offering, and many of those local businesses are based in North Dakota. There are more than 2,000 independent authors and small and medium-sized businesses in the state growing their businesses and reaching new customers with Amazon. Additional Resources: Fulfillment center images and b-roll: https://press.aboutamazon.com/fulfillment-centers See latest Amazon news on the Day One blog: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/ North Dakota Investment Map: https://www.aboutamazon.com/investing-in-the-u-s About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201030005548/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>New one million square-foot site will be in Fargo and create 500 full-time jobs</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 30, 2020-- (NASDAQ: AMZN) – Amazon.com, Inc. plans to open its first fulfillment center in the state of North Dakota in Fargo. The site, which is anticipated to launch in 2021, will create 500 full-time jobs with industry leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one.</p><p>At the new one million square-foot fulfillment center, employees will pack and ship large customer purchases such as sports equipment, patio furniture, fishing rods, pet food, kayaks, bicycles and other household goods.</p><p>Amazon is a great place to work with highly competitive pay, benefits from day one, and training programs for in-demand jobs. On top of Amazon's industry-leading minimum starting wage of $15 per hour, full-time employees receive comprehensive benefits, including full medical, vision and dental insurance and a 401(k) with 50 percent company match, starting on day one. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families.</p><p>Amazon employees have access to innovative programs like Career Choice, where Amazon will pay up to 95 percent of tuition for courses related to in-demand fields, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at Amazon. Since the program's launch, more than 25,000 employees across the globe have pursued degrees in game design and visual communications, nursing, IT programming and radiology, to name a few.</p><p>Key Quotes:</p><p>Alicia Boler Davis, Vice President of Global Customer Fulfillment, Amazon</p><p>"Today is an exciting day for Amazon as we announce our first fulfillment center in North Dakota, bringing 500 full-time jobs with industry-leading pay and benefits to Fargo. Amazon leverages its scale for good and makes investments to support communities. We thank the local and state leaders for their support throughout the process, and we look forward to supporting the North Dakota community with great delivery options."</p><p>Doug Burgum, Governor, North Dakota</p><p>"We're excited and grateful for Amazon's substantial investment and the hundreds of jobs it will bring to our state. This is a testament to North Dakota's attractive business climate, appealing communities and the strong work ethic of our citizens, and we look forward to being part of the company's growth."</p><p>John Hoeven, U.S. Senator, North Dakota</p><p>"This is a welcome investment in Fargo and the surrounding communities, bringing approximately 500 jobs to the region. That's why we worked with the City of Fargo and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to secure the permit needed to construct the building on this property, and we look forward to its completion. Developments like this continue our state's record of growth due to the business-friendly environment we've worked to build."</p><p>Dr. Tim Mahoney, Mayor, Fargo, North Dakota</p><p>"Team Fargo worked expeditiously to advance this monumental project, which is a substantial win for our metro area and the entire state of North Dakota. Amazon's decision is additional proof that the greater Fargo region is one of the Midwest's best epicenters for businesses to relocate or expand. We are elated to welcome Amazon to the City of Far More!"</p><p>Joe Raso, President and Chief Executive Officer, the Greater Fargo Moorhead EDC</p><p>"From the beginning of this project in late spring to our announcement today, it has been a pleasure working with City of Fargo staff and leadership to support Amazon on this exciting opportunity for our region. We look forward to our continued work with Ryan Companies on the construction of this impressive facility, and with Amazon supporting their workforce development and operational needs."</p><p>Amazon in North Dakota:</p><ul><li>From 2010-2019, Amazon has invested more than $239 million in North Dakota, including infrastructure and compensation to employees in the state.</li><li>Amazon's investments in the state contributed an additional more than $168 million into the state's GDP over that same time period.</li><li>Amazon's worldwide fulfillment network supports businesses of all sizes through its Fulfillment by Amazon offering, and many of those local businesses are based in North Dakota. There are more than 2,000 independent authors and small and medium-sized businesses in the state growing their businesses and reaching new customers with Amazon.</li></ul><p>Additional Resources:</p><ul><li>Fulfillment center images and b-roll: https://press.aboutamazon.com/fulfillment-centers</li><li>See latest Amazon news on the Day One blog: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/</li><li>North Dakota Investment Map: https://www.aboutamazon.com/investing-in-the-u-s</li></ul><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201030005548/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>

Amazon.com Announces Third Quarter Results

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon.com-Announces-Third-Quarter-Results/default.aspx

Amazon.com-Announces-Third-Quarter-Results

10/29/2020 16:01:00

Amazon.com Announces Third Quarter Results

10/29/2020

2020

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 29, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced financial results for its third quarter ended September 30, 2020. Operating cash flow increased 56% to $55.3 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $35.3 billion for the trailing twelve months ended September 30, 2019. Free cash flow increased to $29.5 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $23.5 billion for the trailing twelve months ended September 30, 2019. Free cash flow less principal repayments of finance leases and financing obligations increased to $18.4 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $14.6 billion for the trailing twelve months ended September 30, 2019. Free cash flow less equipment finance leases and principal repayments of all other finance leases and financing obligations increased to $17.9 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $10.5 billion for the trailing twelve months ended September 30, 2019. Common shares outstanding plus shares underlying stock-based awards totaled 518 million on September 30, 2020, compared with 511 million one year ago. Net sales increased 37% to $96.1 billion in the third quarter, compared with $70.0 billion in third quarter 2019. Excluding the $691 million favorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, net sales increased 36% compared with third quarter 2019. Operating income increased to $6.2 billion in the third quarter, compared with operating income of $3.2 billion in third quarter 2019. Net income increased to $6.3 billion in the third quarter, or $12.37 per diluted share, compared with net income of $2.1 billion, or $4.23 per diluted share, in third quarter 2019. "Two years ago, we increased Amazon's minimum wage to $15 for all full-time, part-time, temporary, and seasonal employees across the U.S. and challenged other large employers to do the same. Best Buy and Target have stepped up, and we hope other large employers will also make the jump to $15. Now would be a great time," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. "Offering jobs with industry-leading pay and great healthcare, including to entry-level and front-line employees, is even more meaningful in a time like this, and we're proud to have created over 400,000 jobs this year alone. We're seeing more customers than ever shopping early for their holiday gifts, which is just one of the signs that this is going to be an unprecedented holiday season. Big thank you to our employees and selling partners around the world who've been busy getting ready to deliver for customers this holiday." Highlights Investing in Jobs and Employees Amazon announced that it is creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs around the world for people at all skill levels and stages of their careers, including: 100,000 new permanent jobs with industry-leading pay of at least $15 per hour, benefits starting on day one, sign-on bonuses of up to $1,000 in select U.S. cities, and access to company-subsidized upskilling programs like Career Choice. This hiring was part of Amazon opening 100 new operations buildings across North America. 100,000 new seasonal jobs with Amazon Air, logistics, fulfillment centers, sortation centers, and global specialty fulfillment teams in the U.S. and Canada. 10,000 corporate and technology jobs in Bellevue, WA as part of the continued expansion of Amazon's Puget Sound headquarters, and 7,000 new jobs at Tech Hubs in Dallas, Detroit, Denver, New York, Phoenix, San Diego, Toronto, and Vancouver. 10,000 new permanent jobs in the UK, bringing the total in the country to 40,000; and thousands of new permanent jobs in Germany, bringing the total in the country to 16,000. In India, Amazon announced the expansion of its operations network with 10 new fulfillment centers, 5 new sortation centers, nearly 200 delivery stations, and over 100,000 seasonal jobs to help meet customer demand during the festive season. The company also launched an all-women delivery station in the state of Gujarat – the second of its kind in the country and part of the company's ongoing efforts to provide more opportunities for women to build careers at Amazon. More than 320,000 people attended Amazon's Career Day, a virtual event that provided insights, tips, and advice to job seekers on how to build their career and apply for more than 130,000 corporate, technology, and operations positions available at Amazon in North America. Amazon received a record 384,000 applications for roles in Canada and the U.S. within a week of announcing the event. Amazon has promoted more than 35,000 people across its U.S. operations network this year, and more than 30,000 people have participated in Career Choice, an innovative program to upskill employees interested in pursuing a future outside Amazon. Over half of the tens of thousands of program participants this year are from underrepresented minority groups. Amazon Studios and Howard University announced they will partner for a second year of the Howard Entertainment Program, which aims to further diversify the entertainment industry by creating a pipeline of underrepresented talent, including Black students, through internships and other educational opportunities. Amazon continues to ramp up its in-house COVID-19 testing program to keep front-line employees safe, with capacity reaching 50,000 tests a day across 650 sites by November. Amazon was named to multiple leading rankings and awards, including: #2 on the Forbes World's Best Employers, a survey of workers on satisfaction with their employers' COVID-19 response, talent development, gender equality, social responsibility, and more; #3 on the Axios Harris Poll 100, Amazon's eighth year in a row in the top 3 of this brand reputation survey; and #4 on Morning Consult's Most Loved Brands in America, a measure of favorability, trust, and community impact. Supporting Communities Amazon announced plans to add more than 3,000 new schools to Amazon Future Engineer, a four-part program that funds high-quality, age-appropriate computer science curriculum for students and professional development for teachers. With the addition of these new schools, Amazon Future Engineer will expand to reach over 550,000 K-12 students across more than 5,000 elementary, middle, and high schools in underserved communities. Amazon donated more than one million emergency aid items, including water, generators, air filters, food, KN95 masks, and cleaning supplies, to community partners providing disaster relief to people affected by wildfires in California, Oregon, and Washington, as well as Hurricane Laura along the Gulf Coast. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon expanded its Right Now Needs Fund in the Puget Sound region and launched a new fund focused on Northern Virginia. The $3.5 million donation will provide students located near Amazon's two headquarters with immediate access to food, shelter, clothing, school supplies, and more to help eliminate barriers to learning and ensure students can focus on education throughout the school year. To support communities disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, Amazon announced it will make millions of dollars in product and monetary donations to more than a thousand charities this holiday season in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Spain, the UK, the U.S., and more. Protecting the Planet Mercedes-Benz, Best Buy, McKinstry, Real Betis, Schneider Electric, and Siemens signed The Climate Pledge, a commitment co-founded by Amazon and Global Optimism to achieve net-zero carbon by 2040, a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement. CarbonCure, Pachama, Redwood Materials, Rivian, and Turntide Technologies were the first companies to receive investments from Amazon as part of The Climate Pledge Fund, a $2 billion fund that invests in visionary companies whose product and service solutions will facilitate the transition to a zero-carbon economy. In Europe, Amazon announced it will add 1,800 electric delivery vehicles from Mercedes-Benz Vans to its delivery fleet—the largest order of electric vehicles from Mercedes-Benz Vans to date. Amazon unveiled its first custom electric delivery vehicle, designed and built in partnership with Rivian. The new vehicles will make their first deliveries to Amazon customers in 2021. As early as 2022, there will be 10,000 of these vehicles on roads in the U.S. and EU, and all 100,000 vehicles are expected to be on the road by 2030. In the U.S. and EU, Amazon launched Climate Pledge Friendly, a new program that identifies products with one or more of 19 different sustainability certifications, making it easy for customers to discover and shop for more sustainable products in Amazon's store. Products identified as Climate Pledge Friendly meet standards that help preserve the natural world, such as reducing the carbon footprint of shipments to customers. Amazon also announced Compact by Design, a new sustainability certification for products with a more efficient design that leads to carbon emission reductions by requiring less packaging or less frequent purchases by customers. Amazon announced its most sustainable devices ever. The new Echo and Fire TV devices include 100% post-consumer recycled fabric, 100% recycled die-cast aluminum, and 30-50% post-consumer recycled plastic, and new features like Low Power Mode and an energy dashboard will enable customers to understand and reduce the energy consumption of their devices. Amazon is building new wind and solar farms to produce clean energy equivalent to the electricity used by every customer's Echo device. The company has said it will continue building new renewable energy projects until it accounts for the energy consumption of all Amazon devices. Amazon announced its first operational wind farm outside the U.S. in Bäckhammar, Sweden. The wind farm is expected to deliver 280,000-megawatt hours of clean energy annually into the Swedish grid. Empowering Small and Medium-Sized Businesses Amazon hosted Amazon Accelerate, its largest-ever U.S. event to share best practices with small businesses on how to serve customers in Amazon's store and grow their businesses. At the virtual event, Amazon also announced plans to invest billions of dollars to help small and medium-sized businesses succeed, and it outlined plans to onboard an additional 100,000 small and medium-sized businesses in the next year. Amazon hosted its second annual Ignite Digital Festival for more than 1,500 Delivery Service Partners (DSP). The virtual event showcased product and technology innovations to help them succeed, including over 250 logistics program and product changes, from routing updates and navigation improvements on the drivers' delivery app to state-of-the-art safety technology adjustments. Since the DSP program launched over two years ago, there are now more than 1,700 owners across Canada, Germany, Spain, the UK, and the U.S. who have created over 100,000 jobs in their communities, delivered more than 2.2 billion packages worldwide, and generated over $5 billion in revenue for their small businesses. Amazon India hosted Stand for Handmade, a 10-week program to help boost sales for Indian artisans, weavers, and women entrepreneurs by waiving selling fees and promoting local, handmade products to customers. Participating Karigar (artisans) and Saheli (women) sellers more than doubled their sales during this period, and more than 200 new sellers joined the Karigar program. Amazon Australia launched Amazon Launchpad Innovation Grants, an initiative to celebrate innovation by Australian start-ups, entrepreneurs, and small and medium-sized businesses. The program will offer grant packages to organizations with innovative products that support Australians through the pandemic. Shopping and Entertainment In 19 countries, Amazon's Prime Day kicked-off the holiday shopping season on October 13-14 with the two biggest days ever for small and medium businesses in Amazon's stores. Third-party sellers—most of which are small and medium-sized businesses—surpassed $3.5 billion in sales on Prime Day—a nearly 60% year-over-year increase, growing even more than Amazon's retail business. Prime members saved more than $1.4 billion, taking advantage of deep discounts and incredible deals over the two-day event. Amazon India kicked off the Great Indian Festival on October 17, a month-long celebration with deals across popular categories such as smartphones, appliances, televisions, and consumer electronics. Sellers and brand partners experienced the biggest two days of sales in the festival's history. Amazon India also hosted Prime Day on August 6-7, during which twice as many customers became Prime members compared to the previous year. Amazon launched Prime in Turkey, bringing the total number of countries with Prime to 20. Prime in Turkey includes free, fast delivery on thousands of items across 20 categories, as well as access to Prime Video, Prime Gaming, and exclusive deals on Prime Day and throughout the year. Amazon.se launched in Sweden, offering customers more than 150 million products to choose from with everyday low prices and free delivery for eligible orders above SEK 229. Amazon announced that Project Zero—a tool enabling brands to remove potential counterfeit products in Amazon's store—is available in 17 countries around the world, with Australia, Brazil, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Turkey, and the UAE recently added to the program. Project Zero combines Amazon's advanced technology and machine learning with the sophisticated knowledge that brands have of their own intellectual property to drive counterfeits to zero. Amazon launched Amazon One, a fast, convenient, contactless way for people to use their palm to enter, identify, and pay. The highly-secure service uses custom-built algorithms and hardware to create a person's unique palm signature. Amazon One is currently available in two Amazon Go stores in Seattle, with plans to expand to additional Amazon stores. The first Amazon Fresh grocery stores opened in Woodland Hills and Irvine, CA. Amazon Fresh offers a seamless grocery shopping experience whether customers are shopping in-store or online, consistently low prices, a wide assortment of national brands and freshly prepared foods made daily, and free same-day delivery and pick-up for Prime members. The stores also offer new ways to make grocery shopping more convenient, including the Amazon Dash Cart, which enables customers to skip the checkout line, and new Alexa features to help customers manage their shopping lists and better navigate aisles. Amazon Fashion announced the launch of Luxury Stores, a new shopping experience for eligible U.S. Prime members, offering established and emerging luxury fashion and beauty brands. The Amazon Studios global original movies slate continues to grow, with additions such as Sacha Baron Cohen's political satire Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, which recently launched globally on Prime Video, as well as Tom Clancy's Without Remorse, starring Michael B. Jordan, slated to launch in 2021. Amazon premiered several new and returning Amazon Original series, including The Boys, Breathe into the Shadows, Bandish Bandits, Mirzapur, and Putham Pudhu Kaalai in India, Peep Time and Documental S8 in Japan, Pan y Circo in Mexico, and All or Nothing: Tottenham Hotspur in the UK. Amazon Prime Video announced that live international rugby games will be exclusively available to UK Prime customers this winter with a brand new tournament called the Autumn Nations Cup. The tournament will feature the Six Nations (England, France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland, and Wales) as well as two guest teams from Fiji and Georgia. Amazon Music announced multiple new services and features, including partnering with Twitch to add livestreaming to the Amazon Music app, enabling fans to engage with artists in brand-new ways and move seamlessly between livestreams and recorded music; launching podcasts for customers in Germany, Japan, the UK, and the U.S., across all tiers of service at no additional cost; and expanding its HD streaming tier to Canada, France, Italy, and Spain. Amazon announced the launch of Prime Gaming, a new service that lets Prime members enjoy free, exclusive content for their favorite PC, console, and mobile games, plus a collection of PC games for free every month. Prime Gaming is included with Prime memberships and Prime Video subscriptions in over 200 countries and territories. Amazon Devices and Alexa Amazon introduced a reimagined family of Echo devices. The new Echo combines the best of Echo and Echo Plus into a single device with an all-new design, built-in smart home hub, and more powerful speakers; Echo Dot and Echo Dot with Clock feature a powerful speaker packed into a compact design; Echo Dot Kids Edition comes in Panda and Tiger designs with even more features for kids to enjoy; and the all-new Echo Show 10 now features a brilliant 10-inch, adaptive HD display that automatically moves to stay in view as you interact with Alexa. Amazon announced the new Fire TV Stick and Fire TV Stick Lite. Customers have purchased over 100 million Fire TV devices globally, and Fire TV customers are streaming billions of hours each month. The new Fire TV devices are 50% more powerful while using 50% less power than the previous Fire TV Stick. Amazon also introduced a redesigned Fire TV experience that provides new content-discovery features, enhanced Alexa voice integration, and user profiles for personalized recommendations. Amazon announced new ways for customers to connect their devices with Amazon Sidewalk, a shared network that helps devices like Amazon Echo, Ring Security Cams, outdoor lights, and motion sensors work better at home and beyond the front door. Amazon announced the latest AI advancements that make Alexa more natural, conversational, and useful. These advancements include a new teaching capability that helps Alexa get smarter by asking questions to fill gaps in her understanding, and natural turn-taking that will allow customers to interact with Alexa at their own pace without using a wake word, even when multiple people are talking. Amazon introduced new features and services that continue to make Alexa smarter, like Guard Plus and the Care Hub, that help customers keep their homes and loved ones safe. Amazon also announced new Alexa privacy controls including the option for customers to not save voice recordings or simply say, "Alexa, delete everything I've said" to delete their voice history. Amazon expanded Alexa Calling and Messaging capabilities to help customers stay connected with the addition of group calling and integrations with Zoom and Amazon Chime. AT&T customers can also link eligible mobile numbers to make and receive hands-free calls with Alexa. Amazon announced customers have connected more than 100 million smart home devices to Alexa, and introduced smart home features like additional Hunches, that let customers choose to have Alexa proactively act on their behalf. Amazon introduced new devices and features to help kids and families learn, stay connected, and have fun together. Kids can now make Alexa Announcements with their Fire Kids Edition Tablets, help build reading fluency with Reading Sidekick, and enjoy a custom-built kids experience with the new Echo Dot Kids Edition. Amazon announced Amazon Halo, a new service dedicated to helping customers improve their health and wellness. Amazon Halo combines a suite of AI-powered health features that provide actionable insights into overall wellness via the new Amazon Halo app with the Amazon Halo Band, which uses multiple advanced sensors to provide the information necessary to power Halo insights. Amazon announced Luna, a new cloud gaming service that allows customers to play high-quality games on devices they already own. As part of early access, players will have access to more than 100 games through the Luna+ game channel and Ubisoft channel, with more games to come. Luna is built on AWS and harnesses the power of the industry's broadest and deepest cloud platform. Amazon also announced Luna Controller, which is Alexa-enabled and connects directly to the cloud for lower latency gaming. Luna will be available on Fire TV, PC, and Mac as well as on web apps for iPhone and iPad, with Android coming soon. Ring announced several new products and features, including a new category of devices for the car (Ring Car Alarm, Ring Car Cam, Ring Car Connect API, and Ring Car Connect for Tesla), the autonomous flying indoor security camera Ring Always Home Cam, and a new Mailbox Sensor. Amazon announced new eero Pro 6 and eero 6 mesh wifi systems that feature Wi-Fi 6 support for faster speeds, higher performance, and better support for simultaneous connected devices. Amazon continues to support developers and startups with new Alexa tools and features, investments, and programs. Amazon announced that Dolby, Facebook, Garmin, and Xiaomi have joined the Voice Interoperability Initiative, a program to ensure voice-enabled products provide customers with choice and flexibility through multiple, interoperable voice services. The Alexa Fund invested in health and fitness companies Tonal and Zwift; enterprise AI company Fiddler Labs; maker of smart sensor chips Aspinity; and creators of personalized sound environments Endel. The investments are in addition to the launch of two new programs in collaboration with Blavity's AfroTech World and All Raise to support underrepresented founders. The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to approve Project Kuiper, a low earth orbit satellite constellation capable of providing reliable, affordable broadband to unserved and underserved communities around the world. Amazon will invest more than $10 billion in the initiative, creating jobs and infrastructure around the U.S. that will enable the team to deliver on its vision for the project. Blink launched Blink Indoor and Outdoor, two new wireless smart home security cameras that offer two-year battery life, HD video, new privacy zones features, and local or cloud storage options for saved clips. Cameras are available for purchase in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, the UK, and the U.S. Amazon Web Services AWS announced significant customer momentum with new commitments and migrations, including: leading payments technology company Global Payments, to manage issuer processing and handling of their approximately 27 billion transactions processed annually; biotechnology company Moderna, to accelerate the development of messenger RNA medicines to prevent and fight diseases, including a vaccine candidate against COVID-19; restaurant chain Jack in the Box to enhance digital ordering, dining, and customer service experiences for its guests and to drive operational efficiency across its more than 2,200 restaurants; premier visual effects company Weta Digital to accelerate rendering of graphical visual effects, free up talent and resources, and deliver on its multi-year movie slate; leading job site Indeed to migrate more than 30 petabytes of data to AWS, reducing its global data center footprint by 40% while streamlining its IT operations; household appliance manufacturer Arçelik to use analytics, IoT, and machine learning services to build smart factories, automated production lines, and cloud connected appliances; IT services company and AWS Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting Partner DXC Technology to replace its legacy contact center technology and drive automation, cutting operational costs by 40%, reducing volume of common calls by up to 60%, and migrating 1,000 service desk seats; hotel franchise Best Western International to migrate largest contact center within one month and move all agents to remote within one week, enabling seamless support for 14 languages in over 35 countries while reducing costs by 40%; and cold chain provider Carrier to transform how temperature-sensitive goods such as food, medicines, and vaccines are moved around the world by enhancing safety, reliability, and efficiency. AWS and The National Football League (NFL) announced the first six new advanced stats for the 2020 season through the NFL's Next Gen Stats platform powered by AWS. One of the new stats, "Expected Rush Yards," is born out of the NFL's Big Data Bowl competition that AWS sponsored during the NFL Combine. The new advanced stats combine player tracking and machine learning to bring new insights to game play in the 2020 season. AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Braket, a fully managed service that provides a development environment to help customers explore and design quantum algorithms. Quantum computing has the potential to solve computational problems that are beyond the reach of classical computers by harnessing the laws of quantum mechanics to build more powerful tools for processing information. Customers can use Amazon Braket to experiment with quantum algorithms through simulated quantum computers running on computing resources in AWS to help them verify their implementations. When ready, customers can use Amazon Braket to run their quantum algorithms on their choice of quantum processors based on different technologies, including systems from D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti. AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Timestream, a new time series database for IoT and operational applications that can scale to process trillions of time series events per day up to 1,000 times faster than relational databases, and at as low as 1/10th the cost. Amazon Timestream provides a serverless database service that is purpose-built to manage the scale and complexity of time series – such as data collected from industrial equipment, website clickstream logs, and data center infrastructure – so customers can analyze more data more easily and cost effectively, giving them the ability to derive additional insights and drive better business decisions from their IoT and operational monitoring applications. AWS announced the general availability of five AWS Wavelength Zones in Atlanta, Boston, New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Washington D.C., enabling developers to build applications that deliver ultra-low latency to mobile devices and users by deploying AWS compute and storage at the edge of Verizon's 5G network. With AWS Wavelength, developers can serve use cases that require ultra-low latency like machine learning inference at the edge, autonomous industrial equipment, smart cars and cities, Internet of Things (IoT), and Augmented and Virtual Reality. AWS is partnering with Verizon to bring AWS Wavelength to additional customers across the United States, and with other leading telecommunications providers, including Vodafone, SK Telecom, and KDDI, to launch Wavelength Zones across Europe, South Korea, and Japan in 2020 and beyond. For the tenth consecutive year, AWS is positioned in the Leader's quadrant in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Service (IaaS & PaaS, or "CIPS"), and once again placed highest in Ability to Execute and furthest in Completeness of Vision. AWS announced the general availability of Amazon EBS io2 volume, the next generation Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). The new io2 volume is designed for 100x higher volume durability (99.999%) when compared to the 99.9% durability offered by io1 Amazon EBS volumes. Higher volume durability reduces the likelihood of storage failures and makes the primary copy of customers' data more resilient, resulting in better application availability. With io2, customers can drive 10x higher input/output operations per second (IOPS) from their provisioned storage at the same price as io1, so performance improves significantly without increasing storage cost. AWS announced the general availability of AWS Nitro Enclaves, a new capability that makes it easier for customers to create isolated compute environments within Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances to securely process and protect highly sensitive data. AWS Nitro Enclaves helps customers reduce the attack surface for their applications by providing a trusted, highly isolated, and hardened environment for data processing. Each Enclave is a virtual machine created using the same Nitro Hypervisor technology that provides CPU and memory isolation for Amazon EC2 instances, but with no persistent storage, no administrator or operator access, and no external networking. Financial Guidance The following forward-looking statements reflect Amazon.com's expectations as of October 29, 2020, and are subject to substantial uncertainty. Our results are inherently unpredictable and may be materially affected by many factors, such as fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, changes in global economic conditions and customer spending, world events, the rate of growth of the Internet, online commerce, and cloud services, and the various factors detailed below. This guidance reflects our estimates as of October 29, 2020 regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our operations, including those discussed above, and is highly dependent on numerous factors that we may not be able to predict or control, including: the duration and scope of the pandemic, including any recurrence; actions taken by governments, businesses, and individuals in response to the pandemic; the impact of the pandemic on global and regional economies and economic activity, workforce staffing and productivity, and our significant and continuing spending on employee safety measures; our ability to continue operations in affected areas; and consumer demand and spending patterns, as well as the effects on suppliers, creditors, and third-party sellers, all of which are uncertain. This guidance also assumes the impacts on consumer demand and spending patterns, including impacts due to concerns over the current economic outlook, will be in line with those experienced during the fourth quarter to date, and the additional assumptions set forth below. However, it is not possible to determine the ultimate impact on our operations for the fourth quarter, or whether other currently unanticipated direct or indirect consequences of the pandemic are reasonably likely to materially affect our operations. Fourth Quarter 2020 Guidance Net sales are expected to be between $112.0 billion and $121.0 billion, or to grow between 28% and 38% compared with fourth quarter 2019. This guidance anticipates a favorable impact of approximately 90 basis points from foreign exchange rates. Operating income is expected to be between $1.0 billion and $4.5 billion, compared with $3.9 billion in fourth quarter 2019. This guidance assumes approximately $4.0 billion of costs related to COVID-19. This guidance assumes, among other things, that no additional business acquisitions, investments, restructurings, or legal settlements are concluded. A conference call will be webcast live today at 2:30 p.m. PT/5:30 p.m. ET, and will be available for at least three months at amazon.com/ir. This call will contain forward-looking statements and other material information regarding the Company's financial and operating results. These forward-looking statements are inherently difficult to predict. Actual results could differ materially for a variety of reasons, including, in addition to the factors discussed above, the amount that Amazon.com invests in new business opportunities and the timing of those investments, the mix of products and services sold to customers, the mix of net sales derived from products as compared with services, the extent to which we owe income or other taxes, competition, management of growth, potential fluctuations in operating results, international growth and expansion, the outcomes of claims, litigation, government investigations, and other proceedings, fulfillment, sortation, delivery, and data center optimization, risks of inventory management, seasonality, the degree to which the Company enters into, maintains, and develops commercial agreements, proposed and completed acquisitions and strategic transactions, payments risks, and risks of fulfillment throughput and productivity. Other risks and uncertainties include, among others, risks related to new products, services, and technologies, system interruptions, government regulation and taxation, and fraud. In addition, additional or unforeseen effects from the COVID-19 pandemic and the global economic climate may give rise to or amplify many of these risks. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings. Our investor relations website is amazon.com/ir and we encourage investors to use it as a way of easily finding information about us. We promptly make available on this website, free of charge, the reports that we file or furnish with the SEC, corporate governance information (including our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics), and select press releases, which may contain material information about us, and you may subscribe to be notified of new information posted to this site.

<p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 29, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced financial results for its third quarter ended September 30, 2020.</p><ul><li>Operating cash flow increased 56% to $55.3 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $35.3 billion for the trailing twelve months ended September 30, 2019.</li><li>Free cash flow increased to $29.5 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $23.5 billion for the trailing twelve months ended September 30, 2019.</li><li>Free cash flow less principal repayments of finance leases and financing obligations increased to $18.4 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $14.6 billion for the trailing twelve months ended September 30, 2019.</li><li>Free cash flow less equipment finance leases and principal repayments of all other finance leases and financing obligations increased to $17.9 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $10.5 billion for the trailing twelve months ended September 30, 2019.</li><li>Common shares outstanding plus shares underlying stock-based awards totaled 518 million on September 30, 2020, compared with 511 million one year ago.</li><li>Net sales increased 37% to $96.1 billion in the third quarter, compared with $70.0 billion in third quarter 2019. Excluding the $691 million favorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, net sales increased 36% compared with third quarter 2019.</li><li>Operating income increased to $6.2 billion in the third quarter, compared with operating income of $3.2 billion in third quarter 2019.</li><li>Net income increased to $6.3 billion in the third quarter, or $12.37 per diluted share, compared with net income of $2.1 billion, or $4.23 per diluted share, in third quarter 2019.</li></ul><p>"Two years ago, we increased Amazon's minimum wage to $15 for all full-time, part-time, temporary, and seasonal employees across the U.S. and challenged other large employers to do the same. Best Buy and Target have stepped up, and we hope other large employers will also make the jump to $15. Now would be a great time," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. "Offering jobs with industry-leading pay and great healthcare, including to entry-level and front-line employees, is even more meaningful in a time like this, and we're proud to have created over 400,000 jobs this year alone. We're seeing more customers than ever shopping early for their holiday gifts, which is just one of the signs that this is going to be an unprecedented holiday season. Big thank you to our employees and selling partners around the world who've been busy getting ready to deliver for customers this holiday."</p><p>Highlights</p><p><em>Investing in Jobs and Employees</em></p><ul><li>Amazon announced that it is creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs around the world for people at all skill levels and stages of their careers, including:<ul><li>100,000 new permanent jobs with industry-leading pay of at least $15 per hour, benefits starting on day one, sign-on bonuses of up to $1,000 in select U.S. cities, and access to company-subsidized upskilling programs like Career Choice. This hiring was part of Amazon opening 100 new operations buildings across North America.</li><li>100,000 new seasonal jobs with Amazon Air, logistics, fulfillment centers, sortation centers, and global specialty fulfillment teams in the U.S. and Canada.</li><li>10,000 corporate and technology jobs in Bellevue, WA as part of the continued expansion of Amazon's Puget Sound headquarters, and 7,000 new jobs at Tech Hubs in Dallas, Detroit, Denver, New York, Phoenix, San Diego, Toronto, and Vancouver.</li><li>10,000 new permanent jobs in the UK, bringing the total in the country to 40,000; and thousands of new permanent jobs in Germany, bringing the total in the country to 16,000.</li><li>In India, Amazon announced the expansion of its operations network with 10 new fulfillment centers, 5 new sortation centers, nearly 200 delivery stations, and over 100,000 seasonal jobs to help meet customer demand during the festive season. The company also launched an all-women delivery station in the state of Gujarat – the second of its kind in the country and part of the company's ongoing efforts to provide more opportunities for women to build careers at Amazon.</li></ul></li><li>More than 320,000 people attended Amazon's Career Day, a virtual event that provided insights, tips, and advice to job seekers on how to build their career and apply for more than 130,000 corporate, technology, and operations positions available at Amazon in North America. Amazon received a record 384,000 applications for roles in Canada and the U.S. within a week of announcing the event.</li><li>Amazon has promoted more than 35,000 people across its U.S. operations network this year, and more than 30,000 people have participated in Career Choice, an innovative program to upskill employees interested in pursuing a future outside Amazon. Over half of the tens of thousands of program participants this year are from underrepresented minority groups.</li><li>Amazon Studios and Howard University announced they will partner for a second year of the Howard Entertainment Program, which aims to further diversify the entertainment industry by creating a pipeline of underrepresented talent, including Black students, through internships and other educational opportunities.</li><li>Amazon continues to ramp up its in-house COVID-19 testing program to keep front-line employees safe, with capacity reaching 50,000 tests a day across 650 sites by November.</li><li>Amazon was named to multiple leading rankings and awards, including: #2 on the Forbes World's Best Employers, a survey of workers on satisfaction with their employers' COVID-19 response, talent development, gender equality, social responsibility, and more; #3 on the Axios Harris Poll 100, Amazon's eighth year in a row in the top 3 of this brand reputation survey; and #4 on Morning Consult's Most Loved Brands in America, a measure of favorability, trust, and community impact.</li></ul><p><em>Supporting Communities</em></p><ul><li>Amazon announced plans to add more than 3,000 new schools to Amazon Future Engineer, a four-part program that funds high-quality, age-appropriate computer science curriculum for students and professional development for teachers. With the addition of these new schools, Amazon Future Engineer will expand to reach over 550,000 K-12 students across more than 5,000 elementary, middle, and high schools in underserved communities.</li><li>Amazon donated more than one million emergency aid items, including water, generators, air filters, food, KN95 masks, and cleaning supplies, to community partners providing disaster relief to people affected by wildfires in California, Oregon, and Washington, as well as Hurricane Laura along the Gulf Coast.</li><li>Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon expanded its Right Now Needs Fund in the Puget Sound region and launched a new fund focused on Northern Virginia. The $3.5 million donation will provide students located near Amazon's two headquarters with immediate access to food, shelter, clothing, school supplies, and more to help eliminate barriers to learning and ensure students can focus on education throughout the school year.</li><li>To support communities disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, Amazon announced it will make millions of dollars in product and monetary donations to more than a thousand charities this holiday season in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Spain, the UK, the U.S., and more.</li></ul><p><em>Protecting the Planet</em></p><ul><li>Mercedes-Benz, Best Buy, McKinstry, Real Betis, Schneider Electric, and Siemens signed The Climate Pledge, a commitment co-founded by Amazon and Global Optimism to achieve net-zero carbon by 2040, a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement.</li><li>CarbonCure, Pachama, Redwood Materials, Rivian, and Turntide Technologies were the first companies to receive investments from Amazon as part of The Climate Pledge Fund, a $2 billion fund that invests in visionary companies whose product and service solutions will facilitate the transition to a zero-carbon economy.</li><li>In Europe, Amazon announced it will add 1,800 electric delivery vehicles from Mercedes-Benz Vans to its delivery fleet—the largest order of electric vehicles from Mercedes-Benz Vans to date.</li><li>Amazon unveiled its first custom electric delivery vehicle, designed and built in partnership with Rivian. The new vehicles will make their first deliveries to Amazon customers in 2021. As early as 2022, there will be 10,000 of these vehicles on roads in the U.S. and EU, and all 100,000 vehicles are expected to be on the road by 2030.</li><li>In the U.S. and EU, Amazon launched Climate Pledge Friendly, a new program that identifies products with one or more of 19 different sustainability certifications, making it easy for customers to discover and shop for more sustainable products in Amazon's store. Products identified as Climate Pledge Friendly meet standards that help preserve the natural world, such as reducing the carbon footprint of shipments to customers. Amazon also announced Compact by Design, a new sustainability certification for products with a more efficient design that leads to carbon emission reductions by requiring less packaging or less frequent purchases by customers.</li><li>Amazon announced its most sustainable devices ever. The new Echo and Fire TV devices include 100% post-consumer recycled fabric, 100% recycled die-cast aluminum, and 30-50% post-consumer recycled plastic, and new features like Low Power Mode and an energy dashboard will enable customers to understand and reduce the energy consumption of their devices.</li><li>Amazon is building new wind and solar farms to produce clean energy equivalent to the electricity used by every customer's Echo device. The company has said it will continue building new renewable energy projects until it accounts for the energy consumption of all Amazon devices.</li><li>Amazon announced its first operational wind farm outside the U.S. in Bäckhammar, Sweden. The wind farm is expected to deliver 280,000-megawatt hours of clean energy annually into the Swedish grid.</li></ul><p><em>Empowering Small and Medium-Sized Businesses</em></p><ul><li>Amazon hosted Amazon Accelerate, its largest-ever U.S. event to share best practices with small businesses on how to serve customers in Amazon's store and grow their businesses. At the virtual event, Amazon also announced plans to invest billions of dollars to help small and medium-sized businesses succeed, and it outlined plans to onboard an additional 100,000 small and medium-sized businesses in the next year.</li><li>Amazon hosted its second annual Ignite Digital Festival for more than 1,500 Delivery Service Partners (DSP). The virtual event showcased product and technology innovations to help them succeed, including over 250 logistics program and product changes, from routing updates and navigation improvements on the drivers' delivery app to state-of-the-art safety technology adjustments. Since the DSP program launched over two years ago, there are now more than 1,700 owners across Canada, Germany, Spain, the UK, and the U.S. who have created over 100,000 jobs in their communities, delivered more than 2.2 billion packages worldwide, and generated over $5 billion in revenue for their small businesses.</li><li>Amazon India hosted Stand for Handmade, a 10-week program to help boost sales for Indian artisans, weavers, and women entrepreneurs by waiving selling fees and promoting local, handmade products to customers. Participating Karigar (artisans) and Saheli (women) sellers more than doubled their sales during this period, and more than 200 new sellers joined the Karigar program.</li><li>Amazon Australia launched Amazon Launchpad Innovation Grants, an initiative to celebrate innovation by Australian start-ups, entrepreneurs, and small and medium-sized businesses. The program will offer grant packages to organizations with innovative products that support Australians through the pandemic.</li></ul><p><em>Shopping and Entertainment</em></p><ul><li>In 19 countries, Amazon's Prime Day kicked-off the holiday shopping season on October 13-14 with the two biggest days ever for small and medium businesses in Amazon's stores. Third-party sellers—most of which are small and medium-sized businesses—surpassed $3.5 billion in sales on Prime Day—a nearly 60% year-over-year increase, growing even more than Amazon's retail business. Prime members saved more than $1.4 billion, taking advantage of deep discounts and incredible deals over the two-day event.</li><li>Amazon India kicked off the Great Indian Festival on October 17, a month-long celebration with deals across popular categories such as smartphones, appliances, televisions, and consumer electronics. Sellers and brand partners experienced the biggest two days of sales in the festival's history. Amazon India also hosted Prime Day on August 6-7, during which twice as many customers became Prime members compared to the previous year.</li><li>Amazon launched Prime in Turkey, bringing the total number of countries with Prime to 20. Prime in Turkey includes free, fast delivery on thousands of items across 20 categories, as well as access to Prime Video, Prime Gaming, and exclusive deals on Prime Day and throughout the year.</li><li>Amazon.se launched in Sweden, offering customers more than 150 million products to choose from with everyday low prices and free delivery for eligible orders above SEK 229.</li><li>Amazon announced that Project Zero—a tool enabling brands to remove potential counterfeit products in Amazon's store—is available in 17 countries around the world, with Australia, Brazil, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Turkey, and the UAE recently added to the program. Project Zero combines Amazon's advanced technology and machine learning with the sophisticated knowledge that brands have of their own intellectual property to drive counterfeits to zero.</li><li>Amazon launched Amazon One, a fast, convenient, contactless way for people to use their palm to enter, identify, and pay. The highly-secure service uses custom-built algorithms and hardware to create a person's unique palm signature. Amazon One is currently available in two Amazon Go stores in Seattle, with plans to expand to additional Amazon stores.</li><li>The first Amazon Fresh grocery stores opened in Woodland Hills and Irvine, CA. Amazon Fresh offers a seamless grocery shopping experience whether customers are shopping in-store or online, consistently low prices, a wide assortment of national brands and freshly prepared foods made daily, and free same-day delivery and pick-up for Prime members. The stores also offer new ways to make grocery shopping more convenient, including the Amazon Dash Cart, which enables customers to skip the checkout line, and new Alexa features to help customers manage their shopping lists and better navigate aisles.</li><li>Amazon Fashion announced the launch of Luxury Stores, a new shopping experience for eligible U.S. Prime members, offering established and emerging luxury fashion and beauty brands.</li><li>The Amazon Studios global original movies slate continues to grow, with additions such as Sacha Baron Cohen's political satire <em>Borat Subsequent Moviefilm</em>, which recently launched globally on Prime Video, as well as Tom Clancy's <em>Without Remorse</em>, starring Michael B. Jordan, slated to launch in 2021.</li><li>Amazon premiered several new and returning Amazon Original series, including <em>The Boys</em>, <em>Breathe into the Shadows</em>, <em>Bandish Bandits</em>, <em>Mirzapur,</em> and <em>Putham Pudhu Kaalai</em> in India, <em>Peep Time</em> and <em>Documental S8</em> in Japan, <em>Pan y Circo</em> in Mexico, and <em>All or Nothing: Tottenham Hotspur</em> in the UK.</li><li>Amazon Prime Video announced that live international rugby games will be exclusively available to UK Prime customers this winter with a brand new tournament called the Autumn Nations Cup. The tournament will feature the Six Nations (England, France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland, and Wales) as well as two guest teams from Fiji and Georgia.</li><li>Amazon Music announced multiple new services and features, including partnering with Twitch to add livestreaming to the Amazon Music app, enabling fans to engage with artists in brand-new ways and move seamlessly between livestreams and recorded music; launching podcasts for customers in Germany, Japan, the UK, and the U.S., across all tiers of service at no additional cost; and expanding its HD streaming tier to Canada, France, Italy, and Spain.</li><li>Amazon announced the launch of Prime Gaming, a new service that lets Prime members enjoy free, exclusive content for their favorite PC, console, and mobile games, plus a collection of PC games for free every month. Prime Gaming is included with Prime memberships and Prime Video subscriptions in over 200 countries and territories.</li></ul><p><em>Amazon Devices and Alexa</em></p><ul><li>Amazon introduced a reimagined family of Echo devices. The new Echo combines the best of Echo and Echo Plus into a single device with an all-new design, built-in smart home hub, and more powerful speakers; Echo Dot and Echo Dot with Clock feature a powerful speaker packed into a compact design; Echo Dot Kids Edition comes in Panda and Tiger designs with even more features for kids to enjoy; and the all-new Echo Show 10 now features a brilliant 10-inch, adaptive HD display that automatically moves to stay in view as you interact with Alexa.</li><li>Amazon announced the new Fire TV Stick and Fire TV Stick Lite. Customers have purchased over 100 million Fire TV devices globally, and Fire TV customers are streaming billions of hours each month. The new Fire TV devices are 50% more powerful while using 50% less power than the previous Fire TV Stick. Amazon also introduced a redesigned Fire TV experience that provides new content-discovery features, enhanced Alexa voice integration, and user profiles for personalized recommendations.</li><li>Amazon announced new ways for customers to connect their devices with Amazon Sidewalk, a shared network that helps devices like Amazon Echo, Ring Security Cams, outdoor lights, and motion sensors work better at home and beyond the front door.</li><li>Amazon announced the latest AI advancements that make Alexa more natural, conversational, and useful. These advancements include a new teaching capability that helps Alexa get smarter by asking questions to fill gaps in her understanding, and natural turn-taking that will allow customers to interact with Alexa at their own pace without using a wake word, even when multiple people are talking.</li><li>Amazon introduced new features and services that continue to make Alexa smarter, like Guard Plus and the Care Hub, that help customers keep their homes and loved ones safe. Amazon also announced new Alexa privacy controls including the option for customers to not save voice recordings or simply say, "Alexa, delete everything I've said" to delete their voice history. Amazon expanded Alexa Calling and Messaging capabilities to help customers stay connected with the addition of group calling and integrations with Zoom and Amazon Chime. AT&amp;T customers can also link eligible mobile numbers to make and receive hands-free calls with Alexa.</li><li>Amazon announced customers have connected more than 100 million smart home devices to Alexa, and introduced smart home features like additional Hunches, that let customers choose to have Alexa proactively act on their behalf.</li><li>Amazon introduced new devices and features to help kids and families learn, stay connected, and have fun together. Kids can now make Alexa Announcements with their Fire Kids Edition Tablets, help build reading fluency with Reading Sidekick, and enjoy a custom-built kids experience with the new Echo Dot Kids Edition.</li><li>Amazon announced Amazon Halo, a new service dedicated to helping customers improve their health and wellness. Amazon Halo combines a suite of AI-powered health features that provide actionable insights into overall wellness via the new Amazon Halo app with the Amazon Halo Band, which uses multiple advanced sensors to provide the information necessary to power Halo insights.</li><li>Amazon announced Luna, a new cloud gaming service that allows customers to play high-quality games on devices they already own. As part of early access, players will have access to more than 100 games through the Luna+ game channel and Ubisoft channel, with more games to come. Luna is built on AWS and harnesses the power of the industry's broadest and deepest cloud platform. Amazon also announced Luna Controller, which is Alexa-enabled and connects directly to the cloud for lower latency gaming. Luna will be available on Fire TV, PC, and Mac as well as on web apps for iPhone and iPad, with Android coming soon.</li><li>Ring announced several new products and features, including a new category of devices for the car (Ring Car Alarm, Ring Car Cam, Ring Car Connect API, and Ring Car Connect for Tesla), the autonomous flying indoor security camera Ring Always Home Cam, and a new Mailbox Sensor.</li><li>Amazon announced new eero Pro 6 and eero 6 mesh wifi systems that feature Wi-Fi 6 support for faster speeds, higher performance, and better support for simultaneous connected devices.</li><li>Amazon continues to support developers and startups with new Alexa tools and features, investments, and programs. Amazon announced that Dolby, Facebook, Garmin, and Xiaomi have joined the Voice Interoperability Initiative, a program to ensure voice-enabled products provide customers with choice and flexibility through multiple, interoperable voice services. The Alexa Fund invested in health and fitness companies Tonal and Zwift; enterprise AI company Fiddler Labs; maker of smart sensor chips Aspinity; and creators of personalized sound environments Endel. The investments are in addition to the launch of two new programs in collaboration with Blavity's AfroTech World and All Raise to support underrepresented founders.</li><li>The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to approve Project Kuiper, a low earth orbit satellite constellation capable of providing reliable, affordable broadband to unserved and underserved communities around the world. Amazon will invest more than $10 billion in the initiative, creating jobs and infrastructure around the U.S. that will enable the team to deliver on its vision for the project.</li><li>Blink launched Blink Indoor and Outdoor, two new wireless smart home security cameras that offer two-year battery life, HD video, new privacy zones features, and local or cloud storage options for saved clips. Cameras are available for purchase in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, the UK, and the U.S.</li></ul><p><em>Amazon Web Services</em></p><ul><li>AWS announced significant customer momentum with new commitments and migrations, including: leading payments technology company Global Payments, to manage issuer processing and handling of their approximately 27 billion transactions processed annually; biotechnology company Moderna, to accelerate the development of messenger RNA medicines to prevent and fight diseases, including a vaccine candidate against COVID-19; restaurant chain Jack in the Box to enhance digital ordering, dining, and customer service experiences for its guests and to drive operational efficiency across its more than 2,200 restaurants; premier visual effects company Weta Digital to accelerate rendering of graphical visual effects, free up talent and resources, and deliver on its multi-year movie slate; leading job site Indeed to migrate more than 30 petabytes of data to AWS, reducing its global data center footprint by 40% while streamlining its IT operations; household appliance manufacturer Arçelik to use analytics, IoT, and machine learning services to build smart factories, automated production lines, and cloud connected appliances; IT services company and AWS Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting Partner DXC Technology to replace its legacy contact center technology and drive automation, cutting operational costs by 40%, reducing volume of common calls by up to 60%, and migrating 1,000 service desk seats; hotel franchise Best Western International to migrate largest contact center within one month and move all agents to remote within one week, enabling seamless support for 14 languages in over 35 countries while reducing costs by 40%; and cold chain provider Carrier to transform how temperature-sensitive goods such as food, medicines, and vaccines are moved around the world by enhancing safety, reliability, and efficiency.</li><li>AWS and The National Football League (NFL) announced the first six new advanced stats for the 2020 season through the NFL's Next Gen Stats platform powered by AWS. One of the new stats, "Expected Rush Yards," is born out of the NFL's Big Data Bowl competition that AWS sponsored during the NFL Combine. The new advanced stats combine player tracking and machine learning to bring new insights to game play in the 2020 season.</li><li>AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Braket, a fully managed service that provides a development environment to help customers explore and design quantum algorithms. Quantum computing has the potential to solve computational problems that are beyond the reach of classical computers by harnessing the laws of quantum mechanics to build more powerful tools for processing information. Customers can use Amazon Braket to experiment with quantum algorithms through simulated quantum computers running on computing resources in AWS to help them verify their implementations. When ready, customers can use Amazon Braket to run their quantum algorithms on their choice of quantum processors based on different technologies, including systems from D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti.</li><li>AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Timestream, a new time series database for IoT and operational applications that can scale to process trillions of time series events per day up to 1,000 times faster than relational databases, and at as low as 1/10th the cost. Amazon Timestream provides a serverless database service that is purpose-built to manage the scale and complexity of time series – such as data collected from industrial equipment, website clickstream logs, and data center infrastructure – so customers can analyze more data more easily and cost effectively, giving them the ability to derive additional insights and drive better business decisions from their IoT and operational monitoring applications.</li><li>AWS announced the general availability of five AWS Wavelength Zones in Atlanta, Boston, New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Washington D.C., enabling developers to build applications that deliver ultra-low latency to mobile devices and users by deploying AWS compute and storage at the edge of Verizon's 5G network. With AWS Wavelength, developers can serve use cases that require ultra-low latency like machine learning inference at the edge, autonomous industrial equipment, smart cars and cities, Internet of Things (IoT), and Augmented and Virtual Reality. AWS is partnering with Verizon to bring AWS Wavelength to additional customers across the United States, and with other leading telecommunications providers, including Vodafone, SK Telecom, and KDDI, to launch Wavelength Zones across Europe, South Korea, and Japan in 2020 and beyond.</li><li>For the tenth consecutive year, AWS is positioned in the Leader's quadrant in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure &amp; Platform Service (IaaS &amp; PaaS, or "CIPS"), and once again placed highest in Ability to Execute and furthest in Completeness of Vision.</li><li>AWS announced the general availability of Amazon EBS io2 volume, the next generation Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). The new io2 volume is designed for 100x higher volume durability (99.999%) when compared to the 99.9% durability offered by io1 Amazon EBS volumes. Higher volume durability reduces the likelihood of storage failures and makes the primary copy of customers' data more resilient, resulting in better application availability. With io2, customers can drive 10x higher input/output operations per second (IOPS) from their provisioned storage at the same price as io1, so performance improves significantly without increasing storage cost.</li><li>AWS announced the general availability of AWS Nitro Enclaves, a new capability that makes it easier for customers to create isolated compute environments within Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances to securely process and protect highly sensitive data. AWS Nitro Enclaves helps customers reduce the attack surface for their applications by providing a trusted, highly isolated, and hardened environment for data processing. Each Enclave is a virtual machine created using the same Nitro Hypervisor technology that provides CPU and memory isolation for Amazon EC2 instances, but with no persistent storage, no administrator or operator access, and no external networking.</li></ul><p>Financial Guidance</p><p>The following forward-looking statements reflect Amazon.com's expectations as of October 29, 2020, and are subject to substantial uncertainty. Our results are inherently unpredictable and may be materially affected by many factors, such as fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, changes in global economic conditions and customer spending, world events, the rate of growth of the Internet, online commerce, and cloud services, and the various factors detailed below. This guidance reflects our estimates as of October 29, 2020 regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our operations, including those discussed above, and is highly dependent on numerous factors that we may not be able to predict or control, including: the duration and scope of the pandemic, including any recurrence; actions taken by governments, businesses, and individuals in response to the pandemic; the impact of the pandemic on global and regional economies and economic activity, workforce staffing and productivity, and our significant and continuing spending on employee safety measures; our ability to continue operations in affected areas; and consumer demand and spending patterns, as well as the effects on suppliers, creditors, and third-party sellers, all of which are uncertain. This guidance also assumes the impacts on consumer demand and spending patterns, including impacts due to concerns over the current economic outlook, will be in line with those experienced during the fourth quarter to date, and the additional assumptions set forth below. However, it is not possible to determine the ultimate impact on our operations for the fourth quarter, or whether other currently unanticipated direct or indirect consequences of the pandemic are reasonably likely to materially affect our operations.</p><p>Fourth Quarter 2020 Guidance</p><ul><li>Net sales are expected to be between $112.0 billion and $121.0 billion, or to grow between 28% and 38% compared with fourth quarter 2019. This guidance anticipates a favorable impact of approximately 90 basis points from foreign exchange rates.</li><li>Operating income is expected to be between $1.0 billion and $4.5 billion, compared with $3.9 billion in fourth quarter 2019. This guidance assumes approximately $4.0 billion of costs related to COVID-19.</li><li>This guidance assumes, among other things, that no additional business acquisitions, investments, restructurings, or legal settlements are concluded.</li></ul><p>A conference call will be webcast live today at 2:30 p.m. PT/5:30 p.m. ET, and will be available for at least three months at amazon.com/ir. This call will contain forward-looking statements and other material information regarding the Company's financial and operating results.</p><p><em>These forward-looking statements are inherently difficult to predict. Actual results could differ materially for a variety of reasons, including, in addition to the factors discussed above, the amount that Amazon.com invests in new business opportunities and the timing of those investments, the mix of products and services sold to customers, the mix of net sales derived from products as compared with services, the extent to which we owe income or other taxes, competition, management of growth, potential fluctuations in operating results, international growth and expansion, the outcomes of claims, litigation, government investigations, and other proceedings, fulfillment, sortation, delivery, and data center optimization, risks of inventory management, seasonality, the degree to which the Company enters into, maintains, and develops commercial agreements, proposed and completed acquisitions and strategic transactions, payments risks, and risks of fulfillment throughput and productivity. Other risks and uncertainties include, among others, risks related to new products, services, and technologies, system interruptions, government regulation and taxation, and fraud. In addition, additional or unforeseen effects from the COVID-19 pandemic and the global economic climate may give rise to or amplify many of these risks. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.</em></p><p>Our investor relations website is amazon.com/ir and we encourage investors to use it as a way of easily finding information about us. We promptly make available on this website, free of charge, the reports that we file or furnish with the SEC, corporate governance information (including our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics), and select press releases, which may contain material information about us, and you may subscribe to be notified of new information posted to this site.</p>

Amazon Investigation Leads to Arrest, Indictment of Tampa Bay Woman for Shipping Fee Scam

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Investigation-Leads-to-Arrest-Indictment-of-Tampa-Bay-Woman-for-Shipping-Fee-Scam/default.aspx

Amazon-Investigation-Leads-to-Arrest-Indictment-of-Tampa-Bay-Woman-for-Shipping-Fee-Scam

10/29/2020 12:00:00

Amazon Investigation Leads to Arrest, Indictment of Tampa Bay Woman for Shipping Fee Scam

10/29/2020

2020

SEATTLE--October 29, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc.: What:Amazon has systems and processes in place to monitor and detect suspicious behavior in its store. Amazon identified and investigated a suspicious shipping label scheme and closed all accounts tied to the scheme and bad actor. Amazon also referred its evidence to local authorities in Tampa Bay, FL. On Tuesday, October 27, 2020, the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Department arrested Hoai Thu Nguyen (aka Hoai Tibma) for Grand Theft. You can read their press release here. Statement from Amazon:We thank the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office for their swift work on this case. We work hard to build a great experience for our customers and sellers and while we were able to identify and stop this scheme in our store, the support from the sheriff's office helps ensure this fraudster is truly held accountable. Amazon has an extensive history of working with law enforcement to hold bad actors accountable for fraud and abuse: https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/fired-amazon-employee-arrested-after-amazon-reported-him-federal https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazon-supports-investigation-and-prosecution-four-new-york https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazon-stops-multiple-fraudulent-affiliate-marketing-schemes

<p>SEATTLE--October 29, 2020-- Amazon.com, Inc.:</p><p>What:Amazon has systems and processes in place to monitor and detect suspicious behavior in its store. Amazon identified and investigated a suspicious shipping label scheme and closed all accounts tied to the scheme and bad actor. Amazon also referred its evidence to local authorities in Tampa Bay, FL. On Tuesday, October 27, 2020, the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Department arrested Hoai Thu Nguyen (aka Hoai Tibma) for Grand Theft. You can read their press release here.</p><p>Statement from Amazon:We thank the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office for their swift work on this case. We work hard to build a great experience for our customers and sellers and while we were able to identify and stop this scheme in our store, the support from the sheriff's office helps ensure this fraudster is truly held accountable.</p><p>Amazon has an extensive history of working with law enforcement to hold bad actors accountable for fraud and abuse:</p><ul><li>https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/fired-amazon-employee-arrested-after-amazon-reported-him-federal</li><li>https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazon-supports-investigation-and-prosecution-four-new-york</li><li>https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazon-stops-multiple-fraudulent-affiliate-marketing-schemes</li></ul>

Amazon Studios Teams up With Homeboy Industries to Provide Meals to Los Angeles Poll Workers on Election Day

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Studios-Teams-up-With-Homeboy-Industries-to-Provide-Meals-to-Los-Angeles-Poll-Workers-on-Election-Day/default.aspx

Amazon-Studios-Teams-up-With-Homeboy-Industries-to-Provide-Meals-to-Los-Angeles-Poll-Workers-on-Election-Day

10/29/2020 12:00:00

Amazon Studios Teams up With Homeboy Industries to Provide Meals to Los Angeles Poll Workers on Election Day

10/29/2020

2020

On November 3, Amazon Studios and Homeboy Industries Will Serve 800 Poll Workers at 55 Voting Centers CULVER CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 29, 2020-- Amazon Studios is teaming up with Homeboy Industries — a Los Angeles-based nonprofit dedicated to gang rehabilitation and re-entry of formerly incarcerated individuals — to support Los Angeles poll workers. On Election Day, Amazon Studios and Homeboy Industries will provide breakfast and lunch for poll workers in select voting centers located in primarily under resourced (structurally marginalized) areas, including East LA, Palmdale, Compton and San Fernando, with the goal of serving approximately 800 poll workers at 55 voting centers across Los Angeles County. The meals will be produced and delivered by Feed HOPE, Homeboy Industries' newly launched initiative which has delivered more than 150,000 meals to food insecure Angelinos during the COVID-19 pandemic. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201029005387/en/ In light of the current pandemic, this year's Presidential Election will be one of the most difficult election processes in recent history. In order to successfully manage Election Day in Los Angeles County, the county government has enlisted thousands of poll workers to support over 700 voting centers on Election Day across the county, including at mega locations such as Dodger Stadium, SoFi Stadium and the Hollywood Bowl. Poll workers are largely responsible for their own food and refreshments while working on Election Day. Amazon Studios and Homeboy Industries are proud to support local communities and poll workers for their dedication and hard work on this pivotal day. "Amazon Studios is honored to be working with Homeboy Industries, who have made such incredible strides in helping individuals redirect their lives and become contributing members of our community," said Head of Amazon Studios Jennifer Salke. "In this critical election year, we want to support and be there in meaningful and impactful ways for our local communities, who have always supported Amazon Studios and our business. We understand Election Day will be difficult this year due to the pandemic, so with the help of Homeboy, we're glad to provide food and some relief for the poll workers. It's important for us to all come together as a community and support each other this Election Day." "During this unprecedented time, the amazing men and women working in the Homegirl Café launched Feed HOPE in a time of need, and we are honored to partner with Amazon Studios to supply Election Day volunteers healthy and delicious meals as they enable democracy in the most deserving communities in Los Angeles," said Arlin Crane, Vice President of Social Enterprises at Homeboy Industries. "Elections are the cornerstone of our democracy, and we have to do everything in our power to preserve, promote, and defend the sacred right of all voters to cast a ballot and have a voice in shaping our government and our future," said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. "By providing meals and support to local poll workers, Amazon and Homeboy are tapping into the best of the Angeleno spirit: coming together to strengthen the process by which we choose our leaders, dictate a more just and equitable society, and determine the kind of city and nation we can be." "Now more than ever, we see the true value of partnerships in service to our local communities," said Supervisor Kathryn Barger, Chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. "I am grateful for the collaboration and support from Amazon Studios and Homeboy Industries to provide meals to our vital election workers in underserved regions of the County." "These meals, provided through a public-private partnership involving the County, Amazon Studios, and Homeboy Industries, will be a welcome gift to Angelenos who are volunteering their time to serve as frontline workers at the County's vote centers. I'm especially pleased to know that Homeboy Industries, which employs formerly incarcerated persons, will be preparing and providing the meals," said Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas. "Research has shown that increasing civic empowerment among justice-involved populations reduces recidivism. Perhaps we'll see some of the same folks who are delivering the meals at our vote centers this year, casting their ballots, working the polls, and even running for office during the next election cycle." As the largest gang rehabilitation and re-entry program in the world, Homeboy Industries is a beacon of hope in Los Angeles providing jobs and wraparound services to formerly gang-involved and previously incarcerated men, women and youth, allowing them to redirect their lives and become contributing members of the community. Each year, over 10,000 former gang members come through Homeboy Industries' doors in an effort to transform their lives. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Homeboy Industries launched Feed HOPE, a social enterprise which has served more than 150,000 meals to food insecure Angelinos. Led by Homeboy Catering and the Homegirl Cafe, Feed HOPE is serving our communities while also providing hundreds of jobs to women and men working to change the arc of their lives. In addition to feeding poll workers, Amazon Studios and Homeboy Industries will continue to collaborate in furthering the essential and important work the non-profit provides to African-American and Latinx communities. Election Day is Tuesday, November 3, 2020. About Amazon Studios  Amazon Studios is the home for talent, creating and producing original films and television series for a global audience. Original series all premiere exclusively on Amazon Prime Video, which is available in over 200 countries and territories. Recent hit Amazon Original series include the Emmy Award-winning comedies Fleabag, created by and starring Emmy Award-winner Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel from Emmy Award-winners Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, as well as the action thriller drama Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan starring John Krasinski, the irreverent superhero series The Boys, and fantasy drama Carnival Row starring Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne; Amazon Originals also include culturally relevant and buzzed about content such as Rihanna's Savage X Fenty music and fashion event, Donald Glover's Guava Island and Chasing Happiness, a documentary about pop superstars the Jonas Brothers. In film, Amazon Studios produces and acquires original movies for theatrical release and exclusively for Amazon Prime Video. In 2017, Amazon Studios became the first streaming service to win Oscars for Manchester by the Sea and The Salesman. Recent Amazon original movies include the subversive comedy Borat Subsequent Moviefilm with Sacha Baron Cohen, Troop Zero starring Viola Davis and Allison Janney, Tom Harper's The Aeronauts starring Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne, Scott Z. Burns' The Report, Alma Har'el's Honey Boy and the Academy Award nominated Les Misérables directed by Ladj Ly. The 2020 slate include the family comedy My Spy starring Dave Bautista and Chloe Coleman, Chemical Hearts starring Lili Reinhart, Sound of Metal starring Riz Ahmed, Sylvie's Love with Tessa Thompson and Nnamdi Asomugha, Alan Ball's Uncle Frank with Paul Bettany and Sophia Lillis, I'm Your Woman starring and produced by Rachel Brosnahan and more. In addition, the originals film slate includes a number of diverse first-time feature filmmakers – Blow the Man Down directed by Danielle Krudy and Bridget Savage Cole, Selah and The Spades from director Tayarisha Poe, The Vast of Night directed by Andrew Patterson and 7500 directed by Patrick Vollrath. About Homeboy Industries Founded in 1988 by Father Greg Boyle, Homeboy Industries provides hope, training, and support to formerly gang-involved and previously incarcerated men and women allowing them to redirect their lives and become contributing members of our community. Each year over 10,000 former gang members from across Los Angeles come through Homeboy Industries' doors in an effort to make a positive change. They are welcomed into a community of mutual kinship, love, and a wide variety of services ranging from tattoo removal to anger management and parenting classes. Whether it be through their 18-month employment and re-entry program, or seeking discrete services such as tattoo removal or substance abuse resources, Homeboy Industries offer their clients a variety of free wraparound services to facilitate healing and growth. In addition to serving almost 7,000 members of the immediate Los Angeles community in 2018, their flagship 18-month employment and re-entry program was offered to over 400 men and women. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201029005387/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Studios

<p><em>On November 3, Amazon Studios and Homeboy Industries Will Serve 800 Poll Workers at 55 Voting Centers</em></p><p>CULVER CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 29, 2020-- Amazon Studios is teaming up with Homeboy Industries — a Los Angeles-based nonprofit dedicated to gang rehabilitation and re-entry of formerly incarcerated individuals — to support Los Angeles poll workers. On Election Day, Amazon Studios and Homeboy Industries will provide breakfast and lunch for poll workers in select voting centers located in primarily under resourced (structurally marginalized) areas, including East LA, Palmdale, Compton and San Fernando, with the goal of serving approximately 800 poll workers at 55 voting centers across Los Angeles County. The meals will be produced and delivered by Feed HOPE, Homeboy Industries' newly launched initiative which has delivered more than 150,000 meals to food insecure Angelinos during the COVID-19 pandemic.</p><p>This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201029005387/en/</p><p>In light of the current pandemic, this year's Presidential Election will be one of the most difficult election processes in recent history. In order to successfully manage Election Day in Los Angeles County, the county government has enlisted thousands of poll workers to support over 700 voting centers on Election Day across the county, including at mega locations such as Dodger Stadium, SoFi Stadium and the Hollywood Bowl. Poll workers are largely responsible for their own food and refreshments while working on Election Day. Amazon Studios and Homeboy Industries are proud to support local communities and poll workers for their dedication and hard work on this pivotal day.</p><p>"Amazon Studios is honored to be working with Homeboy Industries, who have made such incredible strides in helping individuals redirect their lives and become contributing members of our community," said Head of Amazon Studios Jennifer Salke. "In this critical election year, we want to support and be there in meaningful and impactful ways for our local communities, who have always supported Amazon Studios and our business. We understand Election Day will be difficult this year due to the pandemic, so with the help of Homeboy, we're glad to provide food and some relief for the poll workers. It's important for us to all come together as a community and support each other this Election Day."</p><p>"During this unprecedented time, the amazing men and women working in the Homegirl Café launched Feed HOPE in a time of need, and we are honored to partner with Amazon Studios to supply Election Day volunteers healthy and delicious meals as they enable democracy in the most deserving communities in Los Angeles," said Arlin Crane, Vice President of Social Enterprises at Homeboy Industries.</p><p>"Elections are the cornerstone of our democracy, and we have to do everything in our power to preserve, promote, and defend the sacred right of all voters to cast a ballot and have a voice in shaping our government and our future," said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. "By providing meals and support to local poll workers, Amazon and Homeboy are tapping into the best of the Angeleno spirit: coming together to strengthen the process by which we choose our leaders, dictate a more just and equitable society, and determine the kind of city and nation we can be."</p><p>"Now more than ever, we see the true value of partnerships in service to our local communities," said Supervisor Kathryn Barger, Chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. "I am grateful for the collaboration and support from Amazon Studios and Homeboy Industries to provide meals to our vital election workers in underserved regions of the County."</p><p>"These meals, provided through a public-private partnership involving the County, Amazon Studios, and Homeboy Industries, will be a welcome gift to Angelenos who are volunteering their time to serve as frontline workers at the County's vote centers. I'm especially pleased to know that Homeboy Industries, which employs formerly incarcerated persons, will be preparing and providing the meals," said Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas. "Research has shown that increasing civic empowerment among justice-involved populations reduces recidivism. Perhaps we'll see some of the same folks who are delivering the meals at our vote centers <em>this</em> year, casting their ballots, working the polls, and even running for office during the next election cycle."</p><p>As the largest gang rehabilitation and re-entry program in the world, Homeboy Industries is a beacon of hope in Los Angeles providing jobs and wraparound services to formerly gang-involved and previously incarcerated men, women and youth, allowing them to redirect their lives and become contributing members of the community. Each year, over 10,000 former gang members come through Homeboy Industries' doors in an effort to transform their lives. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Homeboy Industries launched Feed HOPE, a social enterprise which has served more than 150,000 meals to food insecure Angelinos. Led by Homeboy Catering and the Homegirl Cafe, Feed HOPE is serving our communities while also providing hundreds of jobs to women and men working to change the arc of their lives.</p><p>In addition to feeding poll workers, Amazon Studios and Homeboy Industries will continue to collaborate in furthering the essential and important work the non-profit provides to African-American and Latinx communities.</p><p>Election Day is Tuesday, November 3, 2020.</p><p>About Amazon Studios </p><p>Amazon Studios is the home for talent, creating and producing original films and television series for a global audience. Original series all premiere exclusively on Amazon Prime Video, which is available in over 200 countries and territories. Recent hit Amazon Original series include the Emmy Award-winning comedies <em>Fleabag, </em>created by and starring Emmy Award-winner Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and <em>The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel </em>from Emmy Award-winners Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, as well as the action thriller drama<em> Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan</em> starring John Krasinski, the irreverent superhero series <em>The Boys</em>, and fantasy drama <em>Carnival Row </em>starring Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne; Amazon Originals also include culturally relevant and buzzed about content such as Rihanna's <em>Savage X Fenty</em> music and fashion event, Donald Glover's <em>Guava Island</em> and <em>Chasing Happiness,</em> a documentary about pop superstars the Jonas Brothers.</p><p>In film, Amazon Studios produces and acquires original movies for theatrical release and exclusively for Amazon Prime Video. In 2017, Amazon Studios became the first streaming service to win Oscars for <em>Manchester by the Sea</em> and <em>The Salesman</em>. Recent Amazon original movies include the subversive comedy <em>Borat Subsequent Moviefilm</em> with Sacha Baron Cohen, <em>Troop Zero</em> starring Viola Davis and Allison Janney, Tom Harper's <em>The Aeronauts</em> starring Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne, Scott Z. Burns' <em>The Report</em>, Alma Har'el's <em>Honey Boy </em>and the Academy Award nominated <em>Les Misérables</em> directed by Ladj Ly. The 2020 slate include the family comedy <em>My Spy </em>starring Dave Bautista and Chloe Coleman, <em>Chemical Hearts </em>starring Lili Reinhart, <em>Sound of Metal </em>starring Riz Ahmed, <em>Sylvie's Love</em> with Tessa Thompson and Nnamdi Asomugha, Alan Ball's <em>Uncle Frank </em>with Paul Bettany and Sophia Lillis, <em>I'm Your Woman </em>starring and produced by Rachel Brosnahan and more. In addition, the originals film slate includes a number of diverse first-time feature filmmakers – <em>Blow the Man Down</em> directed by Danielle Krudy and Bridget Savage Cole, <em>Selah and The Spades </em>from director Tayarisha Poe, <em>The Vast of Night</em> directed by Andrew Patterson and <em>7500</em> directed by Patrick Vollrath.</p><p>About Homeboy Industries</p><p>Founded in 1988 by Father Greg Boyle, Homeboy Industries provides hope, training, and support to formerly gang-involved and previously incarcerated men and women allowing them to redirect their lives and become contributing members of our community. Each year over 10,000 former gang members from across Los Angeles come through Homeboy Industries' doors in an effort to make a positive change. They are welcomed into a community of mutual kinship, love, and a wide variety of services ranging from tattoo removal to anger management and parenting classes.</p><p>Whether it be through their 18-month employment and re-entry program, or seeking discrete services such as tattoo removal or substance abuse resources, Homeboy Industries offer their clients a variety of free wraparound services to facilitate healing and growth. In addition to serving almost 7,000 members of the immediate Los Angeles community in 2018, their flagship 18-month employment and re-entry program was offered to over 400 men and women.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201029005387/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Studios</p>

AWS Announces General Availability of Nitro Enclaves

/news/news-details/2020/AWS-Announces-General-Availability-of-Nitro-Enclaves/default.aspx

AWS-Announces-General-Availability-of-Nitro-Enclaves

10/28/2020 19:25:00

AWS Announces General Availability of Nitro Enclaves

10/28/2020

2020

AWS Nitro Enclaves makes it easy for customers to create isolated compute environments within Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to further protect their highly sensitive workloads Anjuna, castLabs, Evervault among the customers using Nitro Enclaves SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 28, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services Inc., an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of AWS Nitro Enclaves, a new Amazon EC2 capability that makes it easier for customers to securely process highly sensitive data. AWS Nitro Enclaves helps customers reduce the attack surface for their applications by providing a trusted, highly isolated, and hardened environment for data processing. Each Enclave is a virtual machine created using the same Nitro Hypervisor technology that provides CPU and memory isolation for Amazon EC2 instances, but with no persistent storage, no administrator or operator access, and no external networking. This isolation means that applications running in an Enclave remain inaccessible to other users and systems, even to users within the customer's organization. With this isolation, the AWS Nitro Enclave owner can start and stop, or assign resources to an Enclave, but even the owner cannot see what is being processed inside of AWS Nitro Enclaves. AWS also announced the launch of AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for Nitro Enclaves, a new Enclave application that makes it easy for customers to protect and manage Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for their webservers running on Amazon EC2. To get started with Nitro Enclaves, visit https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/nitro/nitro-enclaves/. Many customers across all industries have asked for help to further protect their highly sensitive data like personally identifiable information, financial data, healthcare records, intellectual property, and more – including from internal users within their own accounts. Today, customers can protect their data with access controls and by using encryption while it is at rest and in transit, but encryption does not protect data when it is unencrypted at the point of use (e.g. a healthcare recommendations algorithm must have access to unencrypted patient data). One solution is to remove much of the functionality that an instance provides for general-purpose computing (e.g. networking, the ability to log into an instance, the capability to store and retrieve data, etc.), but doing so renders the rest of the instance less useful. To protect unencrypted data during processing, customers often set up separate instance clusters for secure data configured with limited connectivity, restricted user access, and other strict isolations. However, the possibility of human error in the setup and administration of such complex custom systems can lead to availability issues or security oversights, and managing these extra instances is an operational burden, an organizational bottleneck, and expensive. With AWS Nitro Enclaves, customers simply select an instance type and decide how much CPU and memory they want to designate to the Enclave. AWS Nitro Enclaves provides the flexibility to partition varying combinations of CPU cores and memory, enabling customers to match resources to the size and performance demands of their workloads. Customers can develop Enclave applications using the open source AWS Nitro Enclaves SDK set of libraries. The AWS Nitro Enclaves SDK also integrates with AWS Key Management Service (KMS), allowing customers to generate data keys and to decrypt them inside the Enclave. With ACM for Nitro Enclaves, customers can easily isolate SSL/TLS certificates within an Enclave, making them usable by webservers on the instance while protecting them from access by other users or applications in the customer's environment. SSL/TLS certificates are used to secure network communications and establish the identity of websites over the Internet or resources on private networks. ACM for Nitro Enclaves ensures that sensitive data associated with these certificates never leaves the Enclave, while also managing the revocation and renewal of certificates to reduce the need for manual monitoring and webserver reconfigurations when a certificate expires. "Customers often tell us that powerful built-in protections like the locked-down security model of the Nitro System are among the primary reasons why they trust AWS with their workloads," said David Brown, Vice President, Amazon EC2, at AWS. "Nitro Enclaves builds on those same security and isolation models that have separated AWS for so many customers, delivering a more efficient method for securely processing highly sensitive data. This means customers can build and innovate faster in a way that still meets the highest bar for security." AWS Nitro Enclaves is available on the majority of Intel and AMD-based Amazon EC2 instance types built on the AWS Nitro System (AWS Graviton2-based instance support is coming in the first half of 2021). AWS Nitro Enclaves is available today in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and South America (Sao Paulo) regions, with more regions coming soon. Anjuna provides simple, secure, enterprise-ready application and data protection against malicious software, IT insiders, and bad actors. "Our customers come to Anjuna because they want a simple way to get their applications up and running in a secure, isolated compute environment," said Ayal Yogev, CEO and Co-Founder of Anjuna Security. "The nature of our business has given us insight into different approaches for achieving this type of isolation. Our hands-on work with Nitro Enclaves confirms that this is a powerful solution for enterprises looking to process sensitive data in a way that protects this data from insider threats. Nitro Enclaves is exactly the type of innovation that has security-minded organizations looking to the cloud, and that's why Anjuna is supporting the service to help AWS customers quickly ‘lift and shift' applications to Enclaves – without recoding or changing processes" castLabs pioneers software and cloud services for digital video markets worldwide. "As a globally operating cloud service provider handling our clients' most valuable data and encryption keys, we're striving to achieve the highest levels of data security, isolation, and trust," said Michael Stattmann, CEO and Founder, castLabs. "Working with an advanced security technology usually increases overhead, but with Nitro Enclaves, achieving a confidential computing implementation is easy to develop and deploy, using much more familiar technologies." Evervault provides simple SDKs for developers to encrypt sensitive data as it enters their infrastructure, and to process that data without ever exposing it. "Our mission is to encrypt the internet," said Shane Curran, CEO, Evervault. "Nitro Enclaves provides the perfect platform to make this happen, because it's the best way to protect data in use." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are just some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201028006266/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon Web Services Inc.

<p><em>AWS Nitro Enclaves makes it easy for customers to create isolated compute environments within Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to further protect their highly sensitive workloads</em></p><p><em>Anjuna, castLabs, Evervault among the customers using Nitro Enclaves</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 28, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services Inc., an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of AWS Nitro Enclaves, a new Amazon EC2 capability that makes it easier for customers to securely process highly sensitive data. AWS Nitro Enclaves helps customers reduce the attack surface for their applications by providing a trusted, highly isolated, and hardened environment for data processing. Each Enclave is a virtual machine created using the same Nitro Hypervisor technology that provides CPU and memory isolation for Amazon EC2 instances, but with no persistent storage, no administrator or operator access, and no external networking. This isolation means that applications running in an Enclave remain inaccessible to other users and systems, even to users within the customer's organization. With this isolation, the AWS Nitro Enclave owner can start and stop, or assign resources to an Enclave, but even the owner cannot see what is being processed inside of AWS Nitro Enclaves. AWS also announced the launch of AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for Nitro Enclaves, a new Enclave application that makes it easy for customers to protect and manage Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for their webservers running on Amazon EC2. To get started with Nitro Enclaves, visit https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/nitro/nitro-enclaves/.</p><p>Many customers across all industries have asked for help to further protect their highly sensitive data like personally identifiable information, financial data, healthcare records, intellectual property, and more – including from internal users within their own accounts. Today, customers can protect their data with access controls and by using encryption while it is at rest and in transit, but encryption does not protect data when it is unencrypted at the point of use (e.g. a healthcare recommendations algorithm must have access to unencrypted patient data). One solution is to remove much of the functionality that an instance provides for general-purpose computing (e.g. networking, the ability to log into an instance, the capability to store and retrieve data, etc.), but doing so renders the rest of the instance less useful. To protect unencrypted data during processing, customers often set up separate instance clusters for secure data configured with limited connectivity, restricted user access, and other strict isolations. However, the possibility of human error in the setup and administration of such complex custom systems can lead to availability issues or security oversights, and managing these extra instances is an operational burden, an organizational bottleneck, and expensive.</p><p>With AWS Nitro Enclaves, customers simply select an instance type and decide how much CPU and memory they want to designate to the Enclave. AWS Nitro Enclaves provides the flexibility to partition varying combinations of CPU cores and memory, enabling customers to match resources to the size and performance demands of their workloads. Customers can develop Enclave applications using the open source AWS Nitro Enclaves SDK set of libraries. The AWS Nitro Enclaves SDK also integrates with AWS Key Management Service (KMS), allowing customers to generate data keys and to decrypt them inside the Enclave. With ACM for Nitro Enclaves, customers can easily isolate SSL/TLS certificates within an Enclave, making them usable by webservers on the instance while protecting them from access by other users or applications in the customer's environment. SSL/TLS certificates are used to secure network communications and establish the identity of websites over the Internet or resources on private networks. ACM for Nitro Enclaves ensures that sensitive data associated with these certificates never leaves the Enclave, while also managing the revocation and renewal of certificates to reduce the need for manual monitoring and webserver reconfigurations when a certificate expires.</p><p>"Customers often tell us that powerful built-in protections like the locked-down security model of the Nitro System are among the primary reasons why they trust AWS with their workloads," said David Brown, Vice President, Amazon EC2, at AWS. "Nitro Enclaves builds on those same security and isolation models that have separated AWS for so many customers, delivering a more efficient method for securely processing highly sensitive data. This means customers can build and innovate faster in a way that still meets the highest bar for security."</p><p>AWS Nitro Enclaves is available on the majority of Intel and AMD-based Amazon EC2 instance types built on the AWS Nitro System (AWS Graviton2-based instance support is coming in the first half of 2021). AWS Nitro Enclaves is available today in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and South America (Sao Paulo) regions, with more regions coming soon.</p><p>Anjuna provides simple, secure, enterprise-ready application and data protection against malicious software, IT insiders, and bad actors. "Our customers come to Anjuna because they want a simple way to get their applications up and running in a secure, isolated compute environment," said Ayal Yogev, CEO and Co-Founder of Anjuna Security. "The nature of our business has given us insight into different approaches for achieving this type of isolation. Our hands-on work with Nitro Enclaves confirms that this is a powerful solution for enterprises looking to process sensitive data in a way that protects this data from insider threats. Nitro Enclaves is exactly the type of innovation that has security-minded organizations looking to the cloud, and that's why Anjuna is supporting the service to help AWS customers quickly ‘lift and shift' applications to Enclaves – without recoding or changing processes"</p><p>castLabs pioneers software and cloud services for digital video markets worldwide. "As a globally operating cloud service provider handling our clients' most valuable data and encryption keys, we're striving to achieve the highest levels of data security, isolation, and trust," said Michael Stattmann, CEO and Founder, castLabs. "Working with an advanced security technology usually increases overhead, but with Nitro Enclaves, achieving a confidential computing implementation is easy to develop and deploy, using much more familiar technologies."</p><p>Evervault provides simple SDKs for developers to encrypt sensitive data as it enters their infrastructure, and to process that data without ever exposing it. "Our mission is to encrypt the internet," said Shane Curran, CEO, Evervault. "Nitro Enclaves provides the perfect platform to make this happen, because it's the best way to protect data in use."</p><p>About Amazon Web Services</p><p>For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.</p><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are just some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201028006266/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon Web Services Inc.</p>

Amazon Announces First Fulfillment Center in Nebraska

/news/news-details/2020/Amazon-Announces-First-Fulfillment-Center-in-Nebraska/default.aspx

Amazon-Announces-First-Fulfillment-Center-in-Nebraska

10/27/2020 16:45:00

Amazon Announces First Fulfillment Center in Nebraska

10/27/2020

2020

New 700,000 square-foot site will be in greater Omaha area and create 1,000 full-time jobs SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 27, 2020-- (NASDAQ: AMZN) – Amazon.com, Inc. announced plans to open its first fulfillment center in the state of Nebraska in Papillion. The site, which is anticipated to launch in 2021, will create 1,000 full-time jobs with industry leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one. Employees will work alongside Amazon robotics to pick, pack and ship small items to customers such as books, electronics and toys. Amazon is a great place to work with highly competitive pay, benefits from day one, and training programs for in-demand jobs. On top of Amazon's industry-leading minimum starting wage of $15 per hour, full-time employees receive comprehensive benefits, including full medical, vision and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) with 50 percent company match, starting on day one. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families. Amazon employees have access to innovative programs like Career Choice, where Amazon will pay up to 95 percent of tuition for courses related to in-demand fields, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at Amazon. Since the program's launch, more than 25,000 employees across the globe have pursued degrees in game design and visual communications, nursing, IT programming and radiology, to name a few. Key Quotes Alicia Boler Davis, Vice President of Global Customer Fulfillment at Amazon"We are thrilled to be opening our first fulfillment center in the great state of Nebraska and bringing 1,000 full-time jobs with industry-leading pay and benefits to greater Omaha. Amazon leverages its scale for good and makes investments to support communities. We appreciate the strong support from local and state leaders throughout the process, and we look forward to supporting the Nebraska community with great delivery options." Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts"Today's announcement by Amazon is exciting news for Nebraska. Our state's wonderful people and welcoming communities continue to attract major investments to the Good Life. Amazon's fulfillment center will grow Nebraska by creating 1,000 great jobs. Winning the project demonstrates our state's resilience and economic vitality despite challenges." David G. Brown, President and CEO, Greater Omaha Chamber"It's no coincidence why Amazon chose Greater Omaha, and Sarpy County specifically. This is a region that works together and aspires to more. When fully operational, this facility will add nearly $204 million to the local economy each year. That's significant, and we're excited and grateful for what's ahead. Congratulations to everyone involved. We are proud to partner with you." Don Kelly, Sarpy County Board Chairman"Sarpy County is the fastest growing county in the state, and that doesn't happen by accident. It's a team effort that requires commitment from the state, the county and the economic development community. We're proud to partner with Amazon and so many great organizations to bring Amazon's newest robotic fulfillment center to Sarpy County." Andrew Rainbolt, Executive Director, Sarpy County Economic Development Corporation"We are beyond enthusiastic about the many great opportunities Amazon's growing presence in Sarpy County offers. Amazon has invested more than $96 million into Nebraska since 2010. Today's groundbreaking shows a continued commitment to collaboration between Amazon, the State of Nebraska, Sarpy County and the City of Papillion. Exciting things are definitely ahead, and we are grateful to the many, many individuals who worked together to make today happen." Papillion Mayor David Black"We are proud of the spirit of collaboration that brings new business to our community; and, we are equally proud of the talented workforce we have at our disposal to fill the technical positions Amazon provides." Amazon in Nebraska From 2010-2019, Amazon has invested more than $96 million in Nebraska, including infrastructure and compensation to employees in the state. Amazon's investments in the state contributed an additional more than $69 million into the state's economy over that same time period. Using methodology developed by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Amazon estimates its investments have created an additional 200+ indirect jobs on top of the company's current 500+ full- and part-time direct hires. Amazon currently operates one delivery station and two Whole Foods Market locations in Nebraska. Amazon's worldwide fulfillment network supports businesses of all sizes through its Fulfillment by Amazon offering, and many of those local businesses are based in Nebraska. There are more than 6,000 independent authors and small and medium-sized businesses in the state growing their businesses and reaching new customers with Amazon. Additional Resources: Fulfillment center images and b-roll: https://press.aboutamazon.com/fulfillment-centers See latest Amazon news on the Day One blog: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/ Nebraska Investment Map: https://www.aboutamazon.com/investing-in-the-u-s About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201027006013/en/ Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

<p><em>New 700,000 square-foot site will be in greater Omaha area and create 1,000 full-time jobs</em></p><p>SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 27, 2020-- (NASDAQ: AMZN) – Amazon.com, Inc. announced plans to open its first fulfillment center in the state of Nebraska in Papillion.</p><p>The site, which is anticipated to launch in 2021, will create 1,000 full-time jobs with industry leading pay and comprehensive benefits starting on day one. Employees will work alongside Amazon robotics to pick, pack and ship small items to customers such as books, electronics and toys.</p><p>Amazon is a great place to work with highly competitive pay, benefits from day one, and training programs for in-demand jobs. On top of Amazon's industry-leading minimum starting wage of $15 per hour, full-time employees receive comprehensive benefits, including full medical, vision and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) with 50 percent company match, starting on day one. The company also offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave and innovative benefits such as Leave Share and Ramp Back, which give new parents flexibility to support their growing families.</p><p>Amazon employees have access to innovative programs like Career Choice, where Amazon will pay up to 95 percent of tuition for courses related to in-demand fields, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at Amazon. Since the program's launch, more than 25,000 employees across the globe have pursued degrees in game design and visual communications, nursing, IT programming and radiology, to name a few.</p><p>Key Quotes</p><p>Alicia Boler Davis, Vice President of Global Customer Fulfillment at Amazon"We are thrilled to be opening our first fulfillment center in the great state of Nebraska and bringing 1,000 full-time jobs with industry-leading pay and benefits to greater Omaha. Amazon leverages its scale for good and makes investments to support communities. We appreciate the strong support from local and state leaders throughout the process, and we look forward to supporting the Nebraska community with great delivery options."</p><p>Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts"Today's announcement by Amazon is exciting news for Nebraska. Our state's wonderful people and welcoming communities continue to attract major investments to the Good Life. Amazon's fulfillment center will grow Nebraska by creating 1,000 great jobs. Winning the project demonstrates our state's resilience and economic vitality despite challenges."</p><p>David G. Brown, President and CEO, Greater Omaha Chamber"It's no coincidence why Amazon chose Greater Omaha, and Sarpy County specifically. This is a region that works together and aspires to more. When fully operational, this facility will add nearly $204 million to the local economy each year. That's significant, and we're excited and grateful for what's ahead. Congratulations to everyone involved. We are proud to partner with you."</p><p>Don Kelly, Sarpy County Board Chairman"Sarpy County is the fastest growing county in the state, and that doesn't happen by accident. It's a team effort that requires commitment from the state, the county and the economic development community. We're proud to partner with Amazon and so many great organizations to bring Amazon's newest robotic fulfillment center to Sarpy County."</p><p>Andrew Rainbolt, Executive Director, Sarpy County Economic Development Corporation"We are beyond enthusiastic about the many great opportunities Amazon's growing presence in Sarpy County offers. Amazon has invested more than $96 million into Nebraska since 2010. Today's groundbreaking shows a continued commitment to collaboration between Amazon, the State of Nebraska, Sarpy County and the City of Papillion. Exciting things are definitely ahead, and we are grateful to the many, many individuals who worked together to make today happen."</p><p>Papillion Mayor David Black"We are proud of the spirit of collaboration that brings new business to our community; and, we are equally proud of the talented workforce we have at our disposal to fill the technical positions Amazon provides."</p><p>Amazon in Nebraska</p><ul><li>From 2010-2019, Amazon has invested more than $96 million in Nebraska, including infrastructure and compensation to employees in the state.</li><li>Amazon's investments in the state contributed an additional more than $69 million into the state's economy over that same time period.</li><li>Using methodology developed by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Amazon estimates its investments have created an additional 200+ indirect jobs on top of the company's current 500+ full- and part-time direct hires.</li><li>Amazon currently operates one delivery station and two Whole Foods Market locations in Nebraska.</li><li>Amazon's worldwide fulfillment network supports businesses of all sizes through its Fulfillment by Amazon offering, and many of those local businesses are based in Nebraska. There are more than 6,000 independent authors and small and medium-sized businesses in the state growing their businesses and reaching new customers with Amazon.</li></ul><p>Additional Resources:</p><ul><li>Fulfillment center images and b-roll: https://press.aboutamazon.com/fulfillment-centers</li><li>See latest Amazon news on the Day One blog: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/</li><li>Nebraska Investment Map: https://www.aboutamazon.com/investing-in-the-u-s</li></ul><p>About Amazon</p><p>Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.</p><p>View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201027006013/en/</p><p>Amazon.com, Inc.Media HotlineAmazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr</p><p>Source: Amazon.com, Inc.</p>