Can Oracle Buck Its Earnings Trend in Fiscal 2Q17? PART 2 OF 11
AWS: the key to Amazon’s cloud scale and presence
Oracle (ORCL) has become a competitive player in the billion-dollar cloud space, where Amazon.com (AMZN), with its market share of 30%, still dominates. But Amazon’s cloud computing segment, AWS (Amazon Web Services), is the key to its profitability.
In fiscal 3Q16, AWS revenue grew 55% YoY (year-over-year) to ~$3.2 billion, indicating that the segment is on track to meet or surpass the $10-billion target the company has set for the segment for full fiscal 2016.
Amazon’s three new AI services
Continuing with its strategy to invest in AWS, Amazon announced three new AI (artificial intelligence) services—Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition—for its cloud users in its recently concluded AWS Re-Invent 2016 conference, held from November 27 to December 1, 2016. These new services are developed and meant to help developers “to build a new generation of apps that have human-like intelligence and can see, hear, speak and interact with people and their environments.”
Lex is the machine learning technology that powers Amazon’s Alexa. It thus enables developers to integrate meaningful conversational experiences in their offerings. Polly is a cloud text to speech service. It enables developers to include life-like speech features to existing applications like e-learning platforms. It thus lets them
create new categories for speech-enabled offerings.
Amazon’s Rekognition is an image processing service that identifies content in images.
Continue to the next part for a look at what else has spurred Amazon’s interest and investment in AI space.
