My first ever AWS Summit Sydney 2019

I’d heard the hype around AWS Summit, and now I can understand the hype to be true. This week, I joined 14,000 other humans in fast-moving cues and with an appetite to learn more about AWS.

The entire event whizzed by in a blur, people, presentations, so many great companies and give aways, but more importantly, inspiration.

There was an almost palpable sentiment among every single Amazon speaker – “It’s Always Day 1 at Amazon”. It’s always day 1 is a compass for Amazon for their team of 600,000 around the world and easily more than 1 million customers. Is there another company on the planet that has the same relentless customer obsession and goal to forever avoid being a ‘day 2’ company?

The event, for me at least, can be summed up by a few words I heard repeated throughout the event:

“This is the slowest pace of change we’re ever going to experience. If there was ever a period of time in history, you’d pick to be alive in, you’d pick this time right now.”

Versent – AWS CONSULTING Partner of the Year – 3 years in a row!

Last year, I read about Versent winning AWS Consulting Partner of the Year and APAC Partner of the Year and I wondered what kind of company takes home so many awards? This year, I now work for that company! Sharing the joy and pride with my Versent family on winning AWS Consulting Partner of the Year 2019, for the third year in a row is mesmerising. These awards are a result of immense, hard work and a dedicated focus to delivering the best AWS experience and solving problems together with our customers. It’s nice to be recognised for that. 🙂

I got asked an interesting question at the event,

“What makes Versent so different to everyone else here?”

I pointed out our Versent booth because when it comes down to it, the difference is this:

Keynotes & Talks

Pre-dominant key themes this year – AI, Robotics, MachineLearning and security is part of the family, not the distant relative you meet at Christmas lunch once a year. AWS clearly focused its energy to make AI, machine learning part of the builder toolkit, and not just something for a select few and the benefits are slowly being realised across industries.

A keynote that really stood out, was one around the impact on human potential, despite adversity, by Dr Jordan Nguyen, an Aussie bio-medical engineer. He tapped into AI and robotics to create a wheelchair controlled by the signals in the human brain. A breakthrough like this has allowed people with significant physical disability e.g. cerebral palsy to fulfil their dream of driving a car… or playing a piano. This is a true case study of what technology can do, enable dreams and potential we dreamt of only a few years ago.

I genuinely got a lot out of the Versent keynote – The Inconvenient Truth of Cloud Climate Change. I was especially excited to see my colleague Jen Yang absolutely nail the presentation with our two co-founders, James and Thor. They really got stuck into debunking the myths around moving to cloud and weren’t afraid to share some trade secrets no one else will tell you about “shifting to cloud”.

General observations

People, people and more people, everywhere – as far as you can see. The sheer number of people who come together to learn, network and keep enabling themselves to build was incredible to witness.

• The diversity in the content; anyone can learn at AWS Summit. It’s not just a developer’s event.

• #silencedisco is, well, a little weird! Every speaker room was provided with headphones and a set to tune into to listen to the speakers. It felt a little odd I must admit, sitting in a room of people with headphones listening to the same speaker on stage.

• Where were the women presenters? It was great seeing my colleague Jen and Versent customer Lia, present on stage, but where were the rest of the ladies at?!

• Swag – it’s a tech conference, what do we expect, there’s swag for EVERYTHING. My favourite was a snowflake tool set.

• Those robots delivering food to us – man wasn’t that cool?… wait a minute… 😉

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Jiggy is a leader, helping Versent’s customers achieve their business vision on AWS. She is passionate about taking customers and Versent teams from idea to successful implementation, as a partnership.

Outside of work, she continues to live her promise of seeing a new country every single year, resulting in lots of travelling tales.  She is also massive cricket fan #goaustralia

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