Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced big deals with three clients: the National Football League (NFL), The Walt Disney Company and Expedia.
The contracts are significant for AWS because rivals such as IBM, Microsoft, Google Cloud, among others, are very active to sign such big deals with larger enterprise customers.
NFL has selected AWS’s machine learning and data analytics services to boost the accuracy, speed, and insights provided by its Next Gen Stats platform, the NFL’s player-tracking system. NFL aims to develop new ways of visualizing the action on the field, uncovering insights into the action on the field, and expanding the fan experience.
By leveraging AWS’s cloud-based machine learning capabilities, the NFL is looking to take its game-day stats to the next level.
Matt Swensson, vice president, Emerging Products and Technology at the NFL, said: “By powering Next Gen Stats with AWS, we’ll be able to kick off our 2018 season with even more impactful and meaningful content, uncovering deeper insights into the game of football.”
Walt Disney
The Walt Disney Company has selected AWS as its public cloud infrastructure provider. Disney will expand its use of AWS to migrate production workloads to the AWS Cloud. Disney already leverages AWS’s services for use cases, including websites and digital properties across all its brands, analytics, mobile, business applications, and machine learning.
Disney’s various segments, including Media Networks, Parks and Resorts, and The Walt Disney Studios, currently run business-critical workloads on AWS, driving optimal operational performance and customer experiences.
“Expanding our relationship with AWS and making AWS our preferred public cloud infrastructure provider aligns with our overall technical strategy,” said Charles Weiner, senior vice president Enterprise Infrastructure Services for The Walt Disney Company.
Expedia
Expedia, a global online travel company, is standardizing on AWS machine learning technologies to enhance travelers’ booking experiences across its brands.
Expedia continues to move its 20 years’ worth of core-business workloads, digital properties, mobile applications, and legacy platforms largely from owned datacenters to AWS and will migrate several databases from Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle to Amazon Aurora as part of that process.
In 2013, Expedia started leveraging AWS to speed up large-scale projects. Expedia could not have integrated and completed one of its first acquisitions in 91 working days without leveraging AWS for capacity and traffic management.
Expedia used AWS’s services to build a scalable platform for application deployment and has been able to launch more than 4,000 cloud applications with a release velocity of 2,000 deployments a day, on average.
In addition, the data science teams for Expedia Worldwide Engineering and Hotels.com are using AWS machine learning services to deploy a variety of modules that add intelligent capabilities to processes such as bidding on search engine marketing.
Tony Donohoe, chief technology officer at Brand Expedia Group, said: Before running analytics workloads on AWS, it took us three hours to analyze five days of performance metrics. Now we can analyze seven days of data in 30 seconds – that’s 360 times faster.”
