How Amazon changed everything? Customer Obsession vs Company Obsession.
If you have been to re: Invent of 2018, or at least watched the Keynote with Werner Vogels you will remember Werner talking about shutting down their Oracle Data warehouses.
But long before that we also heard Andy Jessy had given the news that they would be running 97% of the “missions critical databases” on their own platform Aurora and DynamoDB and mid-2019 they would stop using Oracle Databases completely.
As promised came the news 30 Mar 2019 1:42 AM. Amazon Fulfillment teams have migrated %100 of their databases to AWS platform.
If you are familiar with stocks the stable decline of Oracle vs Amazon is quite clear over the years:
Now I didn’t want to write this to give you the news rather I wanted to highlight a bigger point here.
The company obsession is over! Long live customer obsession!
This shutdown marks not only a mere company switching providers but it really marks the start of a new era, an industry standard the Customer Obsession. And I am not talking about customer obsession on paper and, wishful thinking or a “hey that makes a great slide point in my presentation” kind of customer obsession. I am talking about hardcore dedication and effort by the companies to listen to their clients, going into extremes to get their feedback and most importantly delivering that promise back to their customers.
Let me explain this with an example from AWS and see how it changes the perception of the clients:
Back at the start of 2018, AWS required a written approval and notice period before doing any kind of pen testing on your infrastructure. I personally had to work with my Technical Account Manager to handle questionnaires on what, how, when, by whom. After a couple of emails back and forth I had the permission and I started talking with Trustwave to start our pen testing. Now as expected pen-testing was late, it didn’t complete on time so I had to go back and forth again between my team, my TAM and Trustware. And My TAM between me and AWS Security team to handle all the changes and for us to be granted extra time to complete the testing. We completed the test with around 10 days of delay and finally confirmed to AWS that we had finished.
But what if the permission was not required? Wouldn’t that make things easier for everyone?
Well, guess what. On 28 Feb 2019 Teri Radichel, apart from being a very talented and one of the pioneering security experts working AWS, published an email where AWS stated they have removed the prior approval for pen-testing in various services:
This was great news, not only for directors/managers/ team leads who had to deal with all kinds of questionnaires and synchronize the work with the external consultants but also for security companies and security experts who do pen testing for their clients continuously in AWS.
Not only that it really is worth paying attention to what happened on the same post where we can see the customer obsession and Getting things done attitude of AWS:
Scott Piper, who also is an AWS security Consultant asking for the clarification is met with the great client support. Just after 1 day of getting the feedback AWS Support did respond with the updated page but also given a new email address where Scott can directly contact to:
So here comes the new era that AWS started where the customer is the only source of truth when it comes to the new implementations, services. I can also predict we will be seeing a great change in the startups and startup sector where now an idea is converted to a product or a service by the customers themselves vs entrepreneurs creating the products which they think is right.
Say hi to the new era of customer obsession. We will be seeing more of it every day.
