AWS Has Saved Its Customers $500 Million By Alerting Them

When they are overpaying, that is. The world’s biggest cloud provider does not like making money from customers that are not getting value, according to AWS CEO Andy Jassy.

Who was talking to an audience of technology executives at Gartner Symposium.

The annual event kicked off in Orlando, Florida, where Jassy did a 30-minute interview on stage with Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer who hit the Amazon Web Services chief with some interesting data and feedback from some 7,500 business and IT leaders.

Data from Gartner surveys that showed that the most confusing thing about AWS was the bill, for no less than 95% of the respondents.

Jassy attributed this to the fact that AWS had launched over 1,000 new features and services in 2016, and was on track to launch over 1,200 in 2017. This made keeping up with everything a dauting task for users of its platform.

Nevertheless, AWS is aware of the problem, and launched a program to alert its customers when they had cloud servers with low utilization, so that they can be deactivated.

This initiative has now saved its customers $500 million, according to the AWS CEO:

“We don’t want to make money from customers that aren’t getting value from us. We’re trying to build relationships that lost a long time. How many of your partners call you up and say ‘stop spending money with us’?”

The biggest surprise, meanwhile, was the fact that only 65% considered Amazon as a trusted enterprise partner, compared to a 90% rating for IBM and Microsoft, 75% of Oracle, 60% for Google, and 30% for good old Apple.

This, Jassy said, he would have bene thrilled of, if someone told him for years ago that AWS would be up to the 65% mark in 2017.

Keeping in mind the fact that AWS had grown faster than anyone at Amazon ever anticipated, with $15 billion in sales now, an unheard of 40% growth, with millions of active customers spread all over the world using its platform.

Not bad for a cloud provider with humble beginnings.