Peak’s key takeaways from AWS re:Invent 2021

Major Amazon SageMaker announcements

This year saw AWS announce a whole host of new Amazon SageMaker features, with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) very much at the forefront of the agenda.

Amazon stated that “as ML adoption grows, ML skills are in higher demand. To help meet this growing demand, AWS is expanding the reach of ML beyond data scientists and developers to the broader business user community, including line-of-business analysts supporting finance, marketing, operations and HR teams.”

This move will see Amazon SageMaker Canvas opened up to more non-technical teams to enable the generation of ML-powered predictions with no experience required. Naturally, this resonated with the Peak team due to our recent platform-first announcement; a decision that sees us open up access to the Peak Decision Intelligence (DI) platform to enable more teams to build their own DI solutions. While Amazon SageMaker Canvas will play a major role in empowering more businesses to build models, Peak differs in the sense that its focus is on the insights and decisions that a model can provide. To see both platforms opened up in this way is incredibly exciting!

…but there’s no point being data-driven unless you’re using that data to drive great decisions!

Sustainability

This was a hugely hot topic that came up on a daily basis. In fact, AWS made it a major focus for re:Invent 2021 as part of an Amazon commitment to achieve net zero carbon by 2040, and be on a path to 100% renewable energy by 2025. All re:Invent attendees were provided with a sustainability guide, highlighting initiatives such as Fill It Forward, SWAG donation and a Code Green hackathon. Throughout the conference there were also a wide range of interactive sessions and additional activities to help businesses answer their sustainability challenges.

We’ve had the pleasure of partnering with AWS ourselves recently to help businesses meet their sustainability goals with our 21 Day Sustainability Challenge. Participants can put Peak’s platform to the test in order to discover how much we could reduce food waste by in just three weeks.

MLOps

A theme that was noted by some members of the Peak engineering team was around increased autonomy in MLOps; creating autonomy to enable teams and people to do what they need to do! Topics like abstraction were widely discussed – taking some of the more complicated aspects of MLOps and abstracting it to make it easier for developers. 

We were also introduced to Amazon’s brand new AI & ML Scholarship program! This exciting new scheme, launched in partnership with AWS, Intel and Udacity, will offer participants hands-on learning, scholarships and mentorship for underrepresented high school and college students.

AWS Marketplace

As always, there were plenty of sessions about AWS Marketplace at re:Invent this year! Some of the most captivating that our team managed to catch included an ‘Introduction to AWS Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift’ and ‘How to grow your SaaS business and drive revenue with AWS Marketplace.’

Co-selling alongside AWS is a subject close to the hearts of Peak. We’re proud of our partnership with AWS; one that enables us to welcome new names to our customer base via Marketplace, including one of our more recent wins in UK variety retailer B&M.

Reasons to celebrate

The Peak team will remember re:Invent 2021 for its fascinating keynotes, the long-awaited return of face-to-face networking and a wide variety of insightful sessions – but that’s not all! 

At the AWS Partner Summit, we were absolutely over the moon to have been chosen as the AWS Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Partner of the Year 2021 for the UK and Ireland. This prestigious award recognizes leaders in the UK and Ireland playing a key role in helping customers to drive innovation and build solutions on AWS Cloud. This was one of only two awards of its kind up for grabs for UK&I – and a big congratulations to Accenture for picking up the other one!

Appearing on theCUBE

SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE was back and broadcasting live from re:Invent this year! Richard Potter (Peak CEO), who first appeared on theCUBE in 2019, returned for another special guest appearance for show – one of the most recognized in the world of enterprise tech media. He caught up with hosts Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson to explain what we’ve up to since last time, and to delve deeper into the potential that Decision Intelligence and the Peak platform can offer businesses.

You can now watch his interview, broadcast live from AWS re:Invent, on demand via the link below.