Author: Mark Schwartz

Customers often ask us how Amazon manages to sustain its pace of innovation. It is truly an amazing pace: on average, AWS releases a major new feature or service approximately once every five hours, day and night, 365 days a year. Since 90–95% of our roadmap comes from what customers tell us they need, you […]

I have just posted a series of blog posts that are intended to paint a picture of IT finance for the future. They are related to one another in interesting ways (and hyperlinked, of course) so I thought I would lay out the full picture here. The ideas have emerged over a series of conversations […]

Who is accountable for managing the costs of a digital service? Enterprises are increasingly pushing accountability outward to cross-functional teams. There is an important reason for this: teams can make decisions and put them into action quickly, and speed is important. By putting a cross-functional group of people on the same team, the enterprise makes […]

As I have argued in my other posts, the digital world is bringing a radical change in the role of the CFO. For one thing, the cloud and DevOps are turning fixed costs into variable costs. For another, rapid iteration and delivery make it possible—and essential—for us to make financial decisions based on marginal costs […]

As we navigate the changes brought about by the digital revolution, we can see that the role of the enterprise CFO is also changing. Whether the one is the cause of the other, and which is cause and which effect, I’m not so sure. But the digital world certainly requires us to think very differently […]

The annual budgeting process leads us to make decisions based on total costs. We assign a budget to a cost category, then spend the year managing to that cost. Our investment management process similarly leads us to think in terms of total costs. We plan against a set of requirements, estimate the total cost, figure […]

By Eddie Murray, Global Oil & Gas Leader, Amazon Web Services Introduction by Mark Schwartz, Enterprise Strategist, AWS As my colleague Miriam McLemore says, large enterprises have innovation in their DNA. There was something innovative they did that got them to be big enterprises in the first place, and probably many innovations along the way. […]

by Jeanine Banks, General Manager, Industry & ISV Solutions at AWS Introduction by Mark Schwartz In another take on the question of risk and controls, Jeanine Banks, from our  Product Management organization, shows how companies moving into the digital age are often focused on the wrong risks and build walls and controls that stifle innovation. […]

Live blog post from re:Invent 2018, Las Vegas For decades, enterprises have thought of data in terms of the relational database model. It is a brilliant model and has solved many of the data-handling problems of early IT. With a normalized database schema, we could reduce redundancy and bring out the relationships between data items […]

Live blog post from re:Invent 2018, Las Vegas One consistent theme in Werner Vogels’s keynote speech at re:Invent yesterday was that products designed for the cloud are very different from those designed for on-premises hardware. In the first waves of migration to the cloud and cloud-first delivery of new systems, it was natural for all […]