- Amazon held a meeting for its biggest cloud customers at its annual re:Invent conference.
- The meeting for "XXL" customers was not on the official conference schedule.
- Customers such as Salesforce discussed cost-cutting and AI-ethics issues this year.
The biggest Amazon Web Services conference of the year hosts a dizzying number of customer meetings. One meeting is open only to very important cloud customers: "XXL" or "extra-extra-large" AWS users.
A major draw for AWS re:Invent is the "see-and-be-seen" factor. The annual event, which ran this year from November 27 to December 1 in Las Vegas, allows customers and AWS sales teams to meet in person.
Many of this year's roughly 60,000 attendees spent most of the week zipping between the fourth and fifth floors of the Venetian Convention & Expo Center, where customer meetings took place. The event barred non-customers from even walking the hallways.
The gathering of XXL customers, which the official re:Invent schedule didn't list, is an annual meeting of some of AWS's biggest customers, according to two people who were in attendance who asked to remain anonymous so they could speak freely. Their identities are known to Business Insider.
They said about 50 people attended the meeting, including about a dozen AWS representatives and employees from eight large AWS customers, including Salesforce and Adobe. Not all the largest AWS customers attended the meeting.
The meeting, the people said, is a chance for AWS customers with the largest consumption rates to meet with the company and discuss specific problems.
They said some of this year's conversations revolved around cost cutting. Customers discussed AWS's recent decision to join the FinOps Foundation, of which Microsoft and Google Cloud were already members. "FinOps" is the industry term for cloud financial management. The decision signaled that AWS is taking cost-efficiency more seriously, even though it has the dominant market position and "doesn't really have to" help its customers cut costs, one person said.
The customers also discussed the topic of ethical AI. Both people said they felt more confident about AWS's commitment to AI ethics following the meeting, but neither shared specific details.
Though the meeting is for important customers, Adam Selipsky, the CEO of AWS, did not attend, the people said.
One person said the content of the meeting was "narrow and administrative" in scope, describing it as "large cloud provider meets with large customers to talk about problems only they have."
AWS declined to comment for this story.
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