At their regional AWS Summit in New York City today, Amazon.com announced the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Device Farm. This new offering features real Android and Fire OS devices at Amazon data centers, accessible via a simple user interface, as with any other cloud-based service.
AWS isn’t the first vendor to offer real device testing in the cloud – Keynote (now part of Dynatrace) is a notable competitor – but Amazon’s dominance in the public cloud marketplace heralds a significant move toward establishing real device testing as a must-have for all mobile development.
Perhaps the most important subtext to Amazon’s announcement is their rapid turnaround regarding support for digital technologies. In November 2014, I wrote an article for Forbes criticizing them for their digital blind spot.
What a difference eight months can make. AWS CTO Werner Vogels credited AWS’s sudden focus on digital to the Amazon retail site’s experience from the 2014 holiday season, where 60% of all orders came from mobile devices.
The digital story is not solely about mobile, of course. Digital means connecting customers to the value a company can provide them, which requires an end-to-end technology solution. The cloud, therefore, plays a central role for most digital efforts in modern enterprises today.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/07/09/amazon-embraces-digital-with-cloud-based-device-farm/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.
