Baird's Takeaways From Amazon's AWS re:Invent

Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN's AWS re:Invent conference shows the company's "rapid pace of innovation" and reinforces its leadership position in the cloud, according to Baird.

The Analyst

Baird's Colin Sebastian maintains an Outperform rating on Amazon with an unchanged $2,100 price target.

The Thesis

Sebastian shared the following takeaways from the first days of Amazon's re:Invent conference in a note. (See his track record here.) 

• AWS CEO Andy Jassy suggested the company's new software applications will include machine learning and artificial intelligence components, Sebastian said. AWS intends to use the technology to reduce cost and friction in ML workloads, such as Amazon Elastic Inference, which can cut GPU costs by 75 percent.
• Blockchain technology is now "on Amazon's radar," the analyst said. The company announced Amazon Managed Blockchain, a fully managed service that supports Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum frameworks. This can be used across multiple industries, including health care, mortgage issuance, supply chain and automotive, Sebastian said. 
• The company introduced Lake Formation, which should reduce the time required to build a data lake from months to days, the analyst said. AWS already has more than 10,000 data lakes in its AWS S3 storage service, and the new offering could increase the accessibility of advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence applications, he said. 
• AWS discussed its progress in hybrid cloud initiatives, including leveraging the partner ecosystem to support hybrid workloads and a strategic focus moving forward, according to Baird. 

Price Action

Amazon shares were down 0.25 percent at $1,673.57 at the close Thursday. 

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Photo courtesy of Amazon.