Amazon's cloud arm has struck separate agreements with Volkswagen (VW) and Standard Bank to boost the two companies' cloud platform and customer-facing applications respectively.
VW's deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) will aim to pave the way for a transformation of the car maker's manufacturing and logistical processes across its 122 plants, including the effectiveness of assembly equipment, as well as track parts and vehicles.
Together, the two companies will develop a new platform, dubbed the Volkswagon Industrial Cloud, which will deploy technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning to realise this wider ambition.
AWS' IoT services will be deployed in full across VW's new platform in order to detect and collect data from the floor of each plant, then organise and conduct sophisticated analytics on the information to gain operational insights.
Moreover, VW will feed all the information into a data lake built on an Amazon S3 bucket on which data analytics will be conducted. This, the two companies hope, will lead to improvements in forecasting and insight into operational trends. The manufacturing process could also be streamlined, as well as identifying gaps in production and waste management.
"We will continue to strengthen production as a key competitive factor for the Volkswagen Group. Our strategic collaboration with AWS will lay the foundation," said the chairman of the Porsche AG executive board Oliver Blume.
"The Volkswagen Group, with its global expertise in automobile production, and AWS, with its technological know-how, complement each other extraordinarily well. With our global industry platform, we want to create a growing industrial ecosystem with transparency and efficiency bringing benefits to all concerned."
AWS has also announced that the South African Standard Bank has decided to use its services to migrate production workloads onto the public cloud provider's systems. These include many customer-facing platforms and banking apps.
Subject to regulations, the migration will ideally take place across all banking departments including personal banking and corporate investment banking. The firm will also adopt AWS' data analytics and machine learning tools, to automate financial operations and generally improve web and mobile apps used by its customers.
"Standard Bank Group has been a trusted financial institution for more than 150 years. We look forward to working closely with them as they become Africa's first bank in the cloud, leveraging AWS to innovate new services at a faster clip, maintain operational excellence, and provide secure banking services to customers around the world," Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS.
An AWS cloud centre of excellence will also be created within the bank, featuring a team dedicated exclusively to the public cloud migration. This centre will also build training and certification programmes within the firm to boost employees' digital skills. This will also be extended one step further with an educational and digital skills programme to be launched across South Africa.
