AWS Summit Sydney: The fast eat the slow

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It’s not the big that eats the small. It’s the fast that eat the slow. That’s the ethos Xero has run on as we’ve worked to completely disrupt the accounting software market over the past ten years.

Xero was born in the cloud, the first global platform to go all-in on the technology. Now, with our move to AWS, Xero will pick up the pace of innovation, catching a few of our competitors asleep at the wheel again.

Leveraging machine learning, automation and artificial intelligence advances, layered over the $1.2 trillion worth of global economic activity transacted across the platform in the past 12 months, we’re starting to put all this data to work so small business owners and accountants can see the power of the network and how it will unlock productivity so advisors can help small businesses thrive.

This week, 7,000 cloud enthusiasts have gathered in Sydney for AWS Summit to gain insights on cloud adoption. Rod Drury spoke at the AWS Summit this week, to gave the crowd a look at just how a company like Xero, with more than 1 million subscribers, completed one of the largest migrations in the APAC region and why we believe all application vendors must re-platform to deliver immediate high-value insights to customers through big data innovation and mass automation.

Xero is all-in on AWS. Last year we completed; 1.4 petabytes of data and 59 billion records all while keeping our customers online. It was like changing the engines of a flying passenger jet.

Today we have more than 3 petabytes of data on AWS, 300 apps deployed and 4,800 servers used.

Announced at the Summit, we were delighted to win the AWS Technology Partner of the Year for Australia and New Zealand recognizing a big milestone and showcasing Xero’s commitment to scale to serve millions of customers.

With the considerable investment AWS has made in platform services, we can step that innovation up a level; building and deploying software in even shorter delivery timeframes. Xero can release new software more rapidly, and experiment with these features in ways that was not possible on our previous stack.

Building on the back of the migration, we’ve already been able to develop machine learning systems like our recent invoice coding release. It’s the first step on our way to building a bespoke, personalized assistant for small businesses and their accountants to cut the administrative burden, prevent mistakes, and enable them to spend more time growing their business.

The increasingly global nature of small business means that companies like Airbnb, Amazon, and Facebook and, as a whole, all business platforms must be global, and are quickly becoming the new way to connect the world in the face of political turmoil and economic uncertainty. They operate across borders, connecting cultures, countries and people on one platform.

With more than one million subscribers, 100,000 business advisors and 500+ connected partner apps in our ecosystem, Xero’s unique global business platform enables small businesses and their advisors to use global networks, connect to banks and do business across multiple countries and regions.

Only a global platform – on a single global code base like Xero – can offer the opportunity for small businesses and their advisors to expand their businesses offshore, connect to banks in multiple countries and use Xero’s technology and payment partnerships with Google, Apple, Square, Paypal, Stripe and others to do business seamlessly all over the world. It sets in motion a global network effect as small businesses expand their trade between countries.

Take Lee Fish, a small town fishmonger on New Zealand’s North Island; it’s able to supply Michelin-star restaurants in LA with fresh fish in under 24 hours using cloud technology and real-time data; bringing its sustainable fishing practices, steeped in centuries of tradition, to the rest of the world.

A Xero customer, Lee Fish is able to utilize a global accounting platform that can keep up with them, as well as other cloud technology tools to track how every fish travels, where it was packaged, what boat it was caught on – right down to the fisherman.

Companies are increasingly choosing to collaborate as a coordinated ecosystem, despite possessing overlapping or competitive offerings. This sense of transparency in business is transforming the way services are delivered and products are developed.

This open approach to partnering means that these collaborative efforts often default to open APIs, which anyone building software in the last decade has observed and likely benefitted from. For incumbent companies, this necessitates a mindset shift, taking several attempts to become truly open.

In an increasingly disconnected world, technology platforms are the one thing connecting it – giving way to the ability for small businesses to do trade across borders, subsequently thrive and prosper.

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