Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of Amazon Location Service in December. Priced at a fraction of common alternatives, the service seeks to give users access to maps and location-based services from multiple providers on an economical, pay-as-you-go basis. We caught up Andre Dufour, General Manager, Amazon Location Service, AWS, on the business needs for the service and the gaps the company is trying to address.
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Excerpts:
Why did AWS decided to launch Amazon Location now? Was it a direct outcome of how GIS and geospatial data and technology has gained prominence since COVID outbreak and will continue to in a post-COVID world?
At Amazon, we start from the customer and work backwards. In the case of Amazon Location Service, we saw a need to make it easier and more cost-effective for customers to add maps, location awareness, and other location-based features to their web and mobile applications.
Location is vital part of many modern applications, enabling capabilities ranging from asset tracking to personalized marketing. Before launching Amazon Location, developers faced significant barriers to integrating location data into their application, including potential compromises to data security and privacy, cost-prohibitive pricing, and a challenging integration process that took time away from a customer’s core business. Amazon Location addresses all of these issues, making it easier for customers to access cost-effective, location-based services using high-quality data from trusted providers Esri and HERE Technologies. We also have built-in metrics for health monitoring, so customers can bring their applications to production faster and focus on delivering the best experience to their end users.
Amazon Location has some exciting implications for customers by lowering the cost to implement location-based services into all kinds of applications. Can you elaborate further on the cost side?
We have heard from customers that there are many applications where location information could improve the user experience, but many such applications do not have a positive return on investment with the prices and integration costs that prevail today. With Amazon Location, customers can avoid fixed licensing, along with the high infrastructure and integration costs required to get started with on-premises location-based services installations. By using Amazon Location, customers pay only for the resources they actually use. Amazon Location is priced at a fraction of the cost of other cloud-based alternatives, in order to unlock the creativity of builders on AWS. This enables customers to use location information more pervasively and discover entirely new business applications that would otherwise have been cost-prohibitive to implement using other services.
What are some of the early use cases you are seeing from customers? And what are some of your future plans in terms targeting new markets and customers?
We’ve already seen significant interest from customers for everything from user engagement and geomarketing to asset tracking and delivery.
PostNL, an e-commerce and postal logistics provider in the Netherlands, is using Amazon Location, along with other AWS IoT, serverless, storage, and analytics services, to build a solution to track a quarter million delivery assets. By optimizing based on asset location, PostNL can improve the utilization of their delivery vehicles and realize significant savings, as well as open up new business opportunities.
MobileLog, a service that helps businesses track and trace deliveries and vehicles in real time, is another early customer using Amazon Location. By switching to Amazon Location Service, they are able to consolidate their infrastructure and retire redundant services, and estimate they’ll be able to cut development costs by 50%, and achieve an overall cost reduction of 30-50%.
These examples are just the start. We’ve seen many customers achieve similar benefits and look forward to seeing what else customers are able to build using Amazon Location in the future.
How do you see the technology landscape evolving over time?
We see location becoming more and more pervasive in customer applications. Whether it’s striking map-based visualizations, personalized customer experience based on location, or the tracking of assets for security or optimization purposes, location is no longer just a specialized discipline for cartographers and GIS experts, but rather a basic data type for all developers. We think it will be as normal for developers to talk about a location tag as it is for them to refer to a timestamp. Accordingly, we continue to evolve Amazon Location so that developers attuned to this trend – people who don’t have deep geospatial expertise – can easily introduce location into their applications as a natural extension of their AWS builder experience. Amazon Location has already removed a lot of the undifferentiated heavy lifting that came with integrating some location-based service providers, and we’ll continue to expand the service’s capabilities to meet the needs of our diverse customer base.
When it launched, the AWS service was said to be built on geospatial data from Esri and HERE. Have you added partners since then, and who are the others on your radar?
We’re incredibly excited to work with Esri and HERE Technologies because they are global, trusted providers of high-quality location data. At the moment, we’re focused on working closely with both companies to expand our collaboration. Nonetheless, 90 percent of our roadmap at AWS is driven by customer feedback, so we constantly re-examine how we can expand our capabilities to meet customer demand for additional geospatial data types or specialized regional data.
What are your plan to take on the might of Google in the location space, given that Google’s strength in Location space is pretty much its own, and derived from its Search+Maps abilities?
We don’t focus on what our competitors are doing. We decided to build Amazon Location after hearing from our customers that some of the common location-based services alternatives forced them to make tradeoffs when it came to data privacy and security, had pricing structures that were cost prohibitive, or were just difficult to integrate. Amazon Location solves for those pain points, giving customers an easy, secure, and more cost-effective way to add maps, location awareness, and other location-based features to their web and mobile applications.
Everything we do is grounded in our commitment to customer obsession. The majority of our roadmap is driven by customer requests, so you can expect that we’ll continue to listen to customer feedback and expand our capabilities and offerings based on their needs. Amazon Location is one of those examples where we saw an opportunity to create something that would solve common paint points for customers that wanted to take advantage of location-based services, and we will continue to add new features and innovate on behalf of our customers based on their evolving needs.
Data privacy has become a contentious issue, and gained more prominence since COVID. With various countries and even provinces coming down with some very stringent privacy regulation, how do see the landscape evolving?
Security is our top priority at AWS. Our core infrastructure is built to satisfy the security requirements for military, global banks, and other high-sensitivity organizations, and every customer gets to benefit from those innovations. For Amazon Location specifically, data privacy is incredibly important. Customer’s retain control of their organization’s data. We also anonymize all queries sent to data providers by removing customer metadata and account information. Sensitive tracking and geofencing location information, such as facility, asset, and personnel locations, never leaves their AWS account at all. This helps customers shield sensitive information from third parties, protect user privacy, and reduce an application’s security risks. Additionally, neither AWS nor its location partners have rights to sell customer data or use it for advertising.
