Amazon Web Services Opens San Francisco Pop Up

Amazon Web Services, the largest of the cloud service giants, is taking it to the streets – literally. Here in San Francisco, the company opened a pop up lounge that is meant to bolster awareness and excitement about the company’s IT solutions. The AWS Pop Up Loft is open through June 27^th, 2014, at 925 Market Street.

Cloud computing has drastically altered the landscape for IT infrastructures and Amazon has been the leader in that arena for some time.

Until fairly recently, the majority of major retailers were saddled with grandfathered technologies that didn’t give accurate data about their inventory, nor gave them flexibility and agility with things like apps or the massive content structures required for ecommerce solutions.

Amazon’s pop up loft has all the trappings of a coder’s paradise. Funky furniture, stacks of snacks, and a range of workshops and coding sessions designed to showcase the brand’s web services.

The go-to provider for those solutions has been Amazon Web Services, which offers scalable solutions to manage everything from apps to web services to big data archives, and a host of other data-based applications — all under a pay-as-you-use system that allows for flexible business growth.

Still, critics say Amazon is only relevant to major retail and doesn’t enable brands to build customer relationships or foster loyalty, making it far too easy for the brand experience to become generic and unfocussed.

Everyone’s a Genius: The AWS Loft features a zone for one-on-one tutorials and troubleshooting.

Hot on Amazon’s heels is Bigcommerce, a company that is aiming to be the biggest e-commerce platform for small retailers. Based in Australia, the company has already raised $75million and boasts over 50,000 merchants in 137 countries.

And now the company is ready to seduce Silicon Valley’s cloud customers. Earlier this spring the company opened an office in San Francisco, so you can bet that the Amazon Pop-up Loft is part of a strategic effort to win over some of those small businesses that before, weren’t really part of Amazon’s marketing strategy.

Since its opening day (June 4), Amazon’s Loft has been busy and booked for many of the events, with a daily calendar of free technical sessions, boot camps, and workshops with such experts as Adam DePue from Hearsay Social, and Peter Adams from Cloudability. However the big night for tech heads was last Wednesday’s “fireside chat” with Amazon CTO and vice president Werner Vogels.

>> The AWS Loft, 925 Market Street in Downtown San Francisco. See the Loft schedule of events. Read Amazon Evangelist Jeff Barr’s blog.

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