 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Sponsored by Intel and AWS. Welcome everyone to theCUBE Live and our coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by Andre Dufour. He is the general manager of Amazon Location Service. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Andre. Thanks so much, Rebecca, it's a pleasure. So, AWS is announcing Amazon Location Service in preview. Tell us a little bit more about what it does. What's the impetus for it? Of course, well, Amazon Location Service is a new geospatial service that makes it easy for customers on AWS to integrate location information into their applications. And when I say location information, I mean a couple of specific things, maps, points of interest, places and geocodes from trusted global high quality data partners. And one of the things that's really cool about Amazon Location is we enable customers to access this high quality data in a way that's incredibly cost effective. It's up to 10 times cheaper than some of the alternatives. And so what that means for customers is they can bring to life use cases that previously would have been inconceivable because they just weren't cost effective. Additionally, Amazon Location takes privacy very seriously. And so customers have told us many times that they're very concerned about their location information leaving their control. Whereas with Amazon Location, we keep customers location data in their AWS account unless they decide otherwise. And finally, what we've seen with customers who are using Amazon Location is they're able to move from experimentation with location ideas to scaled production much more quickly than they otherwise could have because it's a native AWS service. So we're so excited to be announcing this today. Well, you just mentioned cost, privacy, scale production, three things that are definitely on customers minds right now. Tell us a little bit more about these use cases. How are customers using it? Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's often easiest to understand the capabilities through the lens of a use case. Now it turns out location in more and more customer conversations is pervasive across a bunch of different use cases. But I'll touch on maybe just four today. So one thing that we're seeing customers commonly using location for is location-based customer engagement. And so what that means is including a location component when you are reaching up to your customers with timely offers. So for example, when they're in close proximity to one of your retail locations, sending them an offer tends to increase their satisfaction and their conversion. An additional use case that springs to mind immediately in many of the conversations is using maps for striking visualizations of data, either showing a route between two points or dropping location pins on a map in order to enhance the visual understanding of subject matter. Additionally, customers tend to use Amazon location for asset tracking. They wanna know where their things are in the world and be able to reason over that both in real time in order to make decisions or retrospectively in order to optimize or to audit. And additionally, customers also use us in delivery use cases, be it last mile delivery for goods that were ordered online or food delivery, which of course is increasingly prevalent these days. And so- Indeed it is. Yeah. One of the customer examples that I think is especially compelling here because it touches on a couple of these is a company called Singleton Solutions and their product is called Mobile Log. It's effectively last mile as a service in the cloud. And what it lets customers do is manage the logistics of a delivery business. And so what Mobile Log and Singleton have been able to do is retire a lot of the custom code that they had built because nothing was really available to meet their location needs. They were able to consolidate their location infrastructure from multiple clouds onto just AWS which simplifies their solution. They were able to move more quickly as they innovate on behalf of their customers and they managed to reduce their costs while doing this by up to 60%. So I think it's a pretty cool example of what location can do for customers. What are some other industries and applications that would benefit most from this affordable location data? Yeah, well, it tends to span many different industries. So we're seeing a lot of use as you can imagine in transportation and logistics and certainly that's an industry that's growing very quickly. Government and public sector tend to have a need to visualize a lot of information on maps. We are seeing retail and folks interested in customer engagement. It really is springing up everywhere and often the conversation kind of have a location component in disguise. For example, we were talking to a telecom service provider who is telling us, well, I can save billions of dollars if I increase the efficiency of my truck rolls. Well, that's the location use case. If people are talking about actually one customer or a person who has used us in beta is post-NL and they're telling us, you know, if they can increase just the loading factor of their trucks by 1% over time, this is big dollar savings for them. And that's all about location and about optimizing the routing and dispatch of their vehicles. And so really it's springing up everywhere but it doesn't always sound like a map or a geocode. It's more of these business-level considerations around optimization, around moving faster and around serving customers more quickly. You mentioned a couple of industries and logistics areas where this is being used. Which customers are currently using Amazon Location Service? Well, so there are a couple that I mentioned. So of course we're only just launching today. We've had a beta program and we have a couple of references that we can talk about publicly. So Singleton is the very first that we touched on and this is a company that's operative in the delivery and dispatch logistics space. And so they've been using us to advantage and have realized some pretty significant cost savings. The other company that's been experimenting with Amazon Location, again in sort of a similar space but with a different geography is post-NL. And so they're the number one e-commerce and delivery or postal logistics company in the Netherlands. And what they're actually using us for is to do asset tracking on their delivery roller cages in order to understand where they are in the world and make better decisions to where they should be in relation to the demand. Andre, I want you to close this out here. And as you said, you launched today, you've been in beta. What is in store for 2021 with Amazon Location Service? What can we expect? What can customers expect? Yeah, so we're in preview today and it's an open preview. So people can just go to the console and directly use it. You don't need to sign up. And what we have to look forward to in the first part of 2021 is general availability of the service. And you can imagine that we'll be rolling that out over ever more regions because there's a significant demand for this all over the world. And then it's a fairly typical AWS motion where what we're gonna do is listen because 90% of our roadmap is compelled by customer requests. And so we'll be very attentive to how people are using the service where they see additional opportunities for us to serve them better and we will move with vigor on those. Great. And for customers who wanna find out more, what should they do? Well, the easiest thing to do is to go to awf.amazon.com slash location and then check us out there and get started with the service today. Great. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE a really interesting conversation. Thank you so much. It's been a privilege. I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2020.