Precognition, the ability to see events in the future, has always fascinated humankind. We probably will get there someday, but time series forecasting gets you close. The human brain is naturally trained to anticipate future events by analyzing the past, but the brain often makes only linear predictions because it can't analyze the amount of data generated in a modern enterprise. How about letting a machine record those past sequences of events from millions of sources, analyze the data, and make predictions for your business? Let's take for example a software as a service (SaaS) provider that has thousands of customers from different industries, including online retail, oil and gas, and airline.

I made my first trip to China in late 2008. I was able to speak to developers and entrepreneurs and to get a sense of the then-nascent market for cloud computing. With over 900 million Internet users as of 2020 (according to a recent report from China Internet Network Information Center), China now has the largest user base in the world. A limited preview of the China (Beijing) Region was launched in 2013 and brought to general availability in 2016. A year later the AWS China (Ningxia) Region launched.

In addition to moving the vast majority of its infrastructure to AWS, the National Football League (NFL) team will use the breadth and depth of AWS's services, including compute, storage, database, analytics, and ML to drive deep analysis of game footage to inform game strategy, improve operational efficiencies, and accelerate decision-making to advance team performance game-to-game. The Seahawks will combine the weekly NFL Next Gen Stats player tracking data, which tracks the position of the ball and every player 10 times per second, with its own player and club data to develop custom analytics and proprietary statistics. The Seattle Seahawks are relying on AWS's unmatched portfolio of services to discover actionable outcomes from its vast amount of player, team, and business data, enabling them to continue to compete at a championship caliber level. The Seahawks are building a data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) that will combine team stats and NFL data, such as Next Gen Stats player tracking, player health and wellness data, and scouting information to provide deeper visibility into player capabilities, as well as give the coaching staff a single, real-time view of player and team performance. By applying AWS analytics services to the data, the Seahawks will be able to quickly uncover insights to better evaluate talent and develop game plans that take advantage of the team's strengths.

Last year we launched new AWS Regions in France and China (Ningxia), and announced that we are working on regions in Bahrain, Hong Kong SAR, Sweden, and a second GovCloud Region in the United States. South Africa in Early 2020 Today, I am happy to announce that we will be opening an AWS Region in South Africa in the first half of 2020. The new Region will be based in Cape Town, will be comprised of three Availability Zones, and will give AWS customers and partners the ability to run their workloads and store their data in South Africa. The addition of the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will also enable organizations to provide lower latency to end users across Sub-Saharan Africa and will enable more African organizations to leverage advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile services, and more to drive innovation. AWS customers are already making use of 55 Availability Zones across 19 infrastructure regions worldwide.

As the digital payments giant Paytm continues to support data localisation, the company has launched its AI Cloud computing platform "Paytm AI Cloud for India" for developers, startups and enterprises with servers located only in India. The company has partnered with Alibaba for Cloud Computing Infrastructure and plans to soon offer an enterprise-messaging solution in partnership with DingTalk. The company claims that AI Cloud computing platform offers a suite of business-centric apps for organisations that need high-quality solutions for cloud computing, ready-to-use services to automate their workflow, easy to integrate payments, messaging and customer engagement without the hassle of managing hardware and software. With this, the company aims to enable the future-of-work with Cloud Computing, AI and mobility-driven-innovation. According to Sujit Kumar Mishra, Vice President – Paytm, every new-age organisation needs to be AI-enabled.

Microsoft is hoping to boost the accessibility of machine learning technology with a new predictive analytics cloud service, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning. The service is part of a movement that includes a new breed of business intelligence vendor that aims to help businesses take advantage of the increasing volume of data they collect. The new service is one of several machine learning technologies that have emerged in the past few years. It shows the need to manage data and the predictive analytics technologies that are increasingly required to analyze complex data structures. Microsoft said it built the new service using technologies that it developed for other products like Xbox and Bing.