After working on the Human Genome Project, Matt Wood ran a DNA sequencing facility in England that churned out terabytes of data. To deal with it all, he built a processing pipeline using Amazon Web Services tools, writes Coral Garnick at the Puget Sound Business Journal. Then Wood told everybody about it.
"I started just talking about my experience with it, really, as a customer," he tells Garnick, " and showing the benefit that I had got out of it. … I think I just caught someone's attention."
Wood is now leading product strategy at Amazon Web Services, where Garnick says that he helps customers figure out what they can do with their data. AWS has a number of tools customers can use, ranging from virtual desktops to analytics platform, and customers themselves range from the financial services sector to real estate, health care, and genomics.
"Instead of having to build and buy and run large, expensive, smelly data centers, today's customers can just plug into AWS," Wood says. "They can pull down all the computational power and databases and storages and … a collection of 70 different services."