[dtihanyi]

"Amazon Q offers 40+ built-in connectors to popular enterprise applications and document repositories, including S3, Salesforce, Google Drive, Microsoft 365, ServiceNow, Gmail, Slack, Atlassian, and Zendesk"

Having a direct link to S3 + existing connectors built in feels like a strong competitive moat. Interested to see how far they can expand on this

[Alex3917]

> Having a direct link to S3 + existing connectors built in feels like a strong competitive moat.

Not really; the hard part is processing the data from each of these sources, not downloading the data from the source. Sure, any company that wants to compete is going to need to raise at least $30m just to get to the same minimal baseline level of support, but that was already the case even without this announcement.

In terms of whether this product will win the market, I honestly doubt it. Figuring out how to best process the data from each source to yield good results is going to be highly subjective, and Amazon's culture makes it unlikely that it will succeed here.

(As someone with a company that offers an API to pre-process email for LLM ingestion, fwiw.)

[dtihanyi]

Fair. I'm biased as someone who has worked with public and private enterprise clients in F500 security/healthcare/government sectors where there's been reluctance to adopt some of these solutions. Amazon offering this natively might mean: 1) I won't have to rely on a smaller third party to have access to my data for connecting & processing that may or may not match my data regulatory requirements (compliance, protection, residency, etc) and 2) it's one less vendor to deal with at a price that's hard to beat in a time when many companies are consolidating systems spend.

[danwee]

This feels strange (maybe I got it wrong).

It's probably because Amazon has all the money in the world they need to develop their products, but I would expect to launch a new product with some minimal but strong features to attract customers. Q offers 40+ built-in connectors from day zero. Like I can imagine the engineers/managers working on connector number 25: "Man, we have implemented already 24 connectors and we don't even know if the product will be a success or not...".

[barryrandall]

I see "connector" and hear "you'll spend weeks trying to get this feature to work before you give up and write it in Python in an afternoon."

[lainga]

15 connectors was the bare minimum. Brian, for example, has 37 connectors, okay. And a terrific smile.

[barryrandall]

"Connectors" are only a differentiator for customers who haven't fallen for "connector" promises in the past.