Another day, another Amazon announcement. Coming from the same re:Invent conference that brought the AI updates we examined yesterday, Amazon has announced a new spin on Amazon One. For those unfamiliar, this is the company’s palm reader for retail checkout and other meat-space authentication.
Rather than getting out your wallet, you simply wave your palm over a waist-level scanner to authenticate your identity or payment method. It requires a one-time setup at any location to establish your palm scan and link it to a payment method or Amazon Prime account. After that, checking out is a breeze.
As noted, the technology can streamline retail transactions – part of Amazon’s broader retail as a service play – as well as fast food, event tickets, and an expanding list of use cases. Amazon has already started to incubate the technology at Whole Foods and the Team Store at Seattle’s Climate Change Arena.
Enterprise Grade
So what’s the new spin on this technology? Amazon will offer it to non-retail enterprises to accelerate the “expanding list of use cases” noted above. The idea is that enterprises can use it for things like employee or guest check-in systems at corporate locations, or access to sensitive software (think: HR).
Known as Amazon One Enterprise, these use cases extend beyond corporate enterprises. Amazon likely sees an opportunity in everything from airports to government buildings – basically, wherever foot traffic flows and wherever secure authenticated entry is required. That could be a wide addressable market.
Amazon One Enterprise is also a natural extension of the technology. Among other things, it’s well-timed for the era of remote work… although that could be eroding as the pendulum swings back to in-office mandates. Either way, distributed workforces compel better security around who’s coming and going.
The move to bring Amazon One to the enterprise also engenders synergies with AWS. And this can occur on both technological and business-development levels. For the former, Amazon One can synchronize with employee and security data. For the latter, it’s all about forming deeper relationships.
Marginal Moves
Altogether, Amazon One Enterprise is all about expanding Amazon’s role in the enterprise software stack. The tip of that spear was AWS, and the company continues to expand its footprint. Here, we’ll point back to our ongoing narrative that triangulates big-tech moves by examining their motivations.
In that light, Amazon is compelled to maintain revenue growth to appease Wall Street. That gets harder and harder to do as the revenue base grows, a function of the law of large numbers. The same challenge faces Apple and others, which is why you see it blitzing giant verticals like entertainment and wearables.
Mathematics aside, growth gets more challenging as core business units mature in terms of market saturation. This compels Amazon to do exactly what you see it doing: expanding into large adjacent markets. That includes everything from advertising to healthcare to its original diversification play: AWS.
But within that expansion strategy, we also see plenty of marginal moves in addition to large vertical conquests. And that’s what Amazon One Enterprise is all about. Expect to see it roll out in the coming months to a corporate HQ near you, with extra enterprise-grade privacy and security baked in.
