All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

Amazon Connect Adds Native Testing and Simulation Tools

🧪 Amazon Connect now includes native testing and simulation capabilities that let teams validate contact center workflows, voice self-service, and business conditions with just a few clicks. You can configure caller identity, customer profile, intent (for example “I need to check my order status”), expected responses, and scenarios such as after-hours or full queues. Tests return pass/fail outcomes, execution paths, and detailed logs, and multiple tests can run concurrently to accelerate validation at scale.

Amazon Connect Agent Workspace Adds Custom Visual Themes

🎨 Amazon Connect now enables administrators to apply custom visual themes to the agent workspace, including logos, fonts, and color palettes tailored for both light and dark modes. Organizations can replace the default interface with a branded experience that aligns the workspace with other company applications, making it more familiar and intuitive for agents. A new header bar gives agents quick access to settings and their light/dark preference, which can help improve satisfaction and efficiency during long shifts.

Amazon Connect Outbound Adds Multi-Channel Journey Builder

📣 Amazon Web Services has added a visual journey builder to Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns, enabling creation of multi-step, multi-channel engagement journeys directly in the console. You can orchestrate voice, SMS, email, and WhatsApp interactions and combine time- or behavior-triggered flows. Integrations with existing Connect Flows, AI capabilities, and Customer Profiles let you personalize interactions and route customers to live agents when needed. The feature is available in all AWS Regions that support Outbound Campaigns.

Amazon Connect adds message streaming for AI chats

💬 Amazon Connect now streams AI chat messages as they're generated, presenting progressive responses and status prompts such as 'One moment while I review your account.' This reduces perceived wait times and reassures customers that an AI agent is actively reasoning, invoking tools, and composing answers. The feature is available in ten AWS regions and can be integrated into existing contact flows and front-end components to improve conversational transparency and responsiveness.

Amazon Connect adds automated criteria for evaluations

🔍 Amazon Connect introduces configurable criteria to automatically select relevant contacts for performance evaluations, helping managers target specific interactions for review. Managers can specify attributes such as inbound contacts with no connectivity issues and agent department to trigger a chosen evaluation form. New metric-driven criteria — including agent call avoidance, contact handling efficiency, and audibility — can also automatically populate evaluation fields. This capability is available in all regions where Amazon Connect is offered.

Amazon Connect adds no-code custom metric creation

📈 Amazon Connect now enables contact center supervisors to create custom metrics using a simple, no-code interface that applies mathematical operations (for example, addition, subtraction, sum, average) to existing Connect data. Nontechnical users can build tailored KPIs and immediately surface them in dashboards and via APIs without engineering support. Use cases include segmented average handle time, total agent outbound time by product, and queue performance filtered by contact type. The feature is available in all AWS regions offering Amazon Connect.

AWS Marketplace Launches Express Private Offers for Buyers

🔔 AWS Marketplace now offers express private offers, enabling customers to receive personalized pricing and contract terms for participating third-party products in minutes. The AI-powered workflow asks a few questions about purchase requirements and contract duration, then evaluates responses against a seller's preconfigured pricing rules to generate an offer. If needs exceed those parameters, customers can be routed to sales for more tailored deals. This capability is available in all AWS Regions where the Marketplace site is supported.

Amazon SageMaker Catalog Adds Automated Data Classification

🤖 Amazon SageMaker Catalog now provides automated data classification that suggests business glossary terms during dataset publishing to reduce manual tagging and improve metadata consistency. The capability leverages Amazon Bedrock language models to analyze table metadata and schema and recommend relevant business and sensitive-data terms from organizational glossaries. Data producers receive AI-generated suggestions they can accept or modify before publishing, helping standardize vocabulary and improve data discoverability. The feature is available in multiple AWS regions and can be managed via SageMaker Unified Studio, the AWS CLI, or SDKs.

AWS Marketplace adds Agent Mode and AI-Enhanced Search

🔎 AWS Marketplace introduced Agent mode and AI-enhanced search to speed solution discovery across 30,000+ listings. Agent mode provides a conversational procurement assistant that ingests use cases and uploaded requirements to deliver tailored recommendations and dynamic side-by-side comparisons. Users can refine results through dialogue, generate downloadable purchasing proposals, and initiate purchases directly. AI-enhanced search supplies contextual results with AI-generated summaries, adaptive categories, and AWS Specializations badges to spotlight validated partners.

Amazon EKS Capabilities: Managed Kubernetes Platform

🚀 Amazon EKS Capabilities is now generally available, offering a fully managed, extensible set of Kubernetes-native platform features that offload operations to AWS. The capabilities run in AWS-owned infrastructure separate from customer clusters and AWS handles autoscaling, patching, and upgrades. Launch features include Argo CD for continuous deployment, AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) for resource management, and Kube Resource Orchestrator (KRO) for dynamic orchestration.

AWS Glue Adds Apache Iceberg-Based Materialized Views

⚡ AWS Glue now supports materialized views stored in Apache Iceberg format and managed in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Data teams can create views with standard Spark SQL, attach a refresh schedule, and rely on automatic change detection, incremental updates, and managed compute for refresh jobs. Query engines across Athena, EMR, and AWS Glue rewrite queries to use these views, improving performance by up to 8x and lowering compute costs, while SQL tools like Redshift and SageMaker can read the Iceberg tables directly.

Amazon CloudWatch adds AI-guided Five Whys reports

🧭 Amazon CloudWatch launched an AI-powered incident report generator that guides teams through a Five Whys root-cause analysis using a chat-based workflow powered by Amazon Q. The feature combines human inputs and automated analysis of incident data to recommend specific remediation and prevention measures. It is available at no additional cost in multiple AWS regions. To use it, create a CloudWatch investigation, click "Incident report," then select "Guide Me" in the Five Whys section.

AWS Lambda Managed Instances — Lambda on EC2, Graviton4

⚙️ AWS Lambda Managed Instances lets you run Lambda functions on Amazon EC2 instances while preserving Lambda's serverless operational model. AWS fully manages instance lifecycle tasks — including OS and runtime patching, routing, load balancing, and autoscaling — and exposes the broad EC2 instance catalog (including Graviton4 and high‑bandwidth networking). You attach functions to a configurable capacity provider via Console, APIs or IaC, and the service integrates with CloudWatch, X‑Ray and AWS Config; current Java, Node.js, Python and .NET runtimes are supported. The feature is now available in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and Europe (Ireland).

AWS Marketplace adds multi-product solution listings

🔗 AWS Marketplace now supports solution-centric procurement via multi-product solutions. Partners, including ISVs and System Integrators, can bundle their own software and services with products they are authorized to resell, while each component retains distinct pricing and terms. Customers gain a single point of contact for negotiation, consolidated procurement, and the ability to manage renewals and term lengths for each component independently. This capability is available across all AWS Regions that operate AWS Marketplace and supports SaaS, Server, AI Agents and Tools, Machine Learning, and Professional Services.

AWS Clean Rooms Adds Synthetic Dataset Generation for ML

🔒 AWS now enables AWS Clean Rooms to generate privacy-enhancing synthetic datasets for training regression and classification ML models without exposing raw records. The capability de-identifies subjects in the original data and reduces the risk of models memorizing sensitive information, allowing partners to collaborate on model training while preserving privacy. Typical use cases include campaign optimization, fraud detection, and medical research.

Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver: Secure Anycast DNS Preview

🌐Amazon announced the preview of Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver, an internet-reachable DNS resolver that offers secure, anycast-based resolution for authorized clients worldwide. It supports split DNS for public domains and Route 53 private hosted zones and integrates DNS Firewall rules to block threat categories, malicious content, and advanced DNS attacks while logging queries centrally. Global Resolver provides high availability via selection of two or more regions for anycast resolution with automatic failover, and AWS will rename the existing Route 53 Resolver to Route 53 VPC Resolver to clarify the difference.

AWS Expands AI Competency with New Agentic AI Categories

🚀 AWS announced a major expansion of its AI Competency, validating 60 partners across three new Agentic AI categories: Agentic AI Tools, Agentic AI Applications, and Agentic AI Consulting Services. The launch includes an AI agent in AWS Partner Central to provide immediate feedback and speed specialization approvals. Validated partners demonstrate production-grade capabilities using services such as Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Strands Agents, and Amazon SageMaker AI, and must meet AWS standards for security, reliability, and responsible AI.

AWS Partner Central Added to AWS Management Console

🔔 AWS has integrated AWS Partner Central directly into the AWS Management Console, giving Partners streamlined access to Partner Central and the AWS Marketplace Management Portal. The release includes expanded APIs to automate co-sell workflows and Marketplace operations, plus enhanced security and user management built on AWS Identity and Access Management with granular permissions and SSO. The console experience is available in all Regions and migration guidance is provided in the existing portal.

AWS Marketplace Adds Variable Payments for Services

📢 AWS Marketplace now offers variable payments, a general-availability billing option that lets professional services sellers invoice customers as work is delivered while enforcing a predetermined contract cap. Sellers can create private offers and submit payment requests tied to outcomes, milestones, or time-and-materials. Customers receive email notifications and can approve each request manually or enable auto-approval for streamlined processing. The feature increases engagement flexibility and buyer transparency and reduces the need for full upfront payments or rigid installment schedules.

AWS Bedrock Knowledge Bases Adds Multimodal Retrieval

🔍 AWS has announced general availability of multimodal retrieval in Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, enabling unified search across text, images, audio, and video. The managed Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) workflow provides developers full control over ingestion, parsing, chunking, embedding (including Amazon Nova multimodal), and vector storage. Users can submit text or image queries and receive relevant text, image, audio, and video segments back, which can be combined with the LLM of their choice to generate richer, lower-latency responses. Region availability varies by feature set and is documented by AWS.