Motorola used to be one of those giant corporate conglomerates that employed 150,000 people, many at a massive campus in Schaumburg, Illinois. But it hit hard times, and over the last several years it sold off chunks of itself and became Motorola Solutions.
Motorola Solutions is still a huge company. It employs around 14,000 and generated $5.8 billion in revenue over the last four quarters. But it has sold the huge campus and moved to new headquarters in Chicago.
As part of its move and cost cutting, Motorola is unplugging its data centers and going all-in in the cloud.
Its cloud of choice is Amazon Web Services, Leo Wang, head of cloud computing, told Business Insider.
"When we first we started, we were moving just one data center, our Schaumburg data center," he said. "Within 6 to 7 months, we moved more than 200 servers, and 150 applications, and we had more than $2 million in computer yearly spend moved over to AWS."
And they liked AWS so much, they decided to move everything else into it, worldwide, over the course of the next two years, Wang said. As of today, the company has moved about 450 servers to AWS, he added.
"We save millions per year. We invested millions initially but the long range savings will be significant, and we have a more aggressive plan next year and the year after."
Choosing Amazon wasn't automatic. In fact, Motorola already had a smaller contract with Microsoft to use its competing cloud, Azure. But Microsoft wasn't able to turn that into a bigger sale.
Motorola Solutions sells radios and communications equipment to government agencies like police, fire, other emergency services.
They chose Azure because Azure had a crucial government security certification known as Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) and Amazon didn't.
So when Motorola opted to move everything to the cloud, the IT folks looked at Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
"Amazon had better technologies in almost all areas. It is much more mature in terms of functionality. They excelled in every aspect that we needed from the cloud perspective and from the customer service perspective, but they didn’t have the CIJS compliance," Wang said.
But CIJS certification was a deal breaker, they told Amazon.
"Initially, they were hesitating. They were not interested in having this certification because they were so big in the market," Wang says.
But they agreed to look into it and decided to get CIJS, realizing it could open up new government markets for its cloud. Amazon is already making a name for itself pursuing government cloud business with its "GovCloud," a highly secured section of the AWS's services reserved for government use.
"Once they realized the importance of this certification in this industry, they invested. In a few months they were certified, and they created a Gov Cloud for us," Wang said.
By doing this, Motorola was able to launch a brand new app for its law enforcement customers on AWS that lets them store camera footage on AWS. This app has the potential to be huge for Motorola and AWS, Wang believes.
Amazon isn't known for its customer service, but Wang can't sing AWS's support praises any louder.
"Andy Jassy personally came to our office and had a detailed look at what we had. They put a lot of attention to us," Wang said.
In comparing AWS's support to that from Microsoft, he called it "very different," saying, "With AWS we are very tightly engaged with them in almost all efforts. We have meetings, we share our concerns, we have follow up, and a consultant works closely with us, and works closely with the product team."
Amazon's big gotcha
There is one big downside to choosing Amazon: it's harder to keep track of costs.
Like all cloud providers Amazon charges for the actual time each machine (known as an instance) is used. That's a benefit over buying servers, which a company pays for if they use them or not.
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