Amazon is widely known as online retailer, having expanded its bookstore business to many other areas over time. Some time ago Amazon has entered the Cloud Computing market. Amazon provides a broad set of services under their label Amazon Web Services (AWS), with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as the most popular one.
Amazon’s strategy for providing web services based on their own experience in providing highly scalable and reliable services for relatively low cost (which is mandatory for their success in the retail business) appears to be valid. Amazon has managed to become one of the most prominent providers for cloud services and has a somewhat unique positioning especially with their Amazon Elastic Cloud, where they have gained a lot of partners, and – not that well-known – with their eCommerce web services.
We expect Amazon to remain innovative and to build on its position and the momentum of the market they are experiencing. It will be hard to compete against Amazon especially in the areas of compute platforms and, to some degree, the payment and merchant services. From our analysis, Amazon appears to be a cloud service provider which should be evaluated in all segments where they provide cloud services.
