Amazon Remains King of the Cloud: Here’s why

Amazon Remains King of the Cloud: Here’s why

Based On Data in from the Q1 results of the global tech giants, Amazon remains king of the cloud. Amazon has accounted for 40% of the global market for public cloud services in Q4 of last year.

The Seattle-based company reported $890 million in operating income from its cloud business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which accounted for the majority of its Q1 2017 profits.

Amazon is looking to diversify its product offerings and rely less on e-commerce as its main driver of revenue.

AWS Summit 2017 in India is showing signs of heading in the same direction. The country, being at the embryonic stages of cloud computing is a big market for Amazon.

Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon .com, speaking at the summit said, AWS in India has grown by more than 50% since last three quarters.

Globally, Alphabet’s (the parent company of Google) revenue grew at 22% year-over-year (YoY) to reach $24.8 billion in the quarter, with $3 billion, or 18% of its Q1 revenue, coming from the segment that houses its cloud business.

Amazon’s revenue reached $35.7 billion in Q1, with $3.6 billion, or 10% of revenue, coming from its AWS cloud segment. Microsoft on the other hand posted revenues of $23.56 billion, with $3.6 billion, or 10%, coming from cloud services.

While this data proves that the businesses in cloud are yet to mature, experts believe, the segment will be increasingly more important for each of the tech giants. This is because the digital ecosystem continues to move away from being device-centric, towards cloud-oriented solutions.

Here products and services can be accessed on a variety of devices from virtually anywhere. This shift will be more noticeable in the years ahead, as consumers and employees seek greater mobility, greater value for money and the Internet of Things brings exponentially more devices into the digital tussle.

“Fortunately we don’t have to worry about bandwidth. And most importantly, we could save a lot on Devops. With cloud support from AWS, the start ups don’t need to bother much on this side. We are India-specific start ups and we don’t have much traffic at night. So we have the elasticity to pay for the duration we use the platform,” said Devendra Rane, CTO of Coverfox.

In India, as major companies are now opening up to the cloud, the main growth driver, according to Vogels is the need for new kind of security that is now indispensable to run a business.

“When we started everything was very local. As a result, there was manpower cost and licensing cost. So we took everything to cloud to make things easier and simpler. We scaled rapidly and everything was automated. Back in 2014, we were having our proof of concept about cloud and approached Netmagic and Microsoft Azure. Why we came to AWS was because they are very customisable. At that time, we had SQL in backend. Most others demanded to join Non-SQL platforms. However AWS was the only one, which was open to customisation”, Soumyadeep Barman of Faasos, a major client of AWS told Business Insider.

Be it making things cost effective by having a significantly lower entry point, or the ability to scale at will, AWS has been a major godsend to start ups.