Amazon AWS and 1Q Results

Amazon continues to be in the news a lot and this past week was no exception. I have always liked the company and think that Jeff Bezos has managed the company and technologies well. I took the latest issue of Wired magazine on my business trips recently and read this article about Amazon and cloud computing. The article discusses the many startups that are successfully using Amazon Web Services to maintain their focus on the business and use Amazon as a HaaS (Hardware as a Service) provider. Eric Schonfeld, over at Seeking Alpha learned recently that of the 60,000 AWS customers, most are not the typical start-up profile, but corporations instead. They try AWS for a project, get hooked and never look back. While this was somewhat surprising to me also, I can see it happening. The same applies (I think) to OpenSource projects - someone at a company tries open source software, gets hooked, and then doesn't look back. Even though most of the AWS users are corporations, I by no means take that to mean that enterprise applications are moving to the cloud (jeeeesh, the term 'cloud' has sure reached a peak in the hype-cycle). I think it means just what Eric was saying -- that they are experimenting with it, and use it for one-off applications that are not enterprise-wide, critical applications.

On Thursday Amazon reported double-digit growth in earnings, but also noted worrying about the economy, and lowering sales expectations as a result. Business Week also has a nice interview with Jeff Bezos -- here.