Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is now a shark. And the sea that it is swimming in now is the massive global IT industry which is estimated to be worth $3.5 trillion dollars.
Recently, the company hosted what has now come to be recognized as its trademark annual event: the re:Invent conference. The glamorous event was held in Las Vegas and was designed specifically for the faithful of Amazon Web Services (AWS).
And it was in the conference that the company actually declared itself a shark in the sea of the global IT industry. Andy Jassy, the fellow who runs AWS, was categorical that Amazon was now ready for the big companies of the world to come to for its cloud computing services. What Jassy was saying is that all the big companies in the world have no choice but to close down their small data centers and outsource all their data work to AWS. Amazon has come up with a fanciful phrase to describe this phenomenon; it says that companies that have decided to work with it are actually “all-in.”
But whether the “all-in” mantra that Amazon is using is something to be taken seriously or not can be determined by considering three of the most important companies that have made Amazon the shark that it is today.
The first one is Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX). Netflix was one of the first major customers of AWS back in 2009 when Amazon.com AWS was still new. One of the fellows who worked at Netflix at the time, Adrian Cockcroft, says that at first, AWS was a small outfit that would not really be relied upon to do much. Yet Netflix believed in the promise that AWS would grow and help businesses across the world. At that time, Netflix was already a big company. The company wanted to stick to its business model in which it invests much of its revenue in its core operations and spends very little amounts of money on maintaining its IT services. So, the company stuck with the then fledgling AWS. By becoming sort of a father-figure to AWS, Netflix helped Amazon grow in leaps and bounds. Sooner, Netflix bought into the “all-in” approach of Amazon.
The second one is Intuit, a Fintech company. According to Michele Iacovone, the fellow who designs the systems that the company sells to clients, by the time Intuit decided to close all its data centers and outsource its services to the cloud that is run by Amazon, Amazon was not fully ready to cater for needs of the Fintech. However, out of good faith, Intuit stuck with Amazon and as time went by, drastic improvements occurred.
The third one is Juniper Networks, Inc. (NYSE:JNPR), a company that makes and sells Apps besides Internet gear and is considered a competitor to Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO). According to Gary Clark, the fellow who is in charge of all technology at the company, they decided to go for the AWS as a way of cutting down their costs of operations.
From these stories, one thing that is clear is that AWS has grown quite rapidly. Amazon has been flexible and adaptive enough to base its growth on addressing the actual needs of its customers.
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