With IBM acquisition of SoftLayer joins battle of Microsoft & Google vs. Amazon Web Services

GigaOm's Barb Darrow posts on IBM's acquisition of SoftLayer.

Who would have thought 7 years ago when AWS launched that they would be a threat to IBM's business model.

IBM’s acquisition of SoftLayer is a bid to make the IT giant relevant in a world where Amazon Web Services has come in from left field to snarf up workloads that IBM would very much like to own. That’s a big problem for Big Blue.

Increasingly, IBM is not just competing with age-old hardware and software rivals like Oracle and HP, but  also with Amazon. Going forward, IBM will butt heads more with Google and Microsoft, which have staked big claims in public cloud infrastructure.

It is interesting to think of this as a battle between IBM's software developers and Amazon Web Service's software developers.  IBM has acquired SoftLayers developers, IP and customers.   When start-ups outgrew AWS the two two places almost everyone evaluates is a move to Rackspace or SoftLayer.  Why the move?  Many times developers want to being run on dedicated hardware.

The second major change was us moving from Amazon Web Services - EC2 and RDS in particular - to running on dedicated hardware, which we rent through Softlayer.

There's nothing wrong with AWS - indeed, we still run a staging environment there - but our database benefits greatly from the low latencies of physical disks, and there aren't very many hosted PostgreSQL services on EC2 that fit our needs.

So, consider that SoftLayer is not just Cloud.

Do you see the pattern for what is next in AWS? I think I do

Someone asked me what Amazon Web Service is going to do next. For the past month, I've been thinking about this problem and what can you see from looking at the releases.  

I'll write a post over the next couple of weeks on what I think AWS is doing next.  Once you see it, it is hard not to think it has to be true.

Also, Netcraft has a report on AWS growth.  With a pretty good estimate of the server count.

Geographic distribution of computers per EC2 region in May 2013

Data Centre (EC2 - Web Facing Computers)	February 2013	March 2013	April 2013	May 2013	Growth (4 month)
Asia Pacific (Singapore)	6,576	6,805	6,998	7,290	10.9%
Asia Pacific (Sydney)	499	739	1,129	1,427	186%
Asia Pacific (Tokyo)	7,342	7,595	8,065	8,601	17.1%
EU West (Ireland)	23,778	24,635	25,326	25,942	9.1%
South America (Sao Paulo)	2,115	2,263	2,396	2,655	25.6%
US East (Northern Virginia)	87,094	88,543	92,426	93,537	7.4%
US West (Northern California)	9,325	9,478	9,715	9,695	4%
US West (Oregon)	5,217	5,573	5,965	7,051	35.2%
GovCloud (Oregon)	14	17	21	27	92.9%

AWS's Sustainable Energy options - Oregon an GovCloud

Missed this one on AWS.  Don't know when it went up.  AWS makes a sustainable energy option statement.

AWS and Sustainable Energy

...

Both the Oregon and GovCloud Regions use 100% carbon-free power. AWS customers who want to operate in a Region that uses 100% carbon-free power can select one of these two Regions. We will continue to work hard on our own, and alongside our power providers all over the world, to offer our services in an environmentally friendly way in all of our Regions.

And, amazon adds that the cloud is greener than having your own data center.

Cloud computing is inherently more environmentally-friendly than traditional computing. Instead of each company having its own datacenter that serves just itself, AWS makes it possible for hundreds of thousands of organizations to consolidate their datacenter use into much smaller combined data center footprints in the AWS Cloud, resulting in much higher utilization rates and eliminating the waste that occurs when data centers don't operate near their capacity. Our cloud approach enables a combined smaller carbon footprint that significantly reduces overall consumption.

AWS is not the cloud, it is the IT Superstore, selection, convenience, easy to buy and pricing transparency

Cloud is such an over used term it is hard for many to understand what exactly is the cloud.  Amazon Web Services is many times equated to the cloud.  But, that doesn't really help to explain what AWS is.

I was looking a presentation on amazon.com and here is a slide of Jeff Bezos's vision.

When Amazon.com started it sold books.  Who in their right mind would build a business selling books?  What Jeff did build was a bigger selection at a better price point and more convenient than his competition.

What is AWS? a bigger selection of IT services at a better price point (consume as you use vs. a license) and convenient to add into Amazon's infrastructure.  With Amazon Prime, two day shipping is free.  With AWS you pay for shipping , the transportation of bits into and out of AWS.  

I think it is much easier to say AWS is the IT superstore.

AWS is building on amazon.com's business model.

And amazon.com's passion to innovate the customer experience is what is being used in AWS.  How many IT vendors have a passion for customer service?

Consider what AWS is thinking up to fulfill this vision.

Morgan Stanley publishes report that AWS will continue domination for another 10 years

Barb Darrow has a post on Morgan Stanley's report.

Killer cloud: report says Amazon Web Services threatens all IT incumbents

by Barb Darrow

11 HOURS AGO

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photo: Flickr/Will Merydith

SUMMARY:

New Morgan Stanley research expects AWS to hit $24 billion in revenue by 2022 and to put the hurt on legacy IT providers in the process.

Barron's also has a post on the report.

Amazon’s Web Services Threatens Almost All IT, Says Morgan Stanley

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By Tiernan Ray

Morgan Stanley’s Scott Devitt, in a longish (32 pages) report in conjunction with colleaguesKeith Weiss, Ehud Gelblum, Simon Flannery, Katy Huberty, Joseph Moore, and Adam Wood, this morning writes that Amazon.com (AMZN) is “making waves” in conventional IT by “applying retail economics” that is making it an “emerging IT mega-vendor.”

Devitt, who has an Overweight rating on Amazon shares, writes that Amazon’s “Amazon Web Services,” which runs compute tasks on its servers for a fee, should be able to reach $24 billion in revenue by 2022, through a combination of services that produce greater scale in computing tasks, and by offering “a continual downward pressure in pricing.”

The authors size the total addressable market for Amazon Web Services at $152 billion, and offer a graphic for that: