Name: How Amazon took over the cloud
Uploaded: 2015-06-26
Duration: 2 min 49 s
Description: How Amazon took over the cloud

[ MUSIC ] Amazon is a company that's really known for its retail marketplace. But quietly over the past nine years it's actually built a pretty vibrant business around selling cloud services and infrastructure to companies. ( background music ) so a few weeks ago Amazon released the financials behind Amazon web services that's cloud computing business and it's on track to make 6 billion dollars this year and all signs point to AWS as being one of Amazon's strongest businesses. Amazon Web Services started out nine years ago. It initially just launched with one specific product that allowed companies to basically store any files that were uploaded to their website in the cloud. Flash forward nine years, it's not just startups using AWS, it's companies like Netflix, it's big, huge enterprises. What's driving the growth right now is that more and more companies are putting their infrastructure, their computing, they're basically allowing their websites and their web products to be powered by the cloud. Because of that trend, more and more enterprises, more and more big companies, including Time Inc. Now use AWS as the place that powers their Web infrastructure. Amazon Web Services had about a seven- year head start when it came to offering these types of services. But Microsoft and Google have caught on, IBM has caught on, and they all are competing With Amazon web services and with each other to create and get a slice of this massive cloud market. Which many people call it a trillion dollar opportunity. Amazon has cut it's price of it's service 48 times in the past six years. Amazon is sending a clear signal to it's competition. It doesn't care about cutting it's prices. Jeff Bezos is known actually for not caring about profit. He cares about sales, he cares about long- term vision. But AWS, Amazon Web Services, is actually making between 100 and 200 million in profit. There are a few challenges that lie ahead for Amazon. And first is that Microsoft is growing pretty fast and part of the reason that Microsoft's growing fast is because it's had a legacy of being an enterprise business. Another thing that Amazon should be worried about is investor pressure to potentially spin- off. There's been a lot of talk on Wall Street about AWS becoming it's own business That being said, Jeff Bezos is the founder of the company, and it's highly unlikely that that would ever happen unless he gave his blessing. [ MUSIC ]