Its strategy hinges on an unprecedented level of automation in computer programming and maintenance, coupled with offering new products and services at a rate none of the old-guard companies seem able to match.
The idea seems to be to dominate not so much by the traditional ‘vendor lock-in’ of hooking customers on proprietary technology, but by making itself the centre of the styles and habits of cloud computing.
At least some of its customers seem to think that will work. On Wednesday, Jim Fowler, the chief information officer of General Electric, said, “AWS will be the trusted partner that will run our company’s information technology for the next 140 years.” That’s how long GE, founded by Thomas Edison, has been around.
Fowler was talking at the annual AWS conference, during a session in which the company indirectly made the case that it would go after all of the existing customers of some of the biggest technology companies around. Among other offerings, AWS plans to send customers machines that will extract an Oracle database, say, and send it to AWS to be transformed to a cheaper cloud product.
GE had at one point thought of building its own cloud, but it went with Amazon in part because of this know-how.
AWS also introduced a range of new technology products, including automated creation of mobile software applications, automated large- and small-scale data analysis systems in real time, and ways of building software that can be managed easily across the globe from a single location.
There were, of course, also ways to make these parts fit together, mostly in automated forms that configured and managed most of the underlying technology.
To work with it all, last week AWS published a 56-page manual on how to build and run software in AWS
“Cloud is the new normal,” Werner Vogels, Amazon’s chief technology officer, said to a roomful of several thousand software engineers on Thursday. “This is how you will build your applications.”
Certainly, a good part of AWS software is open source, which means it could be used elsewhere, and companies like Microsoft and Google also have big clouds. But neither of them, nor IBM, which also wants the cloud business, created more than 500 new features and services last year, as AWS did.
That raises an interesting prospect. AWS does not have a lot of the proprietary technology or onerous contracts that have traditionally held captive the customers of big enterprise software companies. Amazon may be creating a kind of casual lock-in of its own: All this automation, features and standardisation of practices could mean that in several years most young engineers will know how to work in the AWS system, but none other. That’s not exactly a hostage situation, but it would hold companies.
One way Amazon adds so many features, though it won’t talk much about this, is to contract key elements from other companies. QuickSight, the data analysis tool announced on Wednesday as a competitor to IBM’s Cognos, uses technology AWS hired from a start-up called Zoomdata, according to people familiar with the technology. They asked not to be named in order to maintain professional relationships.
Nor are the others moving as quickly not just to grab customers or offer features that will aggregate into standards of how the global automation of computing is done: AWS is rushing to offer the most powerful cloud computing possible.
To that end, the company on Thursday announced it would have online access to Intel’s most powerful chip for computer servers, a semiconductor capable of crunching two terabytes of data in memory, over the equivalent of 100 computing cores, or processing centres.
“They are saying that every possible computing workload can run on their system,” said Diane Bryant, the head of Intel’s data centre business. “This is not just about a commodity business of selling standard computing.”
AWS and a few other cloud giants, like Google, Microsoft and Facebook, are in such a rush to move ahead that they typically order and install in their computing centres tens of thousands of the latest processors up to six months before they are formally released.
“They ship to themselves, and sell their processing power to others — the faster they get to the next generation, the faster they can turn it into new revenue,” Bryant said.
That pace is something the incumbent players, which are built on revenues from assembling and shipping computers to other people, can’t match. It’s likely to be a hallmark of Amazon’s march to own the future.
If Amazon is successful, and so far no company can match the speed with which it is moving, the world will be in a very strange place indeed. For decades, much of the world’s computing could be taking place on systems belonging to an online retailer that in 20 years as a public company has amassed in total less profit than Google or Microsoft have in a quarter.
Cloud computing is, of course, a fundamentally profitable part of Amazon. Maybe someday AWS will be the company that also happens to own an online retailer.
© 2015 The New York Times News Service