“THIS is the new normal,” extolled a visibly excited Andy Jassy, the boss of Amazon Web Services (AWS), as he reeled off one new service after another at a corporate bash on October 7th in Las Vegas. AWS is Amazon’s cloud-computing arm, delivering all manner of services that are hosted in data centres and delivered over the internet. The offerings highlighted by Mr Jassy included something called Snowball, a suitcase-sized box packed with 50 terabytes of digital memory, a dozen of which could hold the entire library of Congress. Firms can use the device to transfer mountains of data to AWS’s cloud in one fell swoop. Such snowballs, AWS hopes, will turn into a digital avalanche to fill up even more Amazon data centres.
As the operator of the world’s biggest e-commerce site, Amazon has lots of experience running huge computer systems. In 2006 it launched its cloud as a separate business. Today AWS offers hundreds of different services, from raw number-crunching and data storage to encryption and machine learning. It claims more than 1m customers, from the tiniest startups to titans like General Electric.
How big Amazon’s cloud has become is a well-kept secret. In Las Vegas Mr Jassy said that AWS now has 50 “points of presence” (which may mean big data centres) worldwide and presented many charts showing triple-digit growth, but was silent on absolute numbers. But Amazon has recently started to release financial results for its cloud-computing business which look very promising (see chart).
The new normal feels more threatening if you are one of the old guard. The shift to the cloud is the biggest upheaval in the IT industry since smaller, networked machines dethroned mainframe computers in the early 1990s. At the same time as Mr Jassy was tub-thumping in Nevada, Michael Dell and Joe Tucci, the chief executives of Dell and EMC, big makers of computers and digital storage devices respectively, were hammering out their own response to this changing landscape.
Read More : http://www.economist.com/news/business/21673523-clouded-marriage-merger-dell-and-emc-more-proof-it-industry-shifting
As the operator of the world’s biggest e-commerce site, Amazon has lots of experience running huge computer systems. In 2006 it launched its cloud as a separate business. Today AWS offers hundreds of different services, from raw number-crunching and data storage to encryption and machine learning. It claims more than 1m customers, from the tiniest startups to titans like General Electric.
How big Amazon’s cloud has become is a well-kept secret. In Las Vegas Mr Jassy said that AWS now has 50 “points of presence” (which may mean big data centres) worldwide and presented many charts showing triple-digit growth, but was silent on absolute numbers. But Amazon has recently started to release financial results for its cloud-computing business which look very promising (see chart).
The new normal feels more threatening if you are one of the old guard. The shift to the cloud is the biggest upheaval in the IT industry since smaller, networked machines dethroned mainframe computers in the early 1990s. At the same time as Mr Jassy was tub-thumping in Nevada, Michael Dell and Joe Tucci, the chief executives of Dell and EMC, big makers of computers and digital storage devices respectively, were hammering out their own response to this changing landscape.
Read More : http://www.economist.com/news/business/21673523-clouded-marriage-merger-dell-and-emc-more-proof-it-industry-shifting
