Amazon Case Study

Amazon Web Services

Question: Do you agree with Andy Jassy who was confident that Amazon had the necessary core assets and a unique set of skills to keep Amazon in its leadership position in cloud computing, as the industry matured and grew? If you agree, then justify your answer and explain what these assets and skills are and how they help Amazon to maintain its leadership position. Otherwise, why do you think that Amazon has no chance against its formidable group of competitors in the cloud computing space? Answer: Yes, we agree that Amazon had the necessary core assets and a unique set of skills to keep Amazon in its leadership position in cloud computing.

 Firstly, Amazon.com itself has already had extensive and complex technology

infrastructure in order to operate and flourish.

 Amazon has had already built good services very deep in the software stack – things like

data storage, computing, database functionality and messaging.

 In addition, Amazon had tremendous buying power and leverage.  Further, innovation, quality and speed of execution mattered a lot in such an IT race.

Amazon’s competitors don’t have the same level of services ready for the market. Only Sun Microsystems, Inc. offered a similar product to EC2, but pricing was not competitive enough. For S3, few of the large famous companies provided pay-as-you-go online storage. In general, Google’s App Engine was expected to evolve and compete with AWS, but could not. UBS estimate Amazon will do about $750 million of business on AWS this year. In fact, a whole generation of Internet companies couldn't exist without it e.g.

 Netflix's movie-streaming empire runs on it.  Zynga, the social gaming company, uses it to handle sudden spikes in usage.

AWS has become such a fact of life for Silicon Valley startups that venture capitalists actually hand out Amazon gift cards to entrepreneurs. Keeping up with the demand requires frantic expansion: Each day, Andy Jassy's operation adds...