Everyone Envies Amazon Cloud Computing Business

January 3, 2013 Off By David

Grazed from eCommerce Bytes. Author: Ina Steiner.

The largest retailers and the smallest online merchants bemoan the power Amazon wields in retail, but the company also has tech firms racing to keep up. Over the years, Amazon developed expertise building its own retail site, and in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began offering IT infrastructure services to other businesses in the form of web services – now commonly known as cloud computing.

Some people may have been confused when an outage at Netflix on Christmas Eve was blamed on Amazon, but despite the fact that Netflix competes with Amazon in streaming digital content, Netflix uses AWS to power its site. (Amazon apologized for its outage without naming which customers had been affected.)…

Amazon AWS has been particularly compelling for startups, since they don’t have to invest in large IT expenditures to get started, and Amazon’s infrastructure can handle rapid growth. Companies from Google to Hewlett Packard have their own cloud ambitions, and in fact, Google hired a key sales executive involved in Amazon AWS to head sales of its own cloud platform. Amazon in turn sued the former VP of global sales Daniel Powers, but as Geekwire reported on Friday, a judge largely rejected Amazon.com’s attempt to restrict his work at Google…

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