AWS Certification Training in Phoenix USA

The behemoth of a booming industry

• As first to market, AWS has benefited handsomely — revenue catapulted 47% to $25.7 billion in 2018, Amazon reported. Amazon accounted for 48% of the $32.4 billion in global sales generated by providers in the infrastructure as a service, or IaaS, market, according to a report from market researcher Gartner Inc. (Rival Microsoft was next, at about 15%, up from 12.7% in 2017. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. BABA, 3.04%and Alphabet’s Google came in at 7.7% and 4%, respectively.)
• Expect more. Much, much more. AWS is on pace to grow to $45 billion to $50 billion in 2020 — which would surpass Oracle Corp. ORCL, 0.93%as the second-largest enterprise software provider — MKM Partners analyst Rohit Kulkarni predicted in late October. And global cloud infrastructure revenue is expected to triple over the next three years to $133 billion, with AWS and Microsoft’s Azure cloud business getting the lion’s share, according to Forrester Research.
• Amazon reached those stratospheric heights using the same recipe it has applied assiduously to its other mega-businesses, hewing closely to a companywide strategy of 14 “leadership principles“ — “Customer Obsession,” “Are Right, A Lot,” “Invent and Simplify,” and “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit” — that are uttered endlessly by Amazon executives.
• “It’s like a religion about the customer,” Vass says. “Jeff Bezos says you can’t predict your competitors or what the government will do. But you can invest heavily in the customer point of view.”
• It sounds like bland culture-speak, but it is tough to argue with the results. By outlining the parameters of a product with a customer before building the technology — or “working backwards from the customer,” as Bill Vass, vice president in charge of edge computing and Internet of Things devices at AWS, puts it — AWS has been able to amass millions of customers that include big-name clients like Intuit Inc. INTU, 3.37%,Netflix Inc. NFLX, 1.49%, General Electric Co. GE, -2.55%, Expedia Group Inc. EXPE, 0.26%, Lyft Inc. LYFT, 2.25%, Siemens AG SIE, +1.62% and McDonald’s Corp. MCD, 0.34%.
• AWS has “built a sizable ecosystem to support the variety and scale of needs required by its customers,” said Lindsey Koshansky, vice president of clinical innovation at Locus Health, a Charlottesvile, Va.-based digital-health company that is an AWS customer.

Competition taps into the force

• The AWS success story has redefined the tech industry in such a way that it has radically altered the business blueprints of some of the biggest names in the history of technology, such as Microsoft, Google, Oracle and International Business Machines Corp. IBM, 1.29%,just to start. They’ve all scrambled to catch up to AWS and grab a slice of an expanding market.
• Meanwhile, the market has changed, allowing these other companies to develop a strategy that could make them stand out against Amazon, or at least compete with the titan of the industry. The move toward a “hybrid-cloud” strategy of keeping some data and actions on-site and using cloud-computing for other tasks seems to have benefited Microsoft, while businesses seeking to strike deals with multiple cloud providers has been beneficial to Google.
• Gartner analyst Nag sees opportunities for Microsoft to leverage its dominance as a software-as-a-service provider to make inroads in winning big cloud contracts. “Microsoft owns the desktop. Microsoft owns the OS. And Microsoft owns the apps,” Nag told MarketWatch. “It has to bully pulpit to effectively drive vendors to the cloud.”
• AWS’s sheen of invincibility in the cloud was punctured in October, when what looked like a slam-dunk contract win of a 10-year, $10 billion pact with the Pentagon, known as JEDI, turned into a shocking loss to Microsoft and warnings from some analysts of a fundamental shift in where the market is headed.
• “With JEDI, I believe the game has changed and the market perception will provide Microsoft the opportunity to apply significant pressure to AWS,” Futurum Research analyst Daniel Newman told MarketWatch, noting just 20% of enterprise workloads are currently in the cloud. “AWS had the first-move advantage. But it is not as deeply entrenched as Microsoft at corporations. We will get closer to parity over the next four, five years.”
• He predicts Azure, which cleaved off 1% of market share from AWS in 2018, will continue to make gains this year and into the future.
• How big a gain? How about enough to make it Microsoft’s biggest business, at a projected $90 billion in fiscal year 2023, according to a Nov. 18 research note from Stifel Nicolaus analyst Brad Reback. He said most potential business customers are in the early stages of shifting their computing tasks to the cloud, and Azure is best positioned to appeal to them because of Microsoft’s strong enterprise-software offerings.
• Microsoft has said little about the JEDI award, but John “JG” Chirapurath, general manager of Azure data, blockchain and artificial intelligence at Microsoft, told MarketWatch, “We see some of the largest corporations on Earth adopting the Azure model for the same reason” that the Pentagon chose Microsoft — a hybrid-cloud setup, with deep data analytics and security.
• “Hybrid is really the default computing situation for every large customer. It is here to stay,” Chirapurath said in a phone interview. “When I look ahead, the customer condition is not going to be one cloud or the other. The first thing I see is hybrid. Not just on-premises, but adopting technology on the edge. The second big area is data analytics.”
• Companies that choose between AWS and Azure do not want to be locked in completely to those vendors, however, which opens the door to other vendors to jump in. Large companies want a multi-cloud strategy beyond a public option, said IBM Chief Information Officer Fletcher Previn.
• “They want to avoid vendor lock-in,” he told MarketWatch. “A stove-piped AWS can be hard.”
• “The market is shifting from the mono-cloud to multi-cloud,” Grannis told MarketWatch in a phone interview. “We’re also in the third wave of cloud, in which customers have moved from a strategy of (technology) rental to building their own platforms and applications to do cool and interesting things. And we’ve built some incredibly successful platforms at Google, like Android and Chrome.”
• The variety with which companies large and small are adopting cloud computing underscores its evolving nature and the opportunities that await Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others, according to Sean Feeney, cloud practice director at digital consultancy Nerdery.
• AWS executives can relate. As the architects of a comparatively new market, they know its story is far from told.