AWS Paying The Price For Amazon’s Broader Ambitions

2017 has been a strange year for cloud. While AWS has kept up with its winning ways, and still commands a comfortable lead, its competitors have put up a better than expected show.

Whether it is Microsoft inching ever closer to the Amazon cloud, or Google finding success in unexpected places, the cloud market seems to be opening up. And some recent developments are actually having a material impact on the Amazon Web Services bottom line.

More specifically, there are clearly visible prospects of companies running away from AWS.

Walmart may have taken the lead here, reportedly building its own datacenter powered by NVIDIA graphics processing units, but Target soon followed. Several other companies are apparently moving away from the Amazon cloud, seeing the company as a competitive threat.

As Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research reveals, the exodus is real:

“We are seeing retailers mount an anti-Amazon strategy and Microsoft, Google and Oracle helping to facilitate this. No one wants to fund AWS while the other side of the house is beating up on them.”

Basically, the business decision made by Amazon are certain to register an impact on its cloud arm.

The only question that remains is, how significant.

John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research, a firm that tracks cloud market share, believes the lead AWS has in this space is so substantial that a few companies leaving the platform will not have too big of an influence on proceedings.

Not when Amazon Web Services has well and truly earned its mindshare:

“Walmart and Target may be two large companies, but in the overall scheme of things they are just players in one single industry vertical. AWS is now well penetrated into a multitude of industry verticals and the public sector.”

Ultimately, blockbuster decisions like large companies changing platforms are not made in a day. It may take a few months to a couple of years to accurately assess whether these truly are the winds of change.

But this much is certain that we are going to see more than few oddball competitive situations in cloud.

Things have started to move in this direction.