Amazon’s role in transforming the cloud into the megatrend it is today has enabled it to secure a dominant position in the marketplace. Wikibon estimates that Amazon Web Services (AWS) raked in nearly $2 billion in 2012, and predicts that the platform will generate over $3 billion in revenue by end of this year.

AWS is immensely popular among developers and SMBs, but the value proposition that established the company as a leader in these markets is not nearly as attractive from an enterprise standpoint. Wikibon’s Stu Miniman says that Amazon’s one-size-fits-all approach leaves plenty of room for the competition.

In one of his latest entries on the Wikibon blog, the analyst wrote that service providers must accomplish two things at once if they wish to compete with Amazon: they have to meet the speed and ease of AWS, and they must “put forth the business case for an alternative that differentiates and clearly communicates why and how they are different”. He listed four areas in which vendors can differentiate from the Amazon:

Performance

Miniman pointed out that “not all clouds are created equal” when it comes to locality, network design and data mobility across compute and storage. Cloud providers need to deliver better overall performance for the workloads their users are running.

Cost

Many observers criticize Amazon as being notorious for lack of price transparency and the ‘colossal’ amount of time and money it takes to move data out of its data centers. According to Wikibon chief analyst Dave Vellante, however the former is a misconception. Vellante told us, “Amazon is extremely transparent about its pricing, probably more so than any cloud vendor. However accurately forecasting the monthly bill is sometimes confusing and some Wikibon users have complained of ‘sticker shock’ upon seeing the bill.”  Vellante believes that pricing transparency is crucial to success for aspiring cloud service providers.

Control

Miniman stressed the importance of reporting and monitoring capabilities. Vendors must provide organizations with the tools they need to meet their privacy, security and compliance requirements.

Support

The fourth and final selling point that cloud providers need to double down on is support. They have to offer better and more transparent SLAs than Amazon, plus 24X7X365 phone support, in order to lure enterprises to their services.