Amazon’s recently concluded re:Invent 2013 summit marked a turning point in the company’s journey to extend its dominance to the enterprise. The re:Invent 2013 juggernaut advanced into the realm of managed services and opened new fronts against traditional IT vendors, furthering its vision to to bring about the demise of the data center.

Like Hadoop, AWS was born out of necessity. Originally designed for internal use, the platform hit general availability in 2006 and rose to dominance in the developer community during the 2008–2009 recession. Since then, it has picked up considerable steam across enterprise business lines, a trend that Amazon hopes to accelerate as CIOs transition from being infrastructure specialists to service brokers.

AWS made a lot of progress since launch, Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante reflects in recent discussion on theCUBE, but the company still has a long way to go towards reaching its lofty goals. Co-host John Furrier highlights that the rapid consumerization of IT and the number of attendees at re:Invent 2013 seems to indicate that the firm is on the right track.. He explains:

“In the enterprise, you’re going to see a massive shift to computing where these “substations” of data centers will move into the cloud at large scale, where computing resources will be ultimately infinite to power things like Google Glass, Internet of Things, mobile devices, applications. What you’re seeing is a collision between the consumer world and enterprises.”

AWS won’t render the data center obsolete, Furrier continues, but rather underpin the value of software in the era of developer-led innovation. In order to compete in this new landscape, Amazon will have to double down on the hybrid cloud by embracing software-defined infrastructure and help customers capitalize on their existing IT investments.

Watch the full video below for more insight into the state of the market and the subtle yet fundamental similarities between OpenStack and AWS.