After roaming the showroom floor for the first few days of Amazon’s re:Invent 2013 conference, Wikibon Principal Research Contributor Stu Miniman got back in theCUBE with hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante to share his conclusions about the public cloud giant’s enterprise plan.

While traditional technology companies anticipate that 80 percent of IT workloads will remain on-premise for the foreseeable future, Amazon expects the opposite, predicting that only 10 percent of all processes will remain in house. Their numbers may be off, but the big vendors do recognize that the cloud has become a force to be reckoned with.

“I gotta give the enterprise guys a lot of credit. They’re not deer in the headlights like the enterprise guys used to be in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when they would deny things like the microprocessor revolution,” Vellante reflects. “Companies today are much more well funded, so it’s gonna be really interesting to see how they fight and hang on to their existing [customer] base.”

Elaborating on these changing competitive dynamics, Miniman observes that re:Invent attracted several enterprise vendors – including a number of hardware suppliers – looking to partner with Amazon in a bid to offer more competitive pricing. Continuing this line of thought, he notes that even if the cheapest AWS plans only appeal to a small percentage of users, they help the company expand its reach and disrupt traditional technologies.

Asked about Workspaces, the desktop-as-a-service introduced on the second day of the conference, Miniman says that the offering addresses the main challenges associated with virtual desktop infrastructure.

”The pricing, the complication of putting this entire [VDI] stack together, and all the politics of moving from your traditional desktop environment into some new version that hopefully allows you to be more mobile is very complicated,” he details. “Some of the biggest barriers are performance and cost and how fast it is to roll this out. Amazon really didn’t have a significant impact on this, and it is a credible player in this space now.”

Check out the video below for the full analysis.