In the second interview segment on SiliconANGLE’s TheCUBE, broadcasting live from the AWS re: Invent 2013 conference in Las Vegas, Wikibon’s Dave Vellante and SiliconANGLE’s John Furrier welcomed Jillian Mirandi, Software and Cloud analyst with TBR Research.

Beginning the broadcast Mirandi was asked to rank the primary cloud providers among AWS, Rackspace, IBM, VMware and Pivotal as they all comprise the 1^st generation firms in the cloud market.

Not surprisingly, Mirandi claimed AWS is leading the crowd among IaaS businesses, thanks in no small part to their rapid roll out of services over the previous 18-24 months. She states they are the fastest growing company in the field and they are leaving their mark on the industry.

Mirandi thinks Rackspace occupies the 2^nd place position due to their embrace of OpenStack and their diligent training of not only their staff but also their customers.

In the kickoff broadcast for this conference, Vellante posited AWS was on their way toward enjoying a total revenue of $4BN for this year. TBR Research, however, sees that figure coming in around the $3BN mark. She says their presence in the infrastructure is a reason for this figure, at approximately 40 percent.

With the big news of the ruling in IBM v. Amazon, Mirandi says this can only serve to boost the credibility of AWS going forward. It also doesn’t hurt that the CIA prefers AWS due to their flexibility and their platform being more secure than what IBM was proposing.

The conversation steered off to the long-term viability for the PaaS market. According to Mirandi, “It’s a very real segment. However, since the cloud is a basically a ground up concept, I think it will eventually get rolled up into either IaaS or SaaS.” She goes on to say PaaS will remain as a middle layer for now. “SaaS and IaaS are still in their infancy. That makes the layer essential for now.”

AWS seems to be dragging some of their larger private and hybrid cloud providers into the public cloud market. Mirandi cautions this eventuality for these vendors because she doesn’t see them being able to compete in a high volume, low cost market due to the inability of their businesses to react flexibly enough to compete in this emerging market.

Mirandi went on to explain how AWS has come to be so dominant among its competitors. “They made the market. They had to build the market because they supported Amazon. They have been able to do a lot quickly. It takes a lot of cost.” She continued, “Since they are used to being low margin, they put less in their pocket and more into the portfolio.”

And AWS’s agility allows them to develop products very quickly. Even with mistakes they have made, they have shown they are able to learn and adapt at a faster rate than their competitors.

TBR Research sees advancing growth for AWS over the next 5 years. They arrived at this projection because they see many people building on Amazon since they have so many business models. A benefit of this is that companies opting to use AWS will soon be able to employ more of a global distribution model in a more affordable way

The AWS re:Invent 2013 conference continues through Thursday. TheCUBE will broadcasting live on SiliconANGLE.tv and you can read more deep dive analysis at Wikibon.org and SiliconANGLE.com. Join in on the conversation as TheCUBE folds in social media by visiting Crowdchat.net/reinvent.