With DevOps starting to gain traction outside of Silicon Valley, a growing number of developers are bypassing their CIOs in adopting cloud services that deliver on the promise of simplified provisioning and full stack integration. Amazon is capitalizing on this trend to reshape the vendor landscape and establish itself as the dominant player in enterprise IT, a vision that doesn’t leave much room for the competition.

Traditional vendors have no choice but to adapt or perish, theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante observed at the end of the company’s recently concluded re:Invent 2013 summit. Amazon is “light years” ahead of the industry when it comes to scale, Furrier notes, and it’s quickly catching up on functionality. But one company can only address so many markets, he continues, which should keep parts of the market open for rivals.

Exploiting this opportunity will be easier said than done, however. Furrier believes that IBM, VMware and other members of the “old guard” will have to match the simplicity and the agility of AWS to stay competitive in the race for developers’ hearts and minds. OpenStack may be the key to reaching this goal, but functionality represents only one side of the hybrid cloud equation. Cost-efficiency is just as important.

“The old guard knows that if people go to Amazon, they’re not gonna leave, because it’s going to be less attractive for them to leave than it is to stay,” Vellante explains. “There’s a huge battle over that trillion-dollar TAM. So the key is that OpenStack, and IBM, and VMware, and Oracle and all the others have to make it economically attractive to not go into Amazon – and that is the battle.”

Watch the clip below for the full discussion.