“The message from Amazon is, “we’re going to win the enterprise”, they’re serious now and they’re showing some proof points.”

That’s how theCUBE host John Furrier sees it at the close of this year’s AWS Re:invent 2014 conference, and it’s true there’s plenty to be excited about. 2014 has proven to be break out year for Amazon Web Services Inc. as far as the enterprise is concerned, with the “gorilla that innovates” going into overdrive with a wave of new services for big business cloud users.

AWS has unleashed a bevy of new enterprise-focused products in the last couple of days, what with its Amazon Aurora database, its EC2 Container Service for Docker, and AWS Lambda, a radical evolution of its hallmark pay-as-you-go business model that makes it possible to efficiently carry out a wide variety of small actions without having to build, deploy and maintain a full-fledged application

“AWS is really targeting the enterprise now, really continuing its journey of accelerated traction, accelerated momentum, adding on more and more use cases, data points and services,” said Furrier in the final wrap segment on theCUBE.

Driving this momentum is Amazon’s strategy of constantly innovating, said Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman. It’s innovating at a break-neck pace and it’s causing a lot of people to focus on what it’s doing. More importantly though, it’s helping to put even more distance between AWS and its competitors.

“If they can keep moving and growing and adding new services at the pace they’re doing, they will continue to seperate themselves from the pack,” said Miniman. “Look at what they announced with Aurora, look at all the other pieces they have, visionary stuff that they’re doing with Lambda, this is their market to lose and I don’t see anybody catching them.”

No threat to AWS’ dominance

Of course it certainly helps Amazon’s case that more and more enterprises are looking to migrate their IT operations to the cloud. As Miniman points out, “Andy Jassy said ‘AWS is looking to be the new normal’, this is what they’re building on”, and they’re doing it extremely fast.

But that in itself could prove to be awkward for Amazon, as its record growth could come back to bite it on the bum.

“How fast are they getting? Too much of a percentage of the wallet, putting too much pressure on their partners, driving down margins,” said Miniman. “If they have too much power there’s that backlash. And there’s definitely people who’re looking for an alternatives. Microsoft is clear number two, Google’s moving into the environment, and of course all the other guys are building their clouds.”

That’s not to say AWS has anything to worry in the near term. It still holds a very substantial lead in the enterprise space and with developers, and what’s more, it doesn’t seem as if its closest competitors are taking the fight to them, in spite of highly publicized price drops by Google Inc.

“Google is not attacking where Amazon is today, getting their niche in the market though they’ve got a lot of those pieces,” said Miniman. And as for the significant lack of any price drop announcement by Amazon at the conference, that’s “really surprising because we categorize those three players as a race to zero. Has Amazon got enough position in the marketplace and added enough value that they feel they don’t have to be the lowest cost option?”

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IT’s cloud crunch

Amazon’s growth is representative of the greater, unstoppable trend in IT, where more companies are looking to shift their operations to the cloud so as to be more agile. Much of the buzz centers around the advantages and benefits cloud can offer, but what’s rarely discussed is the physical impact this will have on enterprise IT departments.

“But it’s having a big impact”, stated Furrier. “Clearly shadow IT is being reined in, it’s becoming standardized.”

Miniman agreed, saying that if you go all-in on cloud you’re going to need less employees in the IT department. “There’s going to be some workforce adjustment and some people are going to be retrained, some people are moving to other jobs. Absolutely, the cloud will have an effect,” he said.

What with all the enterprise focus you could be forgiven for thinking AWS had forgotten its developer roots, expecially in day one of the conference which was almost totally given over to its partner announcements. But then came along the EC2 Container Service for Docker, and all was immediately forgiven.

“When Werner announced Docker there was a real round of applause,” said Furrier. “That was an indication that this is still a developer conference, it’s still about education, it’s still about all of that stuff.”

“I do think AWS is really solid with developers and that’s going to continue for some time. The services they’re offering are just awsome. Startup from local host to cloud with Github, it’s all rocking and rolling.”

Main image credit: tpsdave via Pixabay.com