Amazon.com Inc. sharpened its attack on the information technology industry today, offering some new cloud computing services along with pointed barbs at big traditional tech firms.

The company, still better known as the largest online retailer, has in recent years emerged as the leader in cloud computing, the notion of running traditional IT services online instead of in massive corporate data centers. At one of its frequent conferences for software developers today, this one in Santa Clara, CA, Amazon stepped up its attempt to get more companies to replace their data centers with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform.

“The destination for many enterprises is to move all-in to AWS,” said Matt Wood (pictured), AWS’s general manager of product strategy. He cited companies such as Netflix, financial services firm Suncorp Group, and Kempinski Hotels SA and CapitalOne as depending wholly on AWS or planning to do so in coming years.

Amazon has rolled out a large array of services — some 400 new features or products so far this year alone — in a drive to get more and larger companies to ditch their data centers for the cloud. Despite rampant skepticism about Amazon’s move into Web services a decade ago, AWS now has 1 million monthly users. Its revenues jumped 64 percent in the first quarter from a year ago, to $2.6 billion, driving the entire company’s profitability.

Flurry of new services

Amazon has been clear for some time that this continuous flurry of new services is aimed at replacing many of the products and services offered by traditional enterprise technology vendors ranging from Oracle to IBM. But the company has now amassed a large number of services that offer alternatives to traditional IT, from storage and computing to databases and analytics and other applications.

“They’re more and more replicating the services that you’d expect to get handled in traditional data centers,” said Jean Bozman, vice president and principal analyst at market researcher Hurwitz & Associates. “And they’re not done.”

Far from it. Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry estimates that less than 10 percent of the potential migration to AWS has occurred to date, and predicts that eventually 40 percent of existing workloads and applications will migrate to AWS.

Amazon is now more overtly stepping up its attack. Last week at another AWS Summit in London, Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels mounted an unusually vociferous critique of traditional tech suppliers, accusing them of  “extortionist techniques.” He said Amazon itself used to “write this massive big check to this big database company and the moment they had taken this check they would walk away. They didn’t care anymore.”

Wood was less pointed, but still managed to get in some digs. He quoted a tweet from one new customer of its Aurora database service, Trainline.com, that said it was planning to “throw an Oracle Exadata Database machine into the river.” He also quoted Infor Chief Executive Officer Charles Phillips, who has said, “Friends don’t let friends build data centers.”

Data migration

Amazon trotted out several customers at the summit that need to deal with lots of data in real time, such as the gene sequencing machine maker Illumina Inc., which uses AWS to store and analyze huge data files, with some 270 billion data points per year streamed to its data warehouse. Roomba maker iRobot has mapped more than 500 million square feet of homes in the last 10 months after it launched the first connected vacuum, using AWS to store and analyze the data.

There’s one overriding challenge in Amazon’s big push, however. It’s summed up in a single word that appeared repeatedly not only in the company’s keynote presentation but in countless companies hawking their services in the exhibition hall: “migration.” (If the show were a drinking game and the word was “migration,” the entire audience of 8,000 attendees would have been plastered by 11 a.m.)

The term refers to the need to move data and applications from data centers to AWS, and often back and forth repeatedly in the majority of corporate IT setups that use both the cloud and their own data centers. It’s a gargantuan task made all the worse by the fact that cloud computing has made the use of Big Data much more attractive to a wide range of companies.

If there’s one product that epitomizes the difficulty of moving and migrating data and applications, it’s a gray box called Snowball. Introduced by Amazon last October, it’s a 40-pound packing box containing a physical data storage appliance that can store up to 80 terabytes.

Amazon’s Snowball data migration appliance (Photo: Robert Hof)

For as little as $200 plus shipping, companies can load data into Snowball, which Amazon says can survive a fall from a two-story building, and then it’s sent via UPS or another delivery service to Amazon, where it’s loaded into the customer’s AWS’s S3 storage service. (Shades of Sneakernet.) So far it’s available in the U.S. and a few other selected regions, but Amazon said today that it would become available in all its regions around the world by the end of the year.

Amazon also announced a couple of other services today that are intended to make migration from IT vendors easier. They include a software tool to support conversions from Oracle and Teradata data warehouses to Amazon’s own and a database migration service that now allows continuous movement of data into AWS, not just in isolated batches.

Amazon’s aggressive drive for more large customers comes as it faces more competition in cloud services. While Amazon remains firmly atop the cloud crowd versus the like of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, there’s one sign that it’s feeling some competitive pressure: Executives such as AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy have felt it necessary recently to deny that it’s feeling competitive pressure.

TheCUBE, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE, conducted interviews at the summit, including this wrap-up:

(Disclosure: TheCUBE is the media partner for the summit. Neither Amazon nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by Robert Hof