TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s premier video production team, was invited to the AWS Summit where theCube guys, Wikibon Chief Analyst Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick, were able to get a good sense of the momentum, innovation, commitment to the enterprise, and the richness of the ecosystem via interviews with the company’s executives, partners and customers.

Vellante and Frick both are astounded as to how well Amazon has evolved into what it is today, and how it has become disruptive to the enterprise.

“This is a bookseller that then evolved to basically the retail platform and completely changed that,” stated Frick.  “Then they got into the tablet business and really changed the book publishing business and now they’ve used that as a fundamental infrastructure to change IT services and computing services.”

With all the buzz happening around the event, Vellante was still able to narrow down what Amazon needs to improve on with its AWS such as it’s “posture towards the private cloud,” as he sensed there was some negativity from Amazon in that area, particularly coming out of November’s re:Invent conference. Vellante said some of the most successful companies selling into the enterprise include services companies such as Deloitte, IBM and Accenture and a big part of their value proposition is connecting existing IT infrastructure to external clouds. Vellante believes AWS has huge potential to disrupt existing business models but to do so Amazon must learn to speak the language of enterprise IT, which includes so-called “Private Cloud.”  While Amazon is looking to sell to the enterprise, it has much to learn according to Vellante and many changes still need to happen within the company– but being customer-centric may be its biggest edge against competitors.

“There are still some learnings going on to sell to the enterprise.  It’s a different game and I think their philosophy is, ‘look, we’re just gonna keep doing our thing, keep innovating, keep cutting prices, and not worry too much on the competition and focus on the customer,’” Vellante stated.

With Amazon’s disruptive nature, the big question is can the traditional enterprise players keep up, especially given that Amazon leads in hyperscale, Big Data technologies and doing things in IT that universities researchers aren’t even doing.  Vellante doesn’t doubt that the enterprise can and will compete as they are astute at being fast followers on cloud-like models and competing on the basis of SLAs and security.

As it relates to Private Cloud, Amazon’s Andy Jassy at the AWS Summit cited data that suggested on-premise instances of “cloud” aren’t able to replicate the benefits of Amazon’s cloud, invoking chargebacks and self-service as two capabilities that on-premise clouds aren’t delivering broadly. But Vellante said that many IT organizations don’t want to do chargebacks and allow self-service. “It’s simply not a priority in many IT shops. Chargebacks are political and often not perceived as worth the hassle. And self-service is often seen as a license to spin up virtual machines, which many CIOs don’t want to allow.”

Check out the video below to see the entire recap of this year’s AWS Summit: