Amazon is the king of cloud: Here's the proof

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If the data from the Q1 results of the global tech giants is to be believed, Amazon is ruling the cloud roost. Amazon has accounted for 40% of the global market for public cloud services in the fourth quarter of last year. The Seattle-based company reported $890 million in operating income from its cloud business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which accounted for the majority of its Q1 2017 profits. Amazon is looking to diversify its product offerings and rely less on e-commerce as a main driver of revenue.
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AWS Summit 2017 in India indicated in the same direction. The country, being at the nascent stage of cloud computing is a big market for Amazon. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon .com, speaking at the summit said, AWS in India has grown by more than 50% since last three quarters.

Globally, Alphabet's (the parent company of Google) revenue grew 22% year-over-year (YoY) to reach $24.8 billion in the quarter, with $3 billion, or 18% of its Q1 revenue, coming from the segment that houses its cloud business. Amazon's revenue reached $35.7 billion in Q1, with $3.6 billion, or 10% of revenue, coming from its AWS cloud segment. Microsoft posted revenue of $23.56 billion, with $3.6 billion, or 10%, coming from cloud.

While the data prove that the businesses in cloud is still awaiting maturity, experts believe, the segment will be increasingly important for each of the tech giants. This is because the digital ecosystem moves away from being device-centric and moves towards cloud-oriented solutions wherein products and services can be accessed on a variety of devices from virtually anywhere. This shift will be more pronounced in the years ahead, as consumers and employees seek greater mobility and the Internet of Things brings exponentially more devices into the digital fray.

“Fortunately we don’t have to worry about bandwidth. And most importantly, we could save a lot on Devops. With cloud support from AWS, the start ups don’t need to bother much on this side. We are India-specific start ups and we don’t have much traffic at night. So we have the elasticity to pay for the duration we use the platform,” said Devendra Rane, CTO of Coverfox.

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In India, as major companies are now opening up to the cloud, the main growth driver, according to Vogels is the need for new kind of security that is now indispensable to run a business.

“When we started everything was very local. As a result, there was manpower cost and licensing cost. So we took everything to cloud to make things easier and simpler. We scaled rapidly and everything was automated. Back in 2014, we were having our proof of concept about cloud and approached Netmagic and Microsoft Azure. Why we came to AWS was because they are very customizable. At that time, we had SQL in backend. Most others demanded to join Non-SQL platforms. However AWS was the only one, which was open to customization”, Soumyadeep Barman of Faasos, a major client of AWS told Business Insider.

Be it machine learning or making things cost effective, AWS has been a major blessing to start ups, which can scale fast without bothering about nitty-gritty of developer options.

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