In this vendor ranking segment from the Acceleration Economy course The Cloud Wars Top 10: How It Works, Why It Has Shifted, & How CXOs Use It, I share what differentiates Amazon, which dropped to #3 on the Cloud Wars Top 10 ranking.
This episode is sponsored by Acceleration Economy’s “Cloud Wars Top 10 Course,” which explains how Bob Evans builds and updates the Cloud Wars Top 10 ranking, as well as how C-suite executives use the list to inform strategic cloud purchase decisions. The course is available today.
Highlights
AWS’s slowing growth caused it to fall from #2 to #3 in the latest Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings, as it can’t keep up with Google Cloud, Microsoft, and the other cloud leaders.
- In Q1 2022, its growth rate was 37%, and a year later, it was 16%. It continued its slide for the seventh straight quarter, generating only 12% growth in Q2 2023.
- AWS is continuing to innovate in multiple areas, including the following:
- Amazon has been doing some very interesting things with its foray into the enterprise space with its AWS Supply Chain software. It probably started with supply chain because it’s really good at it, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it move into human resources, finance, or merchandising.
- AWS offers numerous types of databases because companies want smaller, more purpose-built databases to do certain things.
- It has also been able to apply the mass, capability, and power of its parent, Amazon. It’s done extremely well in infrastructure-as-a-service, but it’s been hesitant to move up the software stack. I think it needs to get more aggressive on software going forward.
To get back to the high-level growth that characterized its first 15 years, I recommend that AWS find emerging areas where it has unique insights, customer experiences, and capabilities. It needs to find places where key industries will be in the next 12 to 36 months and create products and services to help meet its goals.
