Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I discuss AWS’ recent performance, highlighting its Q1 growth rate of 17% and its focus on AI and cloud migrations.
Highlights
00:46 —The big story for AWS in Q1 was this reacceleration of its growth rate. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the AI business is now at a multibillion-dollar run rate. It came in at 17%. With revenue of $25.1 billion, I projected growth of 13%, which was way off the mark. So great job by AWS overall; not so good by me, but I’m going to do better next time.
01:46 — Andy Jassy talked about a couple of things, he went into a lot of detail about AI, the things that are happening there. AWS offers a lot of tools for that. He also said that cloud migrations are coming along in a strong way. They can’t have outdated architecture and infrastructure.
02:43— Jassy also made an interesting point that, until recently, Jassey said barely 10% of IT spending is on the cloud; the other 90% is still on premises. As more and more of that on premise money tilts over to the cloud, which it’s going to do very rapidly over the next couple of years, this will provide huge growth possibilities for AWS.
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03:42 — I’m very happy to see AWS get back into the swing of things here. I do want to point out that although Microsoft’s cloud business is much bigger than AWS, Microsoft’s growth rate for Q1 was 23%; Google Cloud, 28%; Oracle, much smaller than AWS, 25%. So 17% is a big improvement for AWS, but it’s not moving at the pace the other three hyperscalers are.
04:31 — On the earnings call, Jassy said that Amazon is getting into the supply chain business. This is the parent company, Amazon, saying, “We’ve got so much experience ourselves with supply chain, we’re going to open that business up, and we’re going to see if we can help other businesses around the world improve their supply chain.”
05:00 — The hyperscalers are moving in very different directions. They’re not homogenous. This is significant because this provides great opportunities for customers to align themselves with the cloud provider that they feel has the most unique capabilities and characteristics for that individual customer’s future.
