I’ve been trying to get a sense for how much the Amazon Web Services means to Amazon in terms of $ today. Its a strategic initiative with lots of buzz but how is that translating? The numbers seem somewhat elusive from what I can find in their public filings and round the web. If anyone has better info please send it along - much appreciated!
There are indirect indicators of adoption growth in a recent earnings announcement: in terms of bandwidth:
“Adoption of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) continues to grow. As an indicator of adoption, bandwidth utilized by these services in fourth quarter 2007 was even greater than bandwidth utilized in the same period by all of Amazon.com’s global websites combined. “
4th quarter no less - that would be the holiday rush. I can imagine that S3 in particular is a bit of a bandwidth intensive but thats a pretty significant milestone. I’m also not sure if that includes bandwidth use by content delivery networks (Mirror-Image by the looks of things) or just from the Amazon data centers themselves.
In MeatSpace terms the numbers are impressive:
“Over 330,000 developers have registered to use Amazon Web Services (AWS), up more than 30,000 from last quarter.”
So serious scale is not only possible but people seem to be using it.
Strong adoptions mixed with snippets from a GigaOm post on Amazon’s impact on the startup world are encouraging for startups. I particularly like the Randy Komisar quote on how the changing economics impact investing:
“We’re now at a point that business plans really don’t matter, It’s an iterative process of quickly getting your ideas into the hands of others.”
“Before — there was a black art. We don’t need gurus, we have a market.”
This is so refreshing. The “old” model of crafting a business plan and polishing a pitch on a brilliant idea that your team could execute to hit a home run just seems so much of a gamble compared with the alternative. I’ve seen the “we have the perfect idea now lets get funded and strap the rockets on we only have one shot” approach before and let me say it takes years off your life. I love calling this empirical model out and getting on with it. Having to pretend that you have everything all figured out before you’ve tested the market in order to get funded is incredibly disingenuous.
The fact that its much cheaper to get to strong prototype and that we have a emerging culture of iteration+community+feedback means that we can take some of the gamble out of the process leaving a better mix of the “good risk”. I wonder what kind of other effects this will have. The standard pattern of 5-7 years, 10X />$100M exits will get tweaked.
