In a new inititative, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon (AMZN) announced that the company will offer backend IT hardware like servers and databases on hire to other companies. Jeff Bozos announced this initiative during his keynote at MIT's Emerging Technologies Conference. This is a big step in moving toward making IT Computing a Utility . Quite like water and electricity : pay-as-you-use. Sometimes I think that Google could be building its huge data centers to enable IT Utility computing.
Amazon's services could be valuable for Start-ups in social media domain where a lot of user generated content (UGC) gets uploaded. Imagine a new Video & Images based social networking site that can tap into Amazon's database service and just focus on its core product development. Right now Amazon is offerring around 10 services at its Amazon Web Services AWS site:
- S3 (Amazon Simple Storage) database service
- EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Service to do computing-intensive tasks
- Webstore Service for building ecommerce sites
- Amazon Fulfillment service to ship products using Amazon's warehousing and shipping network
This is explained further in an interview with Bezos and MIT Technology Review:
...The company is bringing its invisible back-end operations front and center. In a series of initiatives launched over the last year, Amazon has begun to rent out parts of its IT infrastructure as Web services.
Startups in the social-networking or media-sharing arenas, for example, can use Amazon's S3 database service to store their users' photos and videos, rather than buying their own servers. In another service, the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, business customers can offload computing-intensive tasks to temporary "virtual servers" at Amazon's data centers. And last week, Amazon announced two additional services, Webstore by Amazon and Amazon Fulfillment, that allow outside companies to build their own commerce sites around Amazon's software, then ship products using Amazon's own warehousing and shipping network.
In essence, Amazon is finding ways to monetize the software and computing resources it has developed over the last 11 years to handle its own business. "There's a big need at many companies for back-end infrastructure," Bezos remarked. "The problem is server hosting, bandwidth management, and the like really have nothing to do with your actual business." Amazon wants to use the Web services it's developed to "help with some of that heavy lifting," Bezos said.
