Amazons earnings figures were released yesterday, and, as has been the case since Amazon started to break out AWS revenues, the AWS section was eagerly anticipated. Sometimes a graph is far more useful than a percentage, so moving away from the headline growth figure of 64% year on year (which is very impressive), lets take a look at the revenue growth for AWS from Q1FY14 (as far back as details are available explicitly on the AWS segment in Amazons reports).
The trajectory is incredibly strong, and linear. We all know that AWS is not a quarter by quarter business in the sense of traditional technology vendors, with a hockey stick curve to close out the year.
The more interesting question is for every $250M we see Amazon add to its quarterly revenue, how much of a dent does that put in the revenues of everyone else in the wider IT market. As my colleague James pointed out today:
the cloud isn’t just hurting sales of compute and storage any more, it’s an across the board phenomenon which is making life harder for companies with broad portfolios as much as narrow ones
The transformation of the technology industry due to cloud is accelerating, and Amazon is leading the way.
Disclaimer: Amazon is a RedMonk customer
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