Stop Amazon: A New Era Of Cloud Co-opetition

February 16, 2015 Off By David

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

A recent pact between Google and VMware reflects a new air of co-opetition among major cloud computing service suppliers, as companies try to keep Amazon from running away with the market. Ray Noorda, the late founder of Novell, popularized the term co-opetition, meant to convey how competitors will cooperate where their interests overlap in one narrow sphere, while continuing to compete on many other fronts.

Amazon’s continued ability to innovate and create new on-demand computing services around its online retailing base of operations has made it a formidable competitor. As enterprise IT shops experiment with and embrace cloud services, rivals including VMware, Google, Microsoft, Rackspace, and IBM SoftLayer have reason to worry that Amazon will win today’s cloud-services land grab before they can bring forth a full suite of competing services…

That’s why this new sense of co-opetition is no longer about cooperating on a narrow front, as Noorda envisioned. It means cooperating wherever you can to prevent a potential cloud user from becoming the next Amazon convert…

Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/infrastructure-as-a-service/stop-amazon-a-new-era-of-cloud-co-opetition/a/d-id/1319103