Cloud Computing: How Amazon is building a business for the long haul

Grazed from Economic Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Amazon Web Services doesn’t just want to dominate the global business in selling computing online. It also wants to be the rarest thing of all in the technology industry: a long-lived company. Its strategy hinges on an astonishing level of automation in computer programming and maintenance, coupled with offering new products and services at a rate none of the old-guard companies seem able to match.

The idea seems to be to dominate not so much by the traditional "vendor lock-in of hooking customers on proprietary technology but by making itself the center of the styles and habits of cloud computing. At least some of its customers seem to think that will work. On Wednesday, Jim Fowler, chief information officer of General Electric, said, "AWS will be the trusted partner that will run our company’s information technology for the next 140 years." That is how long GE, founded by Thomas Edison, has been around…

Fowler was talking at the annual AWS confererence during a session in which the company indirectly made the case that it would go after all of the existing customers of some of the biggest technology companies around. Along with its other offerings, AWS plans to send customers machines that will extract an Oracle database, say, and send it to AWS to be transformed to a cheaper cloud product…

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