Who is Amazon’s biggest competitor in the cloud?

Grazed from IDG. Author: Brandon Butler.

Who is Amazon’s biggest competitor in the cloud? The go-to answer for many may be companies like Rackspace with its OpenStack platform, perhaps Google with its Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, VMware or one of the up-and-coming cloud computing companies like Joyent.

But Mikhail Malamud, founder of cloud consultancy startup CloudAware, says another cloud company could pose the biggest challenge to Amazon’s cloud plans: Salesforce.com. These two companies, Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com, are two of the leading cloud providers in their respective markets of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for AWS and software as a service (SaaS) for Salesforce.com. But Malamud believes there is one reason why Salesforce.com could be a formidable foe for Amazon in the cloud moving forward: data…

Salesforce.com’s data stash

"Data is the kingmaker in the cloud," says Malamud, whose firm, CloudAware, provides a platform to access AWS resources. Salesforce.com has an enormous cache of customer data, and not just any data, but some of enterprises’ most valuable data — customer information. Salesforce.com has data about who its users’ customers are, what interactions they have with those customers, and increasingly it’s been attempting to collect even more data, from human resource management to social data…

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