Roaming the floor of Amazon Web Services' first user conference last week, it didn't look like a traditional tech show. Many of the 6,000 attendees at AWS re:Invent were with startups or mid-size businesses looking to learn more about AWS services or the public cloud.
Light on attendance were major enterprise IT shops.
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AWS has been making moves in recent months targeting the enterprise market, with the release of services such its Glacier storage service, its Redshift data warehousing product and others. But it raises the question: What is Amazon's enterprise play right now?
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Amazon wants you to leave this conference thinking that anything can be done on its cloud, says Gordon Haff, a cloud evangelist for Red Hat who attended the show. "Public cloud will be a part of enterprise IT, it will not be all of enterprise IT," he says. CIOs are still trying to figure out what workloads make sense for running in the cloud and which still are best for on-premise applications. Many specialized applications, he says, are still best to run yourself in your own data center.
James Staten, a Forrester analyst, predicts that 30 to 50 percent of enterprise workloads and applications could one day run in the public cloud. "It's rare I talk to an enterprise today that isn't doing something in AWS's cloud," he says. The biggest factor holding the industry back, Staten says, is culture.
Customers are used to running their systems on-premise. The cloud is a completely new model with a new pricing structure of PAYG (pay as you go), new operations management, and new use cases. "Enterprises aren't used to the PAYG model," says Michael Wasserman, of cloud cost management startup Apptio. "They want to know how much they'll pay and they want the bulk discounts. That hasn't seemed to be AWS's sales model so far."
In fact, at the conference, AWS Senior Vice President Andy Jassy highlighted the opposite point: The public cloud, he says, is ideal for businesses because there are no upfront costs and businesses only pay for what they use.
