Although Amazon Web Services is facing increasing pressure in the public cloud market, it would appear that many of its customers are more than happy to increase how much they spend with it.
Considered by the majority to be the leading public cloud vendors, AWS can take heart in the news that 48% of all IT and business executives responding to a 2nd Watch survey said that they plan to spend at least 10% more on a number of its cloud-native services in 2017.
These services include the likes of Amazon Kineses, Amazon redshift, Amaozn Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda.
The survey also found that 66% are now or will soon achieve expected return-on-investment from the use of these services.
It was found that 35% of respondents are planning to spend 10-20% more on these services than they did last year, while 13% said that they would spent 21-30% more. According to the survey this is because companies are realising the value of previous investments in cloud-related products and services.
The reasons given for wanting to spend more were given as 31% due to the opportunity to increase revenue, while 24% said that it would be an opportunity to decrease costs that would drive the decision.
Other respondents said that it would help them to provide better customer service (22%), while 20% said it would help them to achieve a faster time-to-market on new products and services. 
Those that appear to be most likely to benefit from the new services were identified as being Sales and Marketing (32%), Customer Service (19%), and Product Development (18%).
Although the vast majority of respondents to the survey are already using public cloud technology, many are still struggling with some challenges when it comes to deploying new cloud services.
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It was found that 34% struggle from a lack of internal technical skills, with 36% saying that they planned to use an outside firm in order to implement new cloud services. A further 28% cited a lack of budget and 21% said that there wasn’t enough executive support.
Jeff Aden, EVP of Marketing & Strategic Business Development & Co-Founder at 2nd Watch, said: “The survey results are consistent with what we’re seeing and hearing from our customers. They are making new investments into these cloud-native services as payoff from previous investments show up, and they’re looking for new ways of creating value and driving down costs.
“As far as challenges go, the largest enterprises will continue seeking support from leading providers that are experts in public cloud and have experience migrating and managing enterprise workloads.”
The survey was varied out by 2nd Watch an AWS Premier Partner. It surveyed 1,000 IT and business executive in the United States from companies of at least 1,000 employees.
