Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, spoke at the AWS Summit at the ExCel Centre in London, claiming that Amazon’s success was driven by a customer-centric approach.
At a keynote speech Vogels described how the business had advanced in 11 years and drew attention to the company’s dominant market position.
"If you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant for last year," said Vogels. "AWS sits up and lonely in the upper right-hand corner…and we’re fine with that."
"Gartner estimates that AWS is the undisputed market share leader," he added, "with more than 5 times the compute capacity than all the other 14 cloud providers combined."
To highlight the range of different sectors and sizes of business that AWS is serving, testiomonials from broadcaster ITV, cloud music service Omnifone, charity JustGiving and analytics start-up GoSquared showed the variation in users.
Accordingly, Vogels claimed that the cloud was revolutionising many different market sectors as well as both start-ups and enterprises.
"There are quite a few companies here in the UK…who are able to move really fast because they’re able to exploit these services from the get-go," he commented. "Enterprises in almost every possible vertical…we have really stable customers making use of cloud services.
He claimed that "almost every possible large media conglomerate [is] making use of AWS," with companies across different sectors "making use of cloud today to be more competitive."
Giving an insight into the reasons for Amazon Web Services’s success, he cited his own experience with adopting cloud, stating: "Cloud has become the new normal and I’m really happy about that. I used to be on the receiving end of this: as the CTO of Amazon.com, I had to deal with providers all the time and I hated it. Why? Because always felt the provider was in charge, not us.
"When we started AWS, we vowed that we would not be like the traditional IT providers."
Vogels added: "How can you be a customer-centric IT provider? It means putting your customers in charge instead of the IT provider. So we shifted the balance of power from IT providers to IT consumers, and that’s where we are now.
"We think this has contributed enormously of AWS because consumers feel that they are in charge. We as providers need to be on our toes almost every day to deliver the absolute best service and the best innovation, otherwise you guys will walk away."
