Jean Paul Sigwalt5
Do #Cloud hosting vendors make money? any insights on AWS cloud financials, as they are not published?
Dez Blanchfield
- yes of course they do, those who do not fall by the way side, at the end of the day it's "business", the myths and lies and spin doesn't pay the bills, it's that simple.
Dez Blanchfield
- the Amazon model is easy to understand, they lead by 200% more than the 2nd largest player ( Microsoft ) and they [ Amazon ] intend to pour every last dollar back into growth ( see Era Of Smart - I posted links above !! )
Dez Blanchfield
- best estimates, Amazon = 2M servers, Microsoft = 1M servers, RackSpace = 110,000 servers, HP = 50,000 servers.. I don't have numbers for SoftLayer ATM as they are moving too fast thanks to the IBM acquisition ;-)
Miroslav Hofbauer
I doubt anyone has insight into figures. However, virtual servers get clearly commoditized, that's why e.g. Rackspace is moving back to managed services. Added value is a key I think
Jean Paul Sigwalt
@dez_blanchfield, well, an European analyst firm was claiming recently they were not. Since financials are not disclosed, and being potentially subsidized from the other 95% of the business
Miroslav Hofbauer
I also looked at SoftLayer #servers. They said they had 100.000 servers in 2011: http://www.datacente...
SoftLayer Hits 100,000 Servers | Data Center Knowledge
IT infrastructure service provider SoftLayer Technologies now has more than 100,000 servers running in its data centers, the company said last week. The Dallas-based provider has added 14,000 servers this year. Read More
IT infrastructure service provider SoftLayer Technologies now has more than 100,000 servers running in its data centers, the company said last week. The Dallas-based provider has added 14,000 servers this year. Read More
Jean Paul Sigwalt
So what happens when a major cloud service provider goes bust? will public money be needed to save them, as it happens recently for the financial sector?
Dez Blanchfield
- @miroslav - I saw that but I'm struggling to map it to real numbers, so if I take it on face value, that would still put IBM SoftLayer as closely following RAX who reportedly have 110,000 servers ATM.
Dez Blanchfield
- you can't say that Amazon's AWS business "isn't making money" just because it's throwing 99% of it's revenue back into growth, that's a completely different commercial conversation.. capital growth is not loss
Miroslav Hofbauer
I'm almost sure they're not loosing money. There are too many small local players and enough space and also apetitie I believe for consolidation in this space.