Amazon's Cloudfront: Blowing Away the Competition?

I had the pleasure of watching Amazon's (AMZN) CTO, Werner Vogels, address 250 or so senior strategy people from the telecom world at the Telco 2.0 event in London a couple of weeks ago.

Sitting at the back of the room, at times I had the sense that the audience's hair was flying back, as if from some powerful blast, or the engines of a UFO landing. In other words, they seemed to be both amazed and shocked by his description of Amazon's approach to building a platform business, the process by which it decided to do so, and the sheer speed with which it has gained traction.

I was somewhat surprised to see, well, that they were surprised. After all this has been a well-covered story for 30 months or so. Nevertheless, that's what happens when you find yourself in a world characterized by innovation cycles of six months or less. And today brings more good and bad news - good for Amazon, bad for lots of other people, especially anyone thinking about possibly scheduling a meeting to talk about maybe thinking about developing a CDN strategy - maybe.

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Comments

[Fremont Rea...:]

what were they blown away by? how much is the new business impacting Amazon's bottomline?

2008 Nov 19 11:47 AM

[Software Guy:]

The way I see it, the people who are in place to take advantage of this caching capability are the people with small to medium size website delivering content. If you have a large number of visitors and a large infrastructure behind it, you probably have an agreement with larger companies like Akamai.

It is certainly disruptive technology but I can't imagine it impacting Amazon's top or bottomline anytime soon. Until their case studies or customer stories cite companies with more than 10 or 15 million dollars of revenue, I don't see this as more than a cool startup tool.

2008 Nov 19 01:38 PM