CEO Jeff Bezos attributes success to innovation and customer-obsessed approach
Highlighting the increasing importance of cloud-based computing and attendant data center needs, Amazon Web Services hit $10 billion in annual sales in 2015, according to a company filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The mark comes 10 years after the service was launched.
According to the April 5 filing, Amazon.com as a whole generated $100 billion in sales with AWS, which provides compute, storage, content delivery, networking and database services, contributed a full 10% to that figure.
Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, in commentary contained in the filing, said the “most noteworthy” aspect of AWS is “the pace of innovation continues to accelerate – we announced 722 significant new features and services in 2015, a 40% increase over 2014.”
Bezos wrote a “customer-obsessed” approach underlies the success of both Amazon and AWS.
“Given 10 years and many iterations that approach has allowed AWS to rapidly expand into the world’s most comprehensive widely adopted cloud service,” Bezos noted. “As with our retail business, AWS is made up of many small teams with single-threaded owners, enabling rapid innovation. The team rolls out new functionality almost daily across 70 services and that new functionality just ‘shows up’ for customers – there’s no upgrading.”
Bezos pointed to the relationship between AWS and Netflix as indicative of the growing importance of cloud computing.
“About seven years ago,” Bezos wrote, “Netflix announced that they were going to move all their applications to the cloud. Netflix chose AWS because it provided them with the greatest scale and the broadest set of services and features. Netflix recently completed their cloud migration, and stories like theirs are becoming increasingly common as companies like Infor, Intuit and Time Inc., have made plans to move all of their applications to AWS.”
As for future plans, Bezos said “the service is only going to get better from here. As the team continues their rapid pace of innovation, we’ll offer more and more capabilities to let builders build unfettered, it will get easier and easier to collect, store and analyze data, we’ll continue to add more geographic locations, and we’ll continue to see growth in mobile and “connected” device applications. Over time, it’s likely that most companies will choose not to run their own data centers, opting for the cloud instead.”
