Many people consider the cloud computing market to still be in the relatively early stages of market maturation. So then, what will the big clouds of today look like in the future?
Investment firm Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. recently analyzed 2,373 recent Amazon Web Services job postings in an attempt to glean into the crystal ball of AWS’s future.
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AWS’s most popular hiring category is in databases and data analysis. AWS wants to make its cloud be the best place for hosting all types of business data, and make it easy to manage, analyze and get quick, actionable insights from. DB found 84 jobs having to deal with databases.
Following data job openings, AWS is also hiring heavily in its core platforms such as its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual machine infrastructure and networking (75 job postings), storage (71) and security (48).
Deusche Bank describes the trend:
AWS still derives the majority of its $8+ billion of revenues from core infrastructure services, the most popular being Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for server capacity and Simple Storage Service (S3) for storage capacity. As AWS moves upstream into (presumably higher-margin) premium services, collecting and analyzing enterprise data (services that are storage and compute-intensive) seems like a natural extension. To the extent that AWS is trying to move to where the puck is going, this may support a view (shared by many others, including the CEOs of Oracle and Tableau to name just two) that over the next 10 years a very large portion of enterprise operational and unstructured data may be stored and analyzed in hyper-scale public cloud data centers.
As AWS ratchets up its cloud as a platform for hosting data, and customers increasingly warm to that idea, which competing vendors does this move to the cloud pose the biggest threat to?
Deusche Bank analysts believe Oracle could have the most to lose. AWS is investing heavily in relational databases – Oracle’s bread and butter. AWS’s Relational Database Service (RDS) already surpasses any Oracle cloud DB offerings, Deusche Bank analysts believe. Teradata could be at risk as AWS’s RedShift data warehouse attracts more attention too, DB says. AWS already has revenues of more than $1 billion for data-related products. DB says a company like Splunk, which provides operations data analysis could be at risk too as AWS improves its CloudWatch feature. And AWS’s move into security could threaten Microsoft’s Active Directory product line.