Amazon Proves Dominance of Cloud Business, Again

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 30, 9:32PM EST · Published Apr 26, 6:20AM EDT

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Amazon Proves Dominance of Cloud Business, Again — © David Ryder / Getty Images

Many of the world’s largest tech companies have rushed into the cloud computing business as more and more governments and corporations move to store their data and applications with outside vendors. The cloud computing business has become the primary chance for growth, on the top and bottom line, for the firms competing in the segment. Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) has been at the top of the market share list since the cloud became big business. Its new earnings show that is still the case. And, its massive cloud business is still growing.

Amazon posted total revenue of $59.7 billion for the quarter that ended March 31, compared to $51 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Net income was $3.6 billion, up from $1.6 billion.

In its cloud business, known as Amazon Web Services, revenue rose to $7.7 billion from $5.4 billion. Operating income was $2.2 billion up from $1.4 billion. AWS, based on its current growth rate, is on a path to post revenue of well over $25 billion, and perhaps higher.

Amazon pointed to the division’s expansion progress:

AWS continued to expand its infrastructure to best serve customers, launching the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region, and announcing plans for the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region. AWS now provides 64 Availability Zones across 21 infrastructure regions globally, with announced plans for another 12 Availability Zones and four regions in Bahrain, Indonesia, Italy, and South Africa.

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And new efficiency in its systems:

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon EFS Infrequent Access (IA), a new storage class for Amazon EFS that is designed for files accessed less frequently, enabling customers to reduce storage costs by up to 85% compared to the Amazon EFS Standard storage class. With EFS IA, Amazon EFS customers simply enable Lifecycle Management, and any file not accessed after 30 days gets automatically moved to the EFS IA storage class.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once said AWS eventually would be bigger than the company’s e-commerce services. At the current rate, he could be right in three to five years.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.