A Dispatch from Cloud City – State of the Union 2016 – Platformonomics

Excerpt from an insightful and entertaining cloud market dynamics perspective by Charles Fitzgerald

"I contend there were two critical inflection points for cloud this past year:

Customers tipped, specifically the enterprises who spend vast sums on IT. Most CIOs have shifted from resistance or tire kicking to active embrace, and are doing so increasingly for business reasons as opposed to technical. Sticking your head in the sand is no longer a viable option. The objections have been knocked down one after another. Security turned out to be powerful a reason to go to the cloud, not shun it. The enterprise tipping point is critical because it dramatically expands the size of the cloud opportunity. We can now realistically talk about a trillion dollars of existing IT spend in play, aka the “cloud jackpot”.

Amazon’s transparency, both financial and cultural. The breaking out of AWS financials in April forever banished the platitudes “your margin is my opportunity” and “the race to the bottom”. AWS proved to be a very large, very profitable and very rapidly growing business. Even bulls were surprised to learn not only that the business is profitable, but much more profitable than anyone imagined. The initial operating margins for AWS were almost identical to those of financial engineering savant IBM. Amazon also had some unsolicited transparency inflicted upon it by the New York Times, who took a deep look at the company’s culture."

A Dispatch from Cloud City – State of the Union 2016 – Platformonomics