AWS CEO Andy Jassy talks about competition

Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy doesn’t talk much about the competition, but he made rare comments about that competition during a recorded chat with a college professor.

On IBM and Oracle:

“I think there’s a second category of large technology companies that just took an ungodly long time to get there. These are companies like Oracle and IBM, some of those folks. I think for them the model that we were pursuing, in the cloud, was so disruptive to their core businesses. The margin structures are radically different. The pricing structures are dramatically different. The delivery model is radically different. The way you take care of customers is radically different. So different that I think you have that dilemma at a lot of large companies: do you really want to try and accelerate the cannibalization of an existing … I think that they fought as long and hard as they could. They pooh-poohed it and they said, first no one will use it, then maybe only startups will use it, and they won’t use it for anything real, then enterprises will never use it, then enterprises will never use it for anything mission-critical. Companies and developers voted with their workloads, and so now they’re in this spot of trying to spin something up. It’s six, seven years late.”

Photo: Jaromír Kavan