Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy believes the cloud computing market is open to a number of other successful players, but he is confident AWS will continue to be a market leader in the space.
"I don't think there is only going to be one successful player in this space, not just one player that captures trillions of dollars - I think there will be several successful players. I don't think there will be 30, but I think there will be a small handful," he told journalists at a press briefing at the AWS re:Invent Conference in Las Vegas.
"But we are optimistic that we will continue to be a significant and strong leader, and we are really pleased with where we are and we are very optimistic that we will continue to be a leader moving forward," he adds.
For 10 years, AWS has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform and Jassy says it continues to have a significant market segment leadership position, with Gartner estimating AWS is several times the aggregate size of the next 14 providers combined.
"If you believe like we do, that in the fullness of time, that relatively few companies will still own their own data centres, and those that do will have a very small footprint, it means that all of that computing is moving to the cloud.
"So if you think about the market segments that an offering like AWS addresses and it's trillions of dollars globally ? there are going to be multiple players, and there will be several players in multiple geographies that will be successful. Some will be more successful in some geographies than in the rest of the world and we will watch how that plays out over time," Jassy says.
Looking forward
Jassy told delegates at the re:Invent Conference that he believes the next 10 years at AWS will see even more innovation than the first 10, which he called "an explosion of innovation" not only by the company but also by its partners.
"If you think about the first 10 years, how much time and energy was wasted by people wondering if anybody was going to use the cloud. We spent a lot of time collectively wrestling with that question.
"Today, we don't have any 'if' conversations; every conversation is a 'when or how' conversation. A whole generation of builders is going to emerge that don't waste any energy on [worrying about cloud adoption]. They will spend all of their time using the cloud and its massive capabilities to build new businesses that we never even imagined before ? and more importantly to take existing businesses and positively change the customer experience.
"This is the world I want to live in and this is the world that I think is very exciting," he adds.
He remains optimistic about AWS' future in years to come and its ability to deliver strong revenue growth for the Amazon group.
"We have also said for several years now that we believe that AWS has the potential, in the fullness of time, to be the largest business at Amazon ? and that is saying a lot because our consumer business is a $100 billion-plus business at this point and is still growing. So it will take several years for that to happen, if it does happen down the road, but the market segment size of the spaces that we are addressing is very large and very high potential ? so we are optimistic that can happen," he concludes.
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