How serious is AWS’ enterprise hurdle?
Last March, the Wall Street Journal had reported Amazon and Microsoft were tightening their grip upon the enterprise tech market.
The report cited that over half of top products and services in intended IT spending, were either Microsoft or Amazon. These were the findings of market research firm ETR that surveyed of 800 CIOs and other high-level corporate decision makers.
WSJ’s report further said, “The products and services include basic IT needs, such as cloud infrastructure and software, data analytics, robotic process automation, artificial intelligence and other emerging digital tools.”
Fast forward to November, and IT Pro UK fine tunes further what the enterprise tech market actually really, really wants, and whom between Microsoft and Amazon, is the preferred vendor.
It confirms what many have been observing and speculating over the past few year. Microsoft has finally overtaken Amazon, despite the latter’s first mover advantage in the cloud computing market.
The enterprise hurdle
Here’s what IT Pro has to say: “By cementing its reputation as the biggest force in the cloud industry, (Amazon Web Services or AWS) has attracted a number of high-profile customers, but it has struggled to make a major splash within large, established enterprises.
You know who hasn’t, though?”
You guessed right, if you thought Microsoft.
Besides having an established footprint in a large number of enterprises, the article observed that Microsoft has concentrated firmly on the enterprise market, even releasing a number of business-friendly features like its Azure Arc platform.
It does not come as a surprise if more than a few CIOs are planning to make Azure a key part of their roadmap, as they mull upon going to the cloud, for the main reason that, “…it works well with all of our existing systems.”
“If your on-prem servers are primarily running workloads like Active Directory, SQL Server and Exchange Server instances, opting for Microsoft’s cloud platform is sort of a no-brainer. Add in the fact that most large businesses are likely to be using Microsoft’s Office and Windows software (and even potentially Windows Server) and the logic becomes apparent,” the IT Pro team observed.
Looks like Satya Nadella’s pivot towards a cloud subscription model, as well as being open source friendly, was quite timely.
Businesses wanting to avoid vendor lock-in, may not be enough to keep Amazon ahead of Microsoft.
Amazon may play the vendor lock-in strategy themselves, if they aren’t already.
An Amazon ban?
Are Amazon partners banned from even mentioning “multi-cloud”?
Besides being at the top among enterprise CIOs’ minds, Microsoft is happy to meet customer requirements to support multi-cloud deployments.
However this is something that IT Pro theorises Amazon will not risk, as giving customers option increases the chance of themselves being ditched.
We welcome readers to shed some light upon what is really happening in the local cloud ecosystem.