How Amazon stole Motorola from Microsoft - Business Insider
"Motorola Solutions ... employs around 14,000 and generated $5.8 billion in revenue over the last four quarters... As part of its move and cost cutting, Motorola is unplugging its data centers and going all-in in the cloud.
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Within 6 to 7 months ... moved more than 200,000 (!?) servers, and 150 applications, and had more than $2 million in computer yearly spend moved over to AWS.
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Azure had a crucial government security certification known as Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) and Amazon didn't... In a few months AWS were certified... so Motorola opted for AWS.
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There is one big downside to choosing Amazon: it's harder to keep track of costs.... AWS pricing model is very complicated, that is a drawback... Motorola hired a cloud consultant, 2nd Watch, to help it move to AWS, size everything properly, train the IT staff and set up its own internal systems for watching usage
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Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions."
Apparently AWS has very efficient core business (VM hosting), and many other services are added by ecosystem of third party partners, in similar way Microsoft does in enterprise. Even some other cloud providers are moving to focus on services. Is it "winner(s) take all" market?
"Amazon Web Services (AWS) pricing on basic services declined 10% to 20% annually since 2014
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So price cuts are stabilizing while the big three cloud vendors keep reducing costs from their infrastructure. That means that profit margins for the cloud providers should improve, which is good news for investors. And, the report’s authors conclude that the total market for public cloud is so huge and that cloud adoption rates are still so low, that there is room for all of the big cloud providers to grow—and profit—going forward."
