AWS CEO: Luck gave Amazon’s cloud-computing unit a boost

Andy Jassy, chief of Amazon Web Services, said that luck plays a role in the tremendous growth of AWS - but the first decisions that have paved the way for the domination of the cloud computing company.

The leader of Amazon Web Services (AWS) said that its dominance in the cloud comes partly from luck - but also from the first decisions that have proven essential for the establishment of a revolutionary organization.

"There's always a fair amount, it's an opportunity," Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, said during a speech at the University of Washington's Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "You have to have a good time and some things to break."

Jassy's comments come as AWS - Amazon's cloud computing unit, which leases energy and storage businesses, governments and computer entrepreneurs - has become an activity at $ 14 billion a year, Driven by the recent years by the massive migration of data from private companies to shared data centers. This is an old company for a decade Amazon has launched - and a very profitable business.

In 2016, $ 3.1 billion was reported in operating revenues, or 32% more than the North American unit of the Amazon, the most important activity of the company in terms of billing. It is also by far the largest provider of cloud computing.

AWS sales growth rate, however, fell to 47 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016 from 69 percent in the period of last year, amid stiff competition from Microsoft, Google and other high-tech companies .

Among the first decisions of the foundation of the AWS fortune was the creation of "building blocks" primitive basic functions that customers could use and combine according to their needs, Jassy said.

Another key: AWS sells its services to the card and charge based on use, as a public service. It was a big deviation from the costly and multi-year contracts that technology providers usually need. "People gave us a lot of credit from the start to the pricing model," Jassy said.

The next key decision was the first AWS market has gone after.

AWS leaders "very early led software developers and start-ups," even though they knew companies and governments to end up being the main customers, according Jassy.

"This turned out to be a very underserved segment," Jassy said. Many of these developers have only spent a few dollars on AWS services, but "we do not care about that," the executive said. "Some of these will be the next big business in the next five to 10 years."

It was also necessary to continue innovating quickly, to adapt to the needs of growth. "Be quick and fast and be poor in functionality to start only works if you can deliver, and iterate quickly," Jassy said.

Now the scope and sophistication of AWS offers include artificial intelligence, voice data, databases and automated learning tools, some of which rely on innovations Amazon has deployed Alexa PDA and its execution centers.

As for growing competition, Jassy said that the IT services market is so large that there is no room for a number of successful cloud providers. However, "I do not think there will be 30 due to the scale that really matters."