Although it has been a couple of months since the hysteria of re:Invent, there has been a great deal of consternation by hoards of people in enterprise IT over the emergence of Amazon AWS. The fear is that AWS and it’s main competitors will substantially disrupt the market for enterprise infrastructure and create the next big oligopoly or even monopoly in the technology industry: The Cloud. In this weekend’s Barrons, we find Tiernan Ray making the near term case for mediocrity, if not eventual doom for the big enterprise technology players (Note: subscription may be required):
The key concern among investors – both venture and public market – and users everywhere really centers around the notion of AWS being a “dominant exchange”. This is what happens when the game becomes one where the entire solution set is owned by a single player, scale matters most, and customers can no longer see an incentive to go anywhere else for their needs.