Skip to main content

Amazon's Cloud Price Reduction, A Desire To Compete Hard And Move Up The Value Chain

Recently Google slashed price for their cloud offering. Amazon, as expected, also announced their 42nd price reduction on their cloud offerings since its inception. Today, Microsoft also announced price reduction for their Azure offerings.

Unlike many other people I don't necessarily see the price reduction by Amazon as waging a price war against the competition.

Infrastructure as true commodity: IaaS is a very well understood category and Amazon, as a vendor, has strong desires to move up in the value chain. This can only happen if storage and computing become true commodity and customers value vendors based on what they can do on top of this commodity storage and computing. They become means to an end and not an end itself.

Amazon is introducing many PaaS like services on top of EC2. For example, RedShift is the fastest growing service on EC2. These services create stickiness for customers to come back and try out and perhaps buy other services. These services also create a bigger demand for the underlying cloud platform. Retaining existing customers and acquiring new customers with as little barrier as possible are key components of this strategy.

Reducing hardware cost: The hardware cost associated with computing and storage have gradually gone down. Speaking purely from financial perspective existing assets depreciate before they are taken out from service. Also, new hardware is going be cheaper than the old hardware (at the original cost). If you do pass on the cost advantage to your customers it should help you reduce price and compete at the same or a little less margin. However, hardware cost is a fraction of overall operations cost. In the short term, Amazon being a growth company will actually spend a lot more on CapEx and not just OpEx to invest and secure the future.

Economies of scale: The cost to serve two computing units is not the sum of cost to serve two one computing units. There are many economies of scales in play such as increasing data-center utilization, investment in automation, and better instance management software. Confidence in predicting minimum base volume and reducing fluctuations also gives Amazon better predictability to manage elasticity. As the overall volume goes up the elasticity or the fluctuations as percentage of overall volume go down. On top of that offerings such as Reserved Instances also are a good predictor of future demand. Amazon views Reserved Instances as how banks view CDs but many customers are looking for a "re-finance" feature for these Reserved Instances when price drops. These economic and pricing implications are great to watch.

To offer competitive pricing to win against  incumbents and make it almost impossible for new entrants to compete on the same terms is absolutely important but it would be foolish to assume it is the sole intent behind the price reduction.

Photo courtesy: Flickr
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Emergent Cloud Computing Business Models

The last year I wrote quite a few posts on the business models around SaaS and cloud computing including SaaS 2.0 , disruptive early stage cloud computing start-ups , and branding on the cloud . This year people have started asking me – well, we have seen PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS but what do you think are some of the emergent cloud computing business models that are likely to go mainstream in coming years. I spent some time thinking about it and here they are: Computing arbitrage: I have seen quite a few impressive business models around broadband bandwidth arbitrage where companies such as broadband.com buys bandwidth at Costco-style wholesale rate and resells it to the companies to meet their specific needs. PeekFon solved the problem of expensive roaming for the consumers in Eurpoe by buying data bandwidth in bulk and slice-it-and-dice-it to sell it to the customers. They could negotiate with the operators to buy data bandwidth in bulk because they made a conscious decision not to st...
Post a Comment
Read more

Focus On Your Customers And Not Competitors

A lorry is a symbol of Indian logistics and the person who is posing against it is about to rethink infrastructure and logistics in India. Jeff Bezos is enjoying his trip to India charting Amazon’s growth plan where competitors like Flipkart have been aggressively growing and have satisfied customer base. This is not the first time Bezos has been to India and he seems to understand Indian market far better than many CEOs of American companies. His interview with a leading Indian publication didn’t get much attention in the US where he discusses Amazon’s growth strategy in India. When asked whether he is in panic mode: For 19 years we have succeeded by staying heads down, focused on our customers. For better or for worse, we spend very little time looking at our competitors. It is better to stay focused on customers as they are the ones paying for your services. Competitors are never going to give you any money. I always believe in focusing on customers, especially on their latent unme...
Post a Comment
Read more

Purple Squirrels

It is fashionable to talk about talent shortage in the silicon valley. People whine about how hard it is to find and hire the "right" candidates. What no one wants to talk about is how the hiring process is completely broken. I need to fill headcount: This is a line that you hear a lot at large companies. Managers want to hire just because they are entitled to hire with a "hire or lose headcount" clause. Managers spend more time worrying about losing headcount and less time finding the right people the right way. Chasing a mythical candidate: Managers like to chase purple squirrels . They have outrageous expectations and are far removed from reality of talent market. Managers are also unclear on exactly what kind of people they are looking to hire. Bizarre interview practices: "How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?" or "can you write code with right hand while drawing a tree with left hand?" We all have our favorite bizarre interview st...
Post a Comment
Read more