Let’s take a closer look at Amazon’s lesser-known gold mine

Amazon may be known as an e-commerce giant, and it does get the vast majority of its revenue from e-commerce, but the company does owe much of its success to Amazon Web Services. Assuming that growth continues as it did last year, Amazon’s cloud business may very well exceed IBM’s own offering in terms of revenue before the year is over, and will account for around 7% of the companies overall sales. That’s impressive to say the least. 

If it keeps growing at the rate it has from this time last year, Amazon Web Services will finish 2015 with a business approaching $7 billion in revenue. And if it hits the $102 billion in overall revenue that analysts expect, that will make AWS account for about 7 percent of sales overall. By revenue it is the biggest cloud, though it’s a matter of ensuring you’re comparing directly to the kind of cloud that Amazon runs. More than a million customers fire up machines in Amazon’s data centers every day, replacing servers they might otherwise have to buy. Some are used for basic data storage, some are used for more complex applications. When cloud business analysts start drawing lines around different companies that run cloud operations, they tend to classify AWS as infrastructure-as-a-service.