Amazon Web Services has been around since 2006, and in the nine years since then, the company had been coy about the cloud business' financial data. But on Thursday, Amazon finally announced AWS sales and revenue figures, astounding investors and analysts and causing a lot of buzz in the intersecting worlds of tech and business.
In the first quarter of 2015, AWS generated $ 1.57 billion in revenue, or 49 percent more than the year-ago first quarter. Its operating income of $ 265 million was a solid $ 20 million more than Q1 2014's $ 245 million figure. And it gets better – Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement that the company's cloud division is a "$ 5 billion business and still growing fast," and one that is, in fact, "accelerating. Late last year, Amazon confirmed that AWS has more than one million customers in the enterprise space and was growing by about 40 percent year-over-year. Still, the company didn't provide any hard numbers for AWS until Thursday, playing its proverbial cards close to its chest.
While AWS' success story is one to behold, Amazon is now facing competition in the cloud services space from other big names in tech, such as Google Microsoft, and IBM. For example, Microsoft's commercial cloud business enjoyed a huge 106 percent improvement year-over-year in its fiscal third quarter, with Azure and other services responsible of $ 6.3 billion in revenue per year. However, Amazon does have a few other things going for it in the cloud space, as it had edged IBM in 2013 for a deal with the CIA itself. And since Google began offering lower pricing than Amazon on certain services , that also means rival companies are now applying pressure on AWS in terms of pricing.
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