Amazon Web Services officials touted their growing array of services and expanding customer base at an Amazon Summit 2013 in San Francisco Tuesday. Senior VP Andy Jassy sounded a familiar refrain: AWS has a high volume, low price mentality that leads to repeated service pricing reductions.
And Amazon unveiled a new AWS Global Certification program, similar to VMware, Microsoft and Novell certified training programs before it. AWS training for technical staff concludes with an independently verified exam. In AWS’ case, there will be three certifications: a Solutions Architect, SysOps Administrator and Developer. Test center sponsor Kryterion will act as the verifier; it has testing centers in 100 countries.
But neither Jassy nor other Amazon officials addressed parent company Amazon.com’s core financial position and whether it will be able to indefinitely sustain its breakneck pace of innovation and price cutting. It has long been a mystery to what extent AWS is an independent business unit of Amazon.com and whether it relies on cash flow from the parent company. The revenues it generates appear in the “other” column of Amazon.com’s fiscal reporting.
Amazon Web Services generated $ 2.1 billion in revenues in 2012, according to an estimate by Ben Schacter, the Macquarie Capital analyst who is thought to have one of the strongest information pipelines into AWS. Those revenues will grow to $ 3.8 billion in 2013 and $ 6.2 billion in 2014, he has said in his reports on Amazon.