Amazon Web Services Inc (AWS), the world's largest cloud service provider, is betting on its new wave of cloud services to capitalise on the emerging market for the Internet of Things, big data analytics and artificial intelligence.
The services are expected to cement AWS's market leadership and cash in on a lucrative market worth trillions of US dollars a year.
According to a report by IT research firm Gartner, AWS leads in cloud infrastructure as a service. The company is now the fastest-growing enterprise IT company in the world.
Andy Jassy, chief executive of AWS, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, said cloud computing technology is moving towards more powerful IT infrastructure next year to supercharge companies' business potential, thanks to more advanced capacity and new service capabilities.
Cloud services began to be implemented globally in 2014 as more digitally advanced companies adopted cloud by moving a significant portion of their mission-critical IT infrastructure there, Mr Jassy said at last week's AWS Re:invent conference in Las Vegas attended by 32,000 people.
AWS's cloud business has experienced growth since it began in 2006.
In the first nine months of 2016, AWS reported revenue of US$13 billion. In the third quarter, the company saw a 55% year-on-year increase in revenue.
AWS has 2 million cloud customers ranging from startup companies to government agencies.
"We believe companies outside the US will increasingly adopt cloud services to increase their business potential and benefits," Mr Jassy said.
He said companies are reducing the overall capacity of their data centres and moving their computing workloads to cloud service providers.
The global cloud computing service market is worth trillions of US dollars per year and such a large market is difficult for a single player to dominate, said Mr Jassy.
Cloud-based service requires huge investment and there is intense competition for customers. This combination will lead to consolidation, he said.
Mr Jassy said AWS's revenue will eventually contribute at least an equal portion to, and perhaps larger revenue than the parent firm's online retail business. AWS contributed 10% of the total in the third quarter this year.
AWS recently unveiled its new artificial intelligence services for cloud users, featuring more advanced AI capabilities to make the technology available to AWS developers so they can build smart applications using their data.
The company also introduced new computer services and capabilities to support a wide range of workloads, including high-performance databases, genome analysis and big data analytics.
AWS also announced a new service called Snowmobile, which is a 21st century version of data transport, with more storage and data networking.
With the new Snowmobile service, AWS said a person could ship one exabyte (an exabyte is 1,000 petabytes) of data to AWS in about six months -- a feat that would take 26 years over a 10Gbps dedicated connection.
The Snowmobile truck's network cable is capable of transporting up to one terabyte per second over multiple 40 Gbps connections into the shipping container's capacious hold.
AWS offers 70 featured services for computing, storage, databases, analytics, mobile, the Internet of Things and enterprise applications.
The company provides data centre services in 14 geographic regions now and expects the figure to increase to 18 regions by 2017.
