{"id":643321,"date":"2013-02-21T09:55:05","date_gmt":"2013-02-21T14:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=612328"},"modified":"2013-02-21T09:55:05","modified_gmt":"2013-02-21T14:55:05","slug":"amazon-gets-more-serious-about-the-enterprise-no-kidding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/643321","title":{"rendered":"Amazon gets (more) serious about the enterprise. No kidding"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you still don\u2019t think Amazon is serious about winning enterprise accounts for Amazon Web Services, you need to get over it. The public cloud leader wants to be the preferred cloud for even the largest and most security-obsessed companies. In fact, attracting enterprise users \u2014 and reassuring C-level execs about the safety and reliability of Amazon\u2019s cloud \u2014 was a primary rationale for last November\u2019s inaugural AWS: Reinvent.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Amazon<\/a>But until recently, the hiring spree underlying this effort \u2014 Amazon has been seeking (and in some cases poaching) high-level sales engineers from enterprise IT companies like Sungard, HP, Oracle and EMC for a year or so \u2014 was a bit under the radar, as GigaOM reported <\/a>in November.<\/p>\n

Can you sell to a CIO? AWS wants you<\/h2>\n

What\u2019s new, as Business Insider <\/a><\/em>reported this week, is that it\u2019s now out in the open; Amazon has posted lots of listings for enterprise-focused sales reps and sales managers. BI<\/em> claimed 75 \u2014 I didn\u2019t count them all, but the list is pretty rich. As of Thursday morning, AWS was seeking enterprise sales managers for New York, Dallas, Herndon, Virg., San Francisco, Irvine, Calif., and Seattle, among other areas. \u00a0As one listing puts it:<\/p>\n

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\u201cAs an Enterprise Sales leader you will have the exciting opportunity to help drive the growth and shape the future of an emerging technology. Your responsibilities will include driving revenue, adoption, and market penetration in enterprise accounts within the local geography. Your responsibilities will include building and managing a highly talented sales team focused on driving revenue, adoption, and market penetration in the Enterprise market. The ideal candidate will possess a technology sales management background that enables them to lead a team of senior enterprise sale representatives with engagements at the CXO level.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Brian McCallian, founder and CEO of New York-based Bronze Drum Consulting<\/a>, sees a tangible change in his AWS interactions of late. \u201cWhat I see as a difference from 2012 is also the kinds of people AWS is hiring \u2026 the new Enterprise Account Manager and AWS Solution Architect I met with this week and last are more focused on eliminating organizational barriers that limit consumption of Cloud Services. And the focus area seems to be enabling Direct Connect for enterprise to simplify how enterprise connects to AWS.\u201d<\/p>\n

Startups and enterprises: two different animals<\/h2>\n

The fact that an established enterprise is, by definition, not a startup, \u00a0illustrates Amazon\u2019s conundrum. Selling services to developers in startups is one thing and AWS was built on that business. But selling into an established enterprise with existing IT and with an internal bureaucracy is a whole other matter.<\/p>\n

For all of AWS\u2019s momentum \u2014 it claims enterprise accounts including Nasdaq and systems integration partners<\/a> like \u00a0Accenture, Deloitte and Capgemini \u2014 some still doubt that big companies will trust mission critical loads to what they see as shared, and therefore insecure, infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Amazon has worked to ease these concerns with new enterprise support options; with\u00a0Virtual Private Cloud<\/a>, which cordons off a section of Amazon\u2019s cloud for a given company\u2019s use; and management tools like Trusted Advisor<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And then there are such enterprise-y services as RedShift<\/a>\u00a0data warehousing, the Data Pipeline<\/a>\u00a0data consolidation service, and any number of new big data and other services<\/a>\u00a0promised by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at Structure: Europe last year. The Register<\/em> <\/a>picked up on yet another job listing<\/a> indicating more big data goodies to come from AWS. Perhaps some sort of big data managed service similar to DynamoDB would be in order.<\/p>\n

Christopher Smith, cloud analyst at Cloud Technology Partners<\/a>, a Boston-based systems integrator, says corporate customers are warming up to AWS and are getting more sophisticated about the notion of putting IT loads outside the firewall. \u201c\u201dObviously [AWS is] the elephant in public cloud space. Clients are hesitant because of associated compliance and governance risk, but we\u2019re seeing more openness due to key enabling technologies, while at the same time a cultural shift and greater understanding that just because you can see and touch the box, doesn\u2019t mean its secure.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that new-found understanding comes as more cloud providers enter the scene.\u00a0Going forward, Amazon will face more enterprise-focused competition for those business accounts. \u00a0EMC chief strategist Paul Maritz will doubtless speak about Pivotal Labs\u2019 <\/a>take on cloud infrastructure at GigaOM\u2019s upcoming Structure:Data conference <\/a>in New York, March 20-21. \u00a0And, as Rackspace, HP and Red Hat gear up their OpenStack-based clouds \u2014 IBM will likely say more about its OpenStack plans at the upcoming OpenStack Summit \u2014 one thing is for sure: Amazon may be the biggest cloud seeking enterprise customers, but it won\u2019t be alone. And all of those rivals sport enterprise relationships that Amazon still craves.<\/p>\n

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