According to an Amazon Web Services blog post Thursday:

“If you are signed up for the Business or Enterprise level of AWS Support, you can use this API to create new support cases, check on the status of open cases, and resolve cases. You can also add and retrieve information for existing cases. The AWS Support API also gives you access to best practices recommendations generated by the AWS Trusted Advisor. You can get the list of checks, access the latest results, and re-run the checks to refresh the results. This has been a much requested feature for customers who wish to integrate support case management into their in-house ticketing systems, and with the release of Support APIs we have delivered on this request.”

AWS support customers can also access their Trusted Advisor recommendations via this API. Trusted Advisor is a monitoring tool that gives customers tips about how to most efficiently deploy their AWS resources.

Enhancing customer support will be key to AWS in the future. Startups and a growing number of bigger, older companies use AWS for test and dev. But when it comes to big production deployments, the knock on Amazon’s public cloud infrastructure is that, when it comes to deploying big, important applications, it may not always be the most trusted — or even the least expensive — venue. That’s why Amazon is doing its best — with its AWS: Reinvent show and new tools — to show AWS as not just cost-efficient, but more importantly a flexible and reliable site for production work loads.

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Here’s how AWS lists the three broad job descriptions covered by the certs:

• Solutions Architect: a technical individual who is skilled at designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform. A Solution Architect generally has knowledge across a broad array of disciplines, including distributed application architecture, networking, infrastructure, and security.
• SysOps Administrator: a technical individual who is responsible for the operational health of an application on the AWS cloud. A SysOps Administrator has in-depth knowledge of the application or service they operate, including how the application is constructed, deployed, and automated, as well as the controls and monitoring points available.
• Developer: a technical individual who has designed and built an AWS-based application. A Developer has involvement with or responsibility for operating the application on the AWS platform.

Older tech companies — Microsoft, IBM, VMware, Cisco Systems — have long relied on certifications as a way for people — either those inside IT shops or at third-party VARs and integrators (and those seeking jobs in either camp) — to show that they have what it takes to succeed working with specific technologies. As with those programs, AWS candidates must pass an exam to get their credentials. Testing will be administered by Kryterion.

Some of the more valuable certs in recent years include the VMware Certified Professional (VCP), Cisco Certified International Expert (CCIE) and Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP). And Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), a more vendor-agnostic certification, is also a top draw for potential hiring companies.

In another nod to the IT concerns of enterprise accounts, AWS also launched a security blog this week. The news comes just after Microsoft opened up Infrastructure-as-a-Service capabilities in Azure that are more directly competitive with AWS and Google gears up for the public release of Google Compute Engine, which I expect will happen at Google I/O in May. While AWS dominates public cloud infrastructure by virtue of its head start, many enterprise customers in particular will likely test out these rivals as well — nobody wants cloud lock-in.

Still, given the traction AWS has among startups and increasingly at bigger businesses, I’d expect to see these certifications cropping up in lots of job postings going forward.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Mega Pixel

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The streaming video company, famous for its use of cloud services, is putting up $100,000 to urge developers to come up with new features or “improve usability, quality, reliability and security of computing resources delivered as a service over the internet.” The company’s not new to contests: In 2006 it launched The Netflix Prize for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to aid in personalized film ratings. That prize was discontinued a few years later.

As for the new challenge, Netflix chief product officer Neil Hunt said in a statement:

“Cloud computing has become a hot topic recently, but the technology is still just emerging … No doubt many of the key ideas that will take it to the next level have yet to be conceived, explored, and developed. The Netflix Cloud Prize is designed to attract and focus the attention of the most innovative minds to create the advances that will take cloud to the next level.”

Prizes will be offered in 10 categories and winners will be judged by a panel including Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon; Martin Fowler, chief scientist of Thoughtworks; Simon Wardley, cloud strategist; Joe Weinman, author and Telx SVP; Aino Corry, developer training expert at University of Aarhus; and Yury Israilevsky, VP of Netflix Cloud.

Deadline for entry is September 15, 2013 with winners to be announced at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Re:Invent conference in November. There’s more information on the prize at Github.

AWS already hosts a startup challenge, but contests like this might bring in some fresh thinking from new and exciting sources.  I look forward to seeing what comes of this contest.

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But until recently, the hiring spree underlying this effort — 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 — was a bit under the radar, as GigaOM reported in November.

Can you sell to a CIO? AWS wants you

What’s new, as Business Insider reported this week, is that it’s now out in the open; Amazon has posted lots of listings for enterprise-focused sales reps and sales managers. BI claimed 75 — I didn’t 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.  As one listing puts it:

“As 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.”

Brian McCallion, founder and CEO of New York-based Bronze Drum Consulting, sees a tangible change in his AWS interactions of late. “What I see as a difference from 2012 is also the kinds of people AWS is hiring … 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.”

Startups and enterprises: two different animals

The fact that an established enterprise is, by definition, not a startup,  illustrates Amazon’s 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.

For all of AWS’s momentum — it claims enterprise accounts including Nasdaq and systems integration partners like  Accenture, Deloitte and Capgemini — some still doubt that big companies will trust mission critical loads to what they see as shared, and therefore insecure, infrastructure.

Amazon has worked to ease these concerns with new enterprise support options; with Virtual Private Cloud, which cordons off a section of Amazon’s cloud for a given company’s use; and management tools like Trusted Advisor.

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

Christopher Smith, cloud analyst at Cloud Technology Partners, 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. “”Obviously [AWS is] the elephant in public cloud space. Clients are hesitant because of associated compliance and governance risk, but we’re 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’t mean its secure.”

But that new-found understanding comes as more cloud providers enter the scene. Going forward, Amazon will face more enterprise-focused competition for those business accounts.  EMC chief strategist Paul Maritz will doubtless speak about Pivotal Labs’ take on cloud infrastructure at GigaOM’s upcoming Structure:Data conference in New York, March 20-21.  And, as Rackspace, HP and Red Hat gear up their OpenStack-based clouds — IBM will likely say more about its OpenStack plans at the upcoming OpenStack Summit — one thing is for sure: Amazon may be the biggest cloud seeking enterprise customers, but it won’t be alone. And all of those rivals sport enterprise relationships that Amazon still craves.

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Redshift, based on technology from ParAccel, claims to offer big-time data warehouse capability for a tenth of the price of legacy suppliers and, as of today, customers can start finding out for themselves if it lives up to the hype. If it does, it will uphold Amazon’s reputation for disrupting tech giants. Redshift availability was announced on the AWS blog.

One of the service’s key attractions, according to several attendees at last November’s AWS: Reinvent show where it was announced, was that Redshift will let customers keep on using their analytics tool of choice, be it MicroStrategy, Jaspersoft or Cognos.  Since training up people on new analytics is a big expense and time suck, that is important.

According to the blog:

“You can use the High Storage Extra Large (15 GiB of RAM, 4.4 ECU, and 2 TB of local attached    compressed user data) for $0.85 per hour or the High Storage Eight Extra Large (120 GiB of RAM, 35 ECU, and 16 TB of local attached user data) for $6.80 per hour. With either instance type, you pay an effective price of $3,723 per terabyte per year for storage and processing. One Year and Three Year Reserved Instances are also available, pushing the annual cost per terabyte down to $2,190 and $999, respectively.”

It’s clear that Amazon’s Redshift will compete not only with things like EMC Greenplum, IBM Netezza and HP Vertica, but also with BitYota and Treasure Data which also run on AWS infrastructure. And it will also spar with Paraccel’s own data warehouse. But Paraccel CEO Chuck Berger told InformationWeek that he expects Amazon’s version will whet the appetite of customers for Paraccel’s own on-premises implementation.

For more on Redshift check out AWS’ introductory video here:

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Robert Rizika, CEO of ProfitBricks, USA

Wanted: Startups to use our clouds

ProfitBricks USA is the latest to tout its ability to successfully woo startups — it claims 35 to 40 percent of 130 startups that have come aboard left AWS. And today it launched a nationwide program to convince more startups to “break up with Amazon on Valentine’s Day.” Qualified startups — those making less than $1 million in annual revenue — get a 20 percent discount on ProfitBricks IaaS services for a year. A limited version of the promotion rolled out in Boston five weeks ago.

CEO Robert Rizika, who explained ProfitBricks’ take on scale-up cloud computing, said the company offers a modern cloud for a modern era — one with a graphical dashboard to make it easier for mere mortals to deploy infrastructure with drag-and-drop ease. And it offers resources by the minute, not by the hour, which has been the AWS model. ProfitBricks pricing is here.

Some background; Since AWS launched in 2006, startups have flocked to its inexpensive compute and storage infrastructure. In essence, AWS decimated barriers to entry for dot.com boom startups. Until AWS showed up, those fledgling companies  pretty much had to turn a huge chunk of their VC money over to Oracle for database licenses and Sun Microsystems for hardware. Amazon was the only game in town when it came to reliable infrastructure for rent cheap.

Changing times mean changing clouds?

But things have changed. For one thing, a bunch of other very capable, albeit smaller, IaaS players have arrived. They may not be as huge as Amazon, but they’re plenty big for most purposes.

And, while startups were quite happy to rely on low-level Amazon services, many are less wild about moving up to higher-level and more complex AWS offerings like Simple Workflow Services, which make it difficult for them to back out of Amazon if they want to change cloud providers. Some see Amazon’s ever expanding list of services as competitive to their own plans. Many Amazon partners/customers, whether it’s due to fear of lock-in or fear of competition with their primary cloud provider, now run on multiple clouds.

They also find it hard to track the constant  pricing changes and tweaks that get posted to the AWS blog seemingly every other day.  A whole flock of startups has grown up around explaining AWS usage and pricing to AWS customers. So much for transparency. Dissidents also complain that to get the best AWS price, they have to lock into 1- or 3-year contracts for Reserved Instances.

“With us, you automatically get the lowest price, our menu is all graphical — you drag and drop — you don’t need to be an expert to order up your resources,” Rizika said.

Amazon’s enterprise shift

Others say Amazon’s growing focus on enterprise accounts,  a big theme at its inaugural AWS: Reinvent conference last November, is diluting its focus on startup customers.

Whatever the case, two things are certain: First, more credible IaaS players are coming online by the month. Second: Amazon has no intention of ceding ground to any of them. It’s gonna be an interesting year.

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Other OpenStack distributions have been available for a while but Morphlabs claims that its offering can provide a secure, multi-tenant infrastructure that these companies can pay for on a subscription basis, and that will provide them with the billing capabilities, credit card validation and processing that they need, said Yoram Heller, VP of business development for the Manhattan Beach, Calif. based company.

There is indeed a market for something like this. As Amazon.com’s AWS arm takes on more IT loads for customers of all sizes, it’s competing more with traditional IT outsourcing companies and hosting companies — that is just the sorts of service providers MorphLabs is targeting here. If you don’t believe that, check out the big enterprise push outlined at AWS: Reinvent, the company’s first trade show last November.

But it’s a tall order. Heller acknowledges that no service or cloud provider offers anywhere near the scale of AWS which some estimates runs more than 250,000 servers. “No one company can beat Amazon — not even Rackspace or Dell — but the perspective is that the whole industry can compete with Amazon and that’s good for us. There are 4,000 outsourced infrastructure providers in the world,” he said in an interview.

“Companies that are being disrupted by Amazon now could either download OpenStack and build a do-it-yourself cloud or they can get it from a vendor like Morph plus Dell, which provides an industrial-strength combination of hardware and software,” he added. That hardware is optimized to run Morphlabs cloud. Over time, that hardware will be built to Open Compute Foundation specifications, he said. Heller said the company will name two additional hardware partners soon.

The cost to service providers can work out to about $10 per virtual machine per month — with a hardware cost of $5 to $10 per month. With markup, they can compete with Amazon on price and — Heller insisted — get better performance.

Last March, Morphlabs and partner Dell announced mCloud Helix, an all SSD-based private cloud based on OpenStack, which it just updated. mCloud Osmium fills in the public cloud check box.

Right now customers can source their hardware from Dell — which builds optimized gear for the cloud — and software from Morph or buy everything from Dell.

Morphlabs is not alone in wanting to draw big service providers to its cloud. HP and others in the OpenStack cloud, and others outside it  are also targeting such customers.

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But now that AWS is seeking credibility as a for-real platform for enterprise applications — a recurring theme at November’s inaugural AWS: Reinvent conference — should it offer a similar challenge for enterprise?

The suggestion was posed on Twitter by IT specialist Jeff Schneider, CEO of MomentumSI. 

Shouldn't #AWS kill their startup challenge and launch an enterprise challenge (if they were serious)?—
Jeff Schneider (@jeffrschneider) January 16, 2013

Over the past year, AWS has launched a series of higher level services and partnerships with such enterprise software stalwarts as SAP. If you so desire, you could run your Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server and even SAP Hana database on AWS although for now, as Capgemini CTO Joe Coyle has pointed out, licensing policies by those enterprise players pretty much nukes their ability to compete there.

#AWS prize for nastiest ERP implementation on cloud—
Jeff Schneider (@jeffrschneider) January 16, 2013

If AWS can encourage corporate execs to promote a contest for their in-house developers to build prototype mission-critical applications in AWS, an enterprise cloud push could accelerate. At GigaOM‘s Structure: Europe conference in October,  Amazon CTO Werner Vogels insisted that these enterprise apps are already taking off in AWS. Others disagree — maintaining that deployment of mission-critical applications in a public cloud is still a very dubious proposition especially in financial services and other regulated industries.

Some say this reluctance stems more from fear, uncertainty and doubt than from real issues with Amazon’s services. CIOs worry that AWS snafus in the consumer arena could impact their corporate services as well, although experts say well-architected IT services across AWS availability zones and regions mitigate that risk.

Then there’s the ingrained fear of change. ”IT people worry they’ll lose their jobs because of cloud,” said Greg Shields, senior partner and principal technologist for Concentrated Technology, an IT consultancy. “I tell them, ‘you will lose your job because of cloud but remember, there’s a legion of former punch-card feeder people out there who are still working. It’s just that they changed. Cloud won’t make you lose your income, you’ll just be doing something different. You may do higher order architecting and thinking about what services make sense in the cloud and how to construct them to make them efficient and secure.’”

So, GigaOM readers, what do you think? Does Amazon need an Enterprise Challenge? Please use comments to weigh in.

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user tommistock

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Count Macquarie Capital in the second camp. In a new research note, Macquarie estimates that the overall cloud market will hit $71 billion in 2015 and pegged AWS’ addressable part of that market at $38 billion. Those numbers are considerably larger than Gartner’s previous estimates of $56 billion for the overall cloud market size and $28 billion for AWS’ piece of the pie. In the note, analyst Ben Schachter said AWS could now be worth $19 billion as a standalone entity, based on a 5X multiple of Macquarie’s 2013 AWS revenue estimate of $3.8 billion, or $30 billion using an 8X multiple.

Macquarie is betting that growing enterprise adoption — a key AWS priority — will feed that momentum. According to the report:

“We highlight that much of AWS‟s past growth has come from SMBs [small and medium businesses] and start-ups. While these will continue to drive growth globally, in 2013 we expect a more concerted effort to focus on growing the AWS business at large enterprises. Importantly, the broadening platform offered by AWS is helping to drive adoption in larger enterprises (moving up the tech stack, with RedShift and other recent product launches). Additionally, we think emerging markets offer a significant opportunity, as many enterprises in these regions will likely bypass traditional technology infrastructure and go straight to the cloud.”

Redshift is the new data warehousing solution Amazon announced at AWS:Reinvent two months ago and that takes aim at expensive solutions from Hewlett-Packard (Vertica), Oracle, SAP, and IBM

Of course all of these estimates are based on analysis of numbers that Amazon doesn’t provide. The company lumps AWS revenue in  with “other” revenue from marketing and promotion activities, other seller sites and co-branded credit cards. Given that, AWS remains pretty much a black box, but I would be willing to bet, all of  Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ talk of low-margin, high-volume business aside, that Amazon is not doing cloud services as a philanthropic exercise.

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1: One word: Amazon

Make that three words: Amazon Web Services. AWS dominated discussion around public cloud computing last year and spent it churning out more services from DynamoDB NoSQL database to Glacier data archiving.  And it kept breaking its own record for number of objects stored in its bread-and-butter S3 storage service.

But, with great power comes great responsibility and a huge amount of attention. So every time AWS stumbled, we heard about it. There were several issues at Amazon’s US-East data center over the year that brought down AWS clients including Netflix, Heroku, Reddit and others. So while CIOs love the idea of saving money by using inexpensive AWS services, none of them want to be “that CIO” who presided over a major outage because of an AWS problem.  To be fair, company data centers have problems all the time — we just don’t hear about them much, if at all.

That fear, uncertainty and doubt around whether AWS really is ready for mission critical work will give companies a reason to look at other cloud options — from Rackspace, from Verizon’s Terremark unit, CenturyLink-Savvis, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Joyent,  SoftLayer or somebody else.

The chart below shows Amazon Inc.’s “other” revenue — which includes AWS — since AWS launched in 2006. From this, you can extrapolate that AWS is now a $2.2 billion-a-year business. How profitable it is remains an open question but it’s clear that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is always ready to sacrifice margin for volume business. And that has to worry the legacy IT incumbents.

2: Location, location, location of data centers

Lobby at Verizon office at 140 West Street, New York post-Sandy

After two 100-year storms in two years on the East Coast, any company with data centers in Manhattan, coastal New Jersey, or any low-lying part of the tri-state area, must be wondering what they’ll do about future data centers. A New York-based banking exec told me after Superstorm Sandy that his company’s post-9/11 decision to put data centers away from Manhattan but near a New Jersey swamp is looking sketchy now. He spoke on the condition of anonymity and hastened to add that neither data center failed during the storm.

It’s true that New York’s financial services hub needs some data centers close to the action for latency reasons. But just what percentage of those workloads really demand millisecond or sub-millisecond response times? That’s a question data center expert Mark Thiele thinks people should ask. (Full disclosure: Thiele is executive VP of data center tech at Switch, which operates the SuperNAP data center in land-locked Las Vegas.) ”It might be interesting to determine what type of infrastructure is really needed for those really low-latency jobs and how much can be offloaded to ‘safe ground’ data centers,” he said.

But just where is safe ground could be tough to determine, says Chris Perretta, CIO and EVP of State Street. ”In the Midwest you get tornadoes, on the coast you get surge, in Florida you get hurricanes, in the west you get wild fires, in California you get earthquakes,” he said.

Still, it’ll be interesting to watch new data center development in the financial services arena. In October, Fidelity Investments said it was putting a $200 million facility in Omaha, Neb., citing tax breaks and other incentives. No mention was made of climate change worry, but IT execs at these companies have to be thinking long and hard about putting any new facility near a storm surge area in the wake of Irene and Sandy.

3: VMware in transition

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger

VMware, which is trying to parlay its server virtualization dominance to similar heft in the data centers powering cloud, has a tough road ahead. It’s still recovering from a licensing change announced in 2011 that raised prices — and ire —  in many VMware shops. While Pat Gelsinger’s first official public act as VMware CEO last August was to repeal the reviled “memory tax,” customers are still talking about it. Give VMware credit for reversing itself but that decision caused many staunch VMware shops to take a look at Microsoft Hyper-V, Xen or KVM virtualization as alternatives to VMware’s ESX hypervisor. That was a dangerous door to open.

VMware’s decision to spin off its Cloud Foundry PaaS, Springsource Java framework, and Gemstone data caching technology to a new entity — along with EMC’s Pivotal Labs’ agile development capability and Ceta analytics — was geared to help VMware focus on its new software-defined data center push. The company seems to get now that it has to work better with third-party virtualization technologies — as evidenced by its buy of DynamicOps. And its decision to join the OpenStack effort, signals that it wants to work with other cloud providers — or at least appear to do so.

4: Legacy IT players strive for continued relevance

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison

All of the big boys of enterprise IT — IBM, Oracle, HP, Microsoft, et al.– are struggling to move from traditional software licensing and packaged software delivery to a cloud model of subscription software and services. Here,  Amazon, Salesforce.com and — yes — Google have disrupted the traditional model of buying big expensive chunks of on-premises software up front and then renewing those licenses every year or so. Salesforce.com forced all these companies to take stock of their model and sparked a buying spree by Oracle, SAP and IBM to snap up SaaS companies.

Joe Coyle, CTO of Capgemini, the big systems integrator, said the reluctance of these big players to make their licensing cloud friendly is their single biggest challenge going forward. “If you look out over the next year, if Oracle, SAP and these guys don’t get their licenses fixed, they’re in for a heap of trouble,” he said. right now if a customer wants to run an Oracle or SAP application on AWS public cloud, the licensing costs make those options uncompetitive with what else is available, he said.

Now, Google, which many had discounted as a force in enterprise software, is getting traction for Google Apps, which more businesses see as a good-enough and cheaper alternative to Microsoft Office. And, Google appears serious about entering the Infrastructure-as-a-Service race against Amazon with Google Compute Engine, announced in June.

5: Building Europe’s cloud

By most accounts, Europe has been slower to adopt cloud computing than North America. There are many reasons for this. First, the economy there is even more fragile than in the U.S. And the market is actually a set of markets and is much more fragmented – by language, by culture, by currency (not all of Europe is in the Euro Zone) — than North America. But the European Commission is trying to push the cloud agenda, spur spending on cloud infrastructure to reap what it sees as a huge opportunity to save money and to build new businesses. A lot of eyes — on both sides of the Atlantic — will be trained on this developing situation in 2013.

6: Open-source cloud boom

OpenStack appeared to hit its stride this year with nearly every company — except Microsoft and Amazon — clamoring aboard the open-source cloud effort incubated nearly four years ago by NASA and Rackspace. In 2012, Rackspace, HP, and others made their OpenStack-based clouds available. But OpenStack doesn’t have the open-source cloud mantra entirely to itself: Citrix  turned over CloudStack to the Apache Foundation as an alternative to OpenStack. Eucalyptus and OpenNebula are already out there. So 2013 will be the year to start measuring momentum among these alternatives and to assess whether there’s room for all of them.

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