As times and technologies change, so too do the way companies do business and consumers interact. Though there was a time the only way companies could stay competitive in this evolving and expanding market was to spend big bucks on their own equipment and technical expertise, today’s new server economy eliminates all of that.
This new evolution makes a lot of sense. More and more consumers of products and services prefer to shop virtually; telecommuting offers work at home potential from around the globe; and the younger portion of the workforce demands more control of their time and resources. In the face of all this, companies need less of a physical presence in terms of headquarters and offices and more of what will serve and support this virtual reality.
When companies like Amazon are willing to share and ‘rent’ aspects of what they use to run their own business, and in fact almost run the technical and logistics aspects of business for you, small companies, start-ups and companies with specialized skill sets don’t need to incur huge costs to stay current or have that presence.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) collection of remote web services include things like authentication infrastructure, billing and account management, storage, bulk and transactional email sending and backup, achieving a full cloud computing support within the budget of any business. Based primarily on usage, fees are relevant to the size and volume of the business and will grow as they do or decline as needed during periods of restructuring or change over.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon says the idea came when they were developing their own infrastructure for internal use and came across the notion that this was not unique to Amazon but something everyone needed.
The idea, combined with Amazon’s philosophy of building better service at lower prices and lower margins than many other high tech companies, makes this kind of venture a win-win. The win for small business is the affordability of the services; the win for Amazon is the sheer number of clients it will attract because of this affordability factor.
In this age of turning to the internet to find products and services, business at every level realize they must have an online presence, not only to compete on the world market but to compete locally because the broader marketplace has infringed on what used to be locally driven economies. It is no longer about turning to the local contractor for a renovation or the local department store for whatever product we need, it is about finding best deals and ideals, wherever they exist.
This idea of offering services and supports across the broad scale world market has at its base the idea of building a platform of basic services for the web on which everyone else will build their sites and services. And that’s everyone. Once established that platform could attract not only small business but huge corporations wanting to supplement and support their own infrastructure; governments needing cheap ways to support their operations through budget cutbacks and cost cutting; and in fact any company who embraces the value of outsourcing what they can to better focus on whatever it is they do best.
Though this a concept that is still fairly new, it is an idea whose time has come. Amazon is clearly ahead of the pack in developing and delivering this model of business. The only question that remains is whether they will be the first, or only, to develop THE platform to support this new economy.
