Amazon Web Services believes wholeheartedly that the cloud is the future. And not just the cloud, but the AWS public cloud. As a result, Amazon sees big opportunity for its technology in the enterprise market and has been making some aggressive moves to fluster the incumbents and stalwarts, like Microsoft.
The strategy has been to continue offering more and more services, beating its opponents at scale, while operating on razor-thin margins. And so far it’s been working: As Alex said in December, through its programmable architecture, volume and tiny margins, AWS has built a “$1.5 billion business.”
Now, it seems that AWS is looking to apply its model to mobile to get deeper into enterprise — with the creation of what looks to be a whole new arm of its cloud division. TechCrunch today learned of a job listing that has been posted both on its own site and on Stack Overflow that, in its attempt to allure engineers, describes the position as one that will be part of a new business.
“The Amazon Web Services (AWS) team is launching a new business,” it says plainly, and is looking for someone who wants to build “amazing customer experiences on tablet and mobile apps on Android or iOS platforms.”
The post continues:
In this role, you will be responsible for creating and owning world-class production tablet and web client applications across major platforms including iOS and Android … As a member of the founding team, you will have significant influence on our overall strategy by helping define the product features, drive system architecture, and spearhead the best practices that enable a quality v1 product setting the ground work for a successful v2 and beyond.
While we don’t know yet what Amazon has cooking (we’ve reached out and are awaiting their comment), we do know that they’re launching a new business that is focused on building “quality software” for mobile and for those with deep experience building tablet apps. It will be a new product, something AWS hasn’t done before and the team will be small, iterating quickly in a “hyper-growth environment where priorities shift fast.”
Again, Amazon needs a way to get deeper into the enterprise market as well as offer more for developers who increasingly look to their mobile devices to manage their apps.
AWS has been showing off its capabilities by adding the ability for its customers to quickly create virtual private clouds, and it’s been dropping its prices across the board. EC2 discounts, messaging and notifications, you name it.
Rishidot Research Founder Krishnan Subramanian says that Amazon looks to me “making a play on the front-end and looking to build out a management service to build apps for AWS on multiple mobile platforms.”
For the most part, developers access AWS through the web, Subramanian said. Third-party providers are offering mobile apps, not Amazon. This new group could be charged with building a new arsenal of mobile apps.
AWS does need to make a backend play but this job posting does not reflect that. As it stands right now, Amazon doesn’t have the middleware, or cloud-based mobile SDK, which would allow mobile developers to build an app without having to worry about building their own stack. However, given how well Kinvey and others (who do offer this support) are doing, Amazon will likely look to get into that space.
Eventually, there’s going to be a bloodbath in this space, or a feed frenzy. Kinvey et al have already begun to feed off Oracle, IBM and the other enterprise giants, and Amazon would be remiss if it wasn’t on its gameplan.
But that is not the priority with this job posting. More so it looks like a way for the company to appeal to people who use mobile devices to manage their AWS instances.
Comment