'Old guard' tech firms give cloud customers a raw deal, says AWS chief Jassy

Rivals' private cloud offerings are costly and inflexible says Amazon Web Services VP

Amazon Web Services' senior vice president, Andy Jassy, opened the company's AWS Enterprise Summit 2013 in London today with a direct attack on private cloud vending rivals, branding their solutions as costly and inflexible.

Accusing "old guard" technology companies of "charging as much as [customers] want to pay" for localised services before the cloud gained popularity, Jassy said that once vendors had to face up to the reality of the cloud, they began using private clouds as an excuse to carry on their overcharging habits.

"The old guard technology companies are really different to [Amazon's pay-as-you-use public offering] - they charge enterprises as much as they want to pay, and it's been a very high margin business for them," said Jassy.

"It's been a very good model. In the early days of the cloud, the old guard companies poo-pooed it, saying ‘Nobody's going to use it for anything critical and enterprises will never use it'."

But, said Jassy, after "all the hand-waving" as cloud was adopted by "startups, mid-sized companies, enterprises and the public sector", these vendors soon changed their tune.

"The old guard said ‘No, no you're right, [cloud is] really meaningful, but what you want is private cloud - we'll give you everything the cloud gives you, but on-premise."

However, Jassy maintained that private cloud "doesn't have a lot of the benefits" of public.

"You have to lay out all the expense yourself, it's not elastic or pay as you use, the company still has to decide how much infrastructure it buys, you can't move as fast and you're still managing it yourself. And of course it's not global."

Jassy went on to vaunt AWS's growing focus on hybrid cloud solutions, and the company's ability to help customers avoid the "binary decision" of public or private by hybridising, using existing on-premise data centres with AWS' public cloud offerings.

Jassy told delegates that Amazon is now installing enough cloud server capacity every day to "handle the entirety of Amazon's global $5.2bn, 8,000 employee business" as it was in 2003.