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January 19, 2011, 9:48 AM EST
By Joseph Galante
(Updates with today’s share trading in fifth paragraph.)
Jan. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc., the online retailer that rents computer servers on the side, is starting a service today aimed at helping businesses simplify management of their websites and computing applications.
Customers can use the new Elastic Beanstalk service to tap Amazon’s computing power even without the technical know-how to write complex software to run applications. In the past, a business managing an app or website on Amazon servers would have to write code to interact with arcane computing infrastructure.
“It significantly lowers the bar for a technical understanding of what’s actually going on behind the scenes,” Adam Selipsky, an Amazon vice president, said in an interview. “It takes one step to upload your application and then it just runs. You never have to interact with the infrastructure running your application. It just gets served out to your audience.”
Amazon aims to increase revenue by persuading companies to rent its servers and ditch their own. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos says the Amazon Web Services unit -- which generated about $500 million in revenue last year, according to Barclays Capital -- will eventually become as big as its retail site. Elastic Beanstalk targets both novices and experienced developers.
Amazon fell $1.89 to $189.36 at 9:43 a.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares advanced 34 percent last year.
Amazon doesn’t disclose revenue from its Web Services unit.
Automatic Ferrari
Amazon, based in Seattle, introduced its Web Services business in 2006 to give companies an alternative to building costly data centers. For pennies a minute, businesses can rent servers residing remotely in Amazon buildings. International Business Machines Corp., AT&T Inc. and Microsoft Corp. offer similar cloud-computing services.
As their needs become more complex, businesses can choose to manually control specific tasks using Elastic Beanstalk. There is no extra charge for the service. Customers pay only for computing power to run their applications.
“They’re giving people a Ferrari with an automatic engine that’s convertible into a manual when they’re ready for it,” said Jeff Hammond, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Boston. “It’s getting people into the model that creates the annuity stream. If this helps people cross the chasm more easily then it’ll have long-term payback.”
--Editors: Lisa Wolfson, Elizabeth Wollman
To contact the reporter on this story: Joseph Galante in San Francisco at jgalante3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
Webmaster Forum | SEO Forum | Coding Forum | Graphics Forum</b>
(Updates with today’s share trading in fifth paragraph.)
Jan. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc., the online retailer that rents computer servers on the side, is starting a service today aimed at helping businesses simplify management of their websites and computing applications.
Customers can use the new Elastic Beanstalk service to tap Amazon’s computing power even without the technical know-how to write complex software to run applications. In the past, a business managing an app or website on Amazon servers would have to write code to interact with arcane computing infrastructure.
“It significantly lowers the bar for a technical understanding of what’s actually going on behind the scenes,” Adam Selipsky, an Amazon vice president, said in an interview. “It takes one step to upload your application and then it just runs. You never have to interact with the infrastructure running your application. It just gets served out to your audience.”
Amazon aims to increase revenue by persuading companies to rent its servers and ditch their own. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos says the Amazon Web Services unit -- which generated about $500 million in revenue last year, according to Barclays Capital -- will eventually become as big as its retail site. Elastic Beanstalk targets both novices and experienced developers.
Amazon fell $1.89 to $189.36 at 9:43 a.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares advanced 34 percent last year.
Amazon doesn’t disclose revenue from its Web Services unit.
Automatic Ferrari
Amazon, based in Seattle, introduced its Web Services business in 2006 to give companies an alternative to building costly data centers. For pennies a minute, businesses can rent servers residing remotely in Amazon buildings. International Business Machines Corp., AT&T Inc. and Microsoft Corp. offer similar cloud-computing services.
As their needs become more complex, businesses can choose to manually control specific tasks using Elastic Beanstalk. There is no extra charge for the service. Customers pay only for computing power to run their applications.
“They’re giving people a Ferrari with an automatic engine that’s convertible into a manual when they’re ready for it,” said Jeff Hammond, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Boston. “It’s getting people into the model that creates the annuity stream. If this helps people cross the chasm more easily then it’ll have long-term payback.”
--Editors: Lisa Wolfson, Elizabeth Wollman
To contact the reporter on this story: Joseph Galante in San Francisco at jgalante3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
Webmaster Forum | SEO Forum | Coding Forum | Graphics Forum</b>