Amazon Web Services (AWS) rakes in $6 billion and turns a profit

Photo of author

By Larry Banks

Amazon has revealed numbers for its cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services (AWS). The business raked in $1.57 billion during the first quarter, which is inline with most projections, and it’s generating about $6 billion per year.

Amazon Web Services is profitable

Amazon Web Services is in fact profitable, having kept $265 million this quarter and pretty much on track to make a billion dollars in profits this year. That makes Amazon one of the largest cloud computing infrastructure companies.

However, IBM might dispute that figure, as it says on a trailing 12-month basis, its cloud revenues are $7.7 billion. But it also said that IBM’s “as-a-service” offerings are on track to do around $3.8 billion, which is a more accurate comparison to Amazon’s cloud services.

IBM is know for its hybrid cloud services, where the companies buy hardware and software the old-fashioned way and install in their own data centres, but set the whole thing up so it can utilise IBM’s cloud if they need more storage space.

Amazon Web Services Architecture

Microsoft’s cloud services are currently at around $6.2 billion per year, and the company said on Thursday that its latest cloud numbers look set to pull in revenues of $6.3 billion this year.

That’s not quite a straight comparison however as Microsoft includes software-as-a-service apps, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM in its cloud revenue figures. Its cloud service, Azure, competes directly against AWS, and that’s a smaller slice of the $6.3 billion.

Google on the other hand earns $7 billion from non-advertising businesses, and so is behind Amazon, Microsoft and IBM in this respect. Google also released earnings recently and said the “other” segment (including enterprise apps and cloud computing) had $1.75 billion in revenues this quarter, around $7 billion a year.

SOURCE: Amazon

Images Courtesy of DepositPhotos