So starting this quarter (Q1-15), Amazon Web Services will be broken out as a separate segment for reporting. To me this says that it’s now a fully viable, self sustainable business that is generating significant revenue. I’m interested to see top line revenue and operating margin and what their cost of doing business is as it should be really interesting.
Expect cloud companies to be all over this with their spin. You can expect companies like IBM to pad their cloud results with everything they can throw in there to claim they’re larger. Many other companies will look at the overall market and say, “hey, see, not a big deal, small numbers relative to the overall market” and other blah, blah, blah stuff.
But what I really expect to see are large telcos looking at the viability of large scale public clouds that they can leverage for high margin managed services. We’re seeing this initiative today, even with AWS themselves going after the enterprise space with their partner network and managed offering. Stay tuned folks, it’s about to get interesting….
We expect to change our reportable segments to report North America, international and Amazon Web Services, beginning with first quarter of 2015.
via Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Q4 2014 Results – Earnings Call Transcript | Seeking Alpha.
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