Amazon Q1 2011 Earnings High, But No Clouds in Sight
Amazon.com seems to be in one of those “good news/bad news” situations when it comes to its Q1 earnings. The good news: sales are up 38 percent year-over-year, meaning Amazon did $9.86 billion of business. The bad news: net income is down 33 percent and operating income took only slightly less of a hit. But most relevant to TalkinCloud readers, the real news is that Amazon’s Q1 earnings statement doesn’t give a whole lot of lip service to the Amazon Web Services IaaS business.
In some ways, it’s unsurprising – the recent Amazon EC2 cloud outage left a bad taste in the mouths of many service providers and investors, and so soon after the incident I doubt the company wants to remind people of its involvement. All the same, on a long list of Amazon highlights for the quarter was Amazon Web Services’ newfound availability in the the Asia Pacific/Tokyo region — but it was listed dead last.
Mostly, the company discussed the success of the Amazon Kindle e-book reader. That said, it’s worth noting that the consumer-focused Amazon Cloud Drive fares better, with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos himself taking time out of the press release to single it out for praise.
Amazon is an e-retail company first and an IaaS provider second. That’s just a fact that’s borne out by its balance sheet. All the same, for good or ill, Amazon Web Services is a major force in the cloud computing market, and I, for one, would like to see that acknowledged more often.
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