Revenue
$280 billion (2019)
Employees
840,000 (2019)
Founded
2006
Add-on
How they do it: The customer gets free ”credits” in the beginning to set up their cloud computing structure on AWS. Once these credits are used up and the customer has needs more server capacities, he can flexibly use as much server capacity as he needs and is billed accordingly.
Auction
How they do it: Amazon Web Services offers a flexible bidding option for computing power called ”spot instances”. Amazon EC2 Spot Instances offer spare compute capacity available in the AWS cloud at steep discounts compared to On-Demand instances. Spot Instances enable customers to optimize your costs on the AWS cloud and scale your application’s throughput up to 10X for the same budget.
Cash Machine
How they do it: Amazon Web Services offers pricing for it’s computing pricing on an annual, pre-paid schedule. These so-called ”Reserved Instances” provide customers with a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to On-Demand instance pricing.
Digitization
How they do it: AWS allows customers to scale their cloud computing capacities on a as-needed model. Instead of needing to own and administrate physical servers, every business can access Amazon’s servers through AWS.
Freemium
How they do it: AWS gives away free ”credits” to use their service and set up ones infrastructure on the AWS cloud computers However as soon as the company’s product need grow and exceed the capacity covered by the free credits, it has to pay for the additional use.
Guaranteed Availability
How they do it: AWS guarantees its customers 24/7 availability of cloud computing capacity. This allows them to price in maitenance and sell their capacity at a premium with full serice.
Layer Player
How they do it: AWS focuses on bringing customers various technological solutions in the area of cloud computing. It solely focuses on providing the capacity and applications to support its customers. Customers come from all kinds of industries and business sizes.
Leverage Customer Data
How they do it: AWS collects data to support their customers in optimizing their IT architecture. In addition it may suggest additional AWS services and features which could be beneficial to the customer’s business.
Lock-in
How they do it: In the beginning customers set up their initial cloud computing structure on AWS by using the free ”credits”. With an increased use of the product, the switching cost to a different solution increase as well.
Make More Of It
How they do it: Amazon with its vast investments in servers, originating from their main property, the e-commerce platform Amazon.com, makes these resources available to third parties. Customers from over 190 countries use Amazon Web Services for cloud computing and related services.
Pay Per Use
How they do it: The customers pay based on the cloud computing capacity they have used in a defined period.
Performance-based Contracting
How they do it: AWS value proposition is that it is supposed to be cheaper to scale once IT architecture by using AWS cloud computing instead of building and owning own physical server farms. The billing model is based on the usage of the cloud computing capacity rather than being based on the cost of the actual servers for AWS.
Self-service
How they do it: AWS cloud computing can be set up by every business independently without needing to talk to a AWS representative. Extensive tutorials and documentation help the customers to act and use the service as independent as possible. However, in case support is needed, AWS has it available.
Solution Provider
How they do it: AWS is a full solution provider in the area of cloud computing. As a one-stop-shop it offers a wide range of services such as computing, storage, networking, application services and developer tools.
Subscription
How they do it: AWS’ customers subscribe to their services and but are billed on a per-use basis, allowing customers to only needing to pay the cloud computing power which was used by its applications.
Two-sided Market
How they do it: AWS has a markeplace for cloud computing applications. In a digital catalag with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors, users can find software to test, buy and deploy on AWS.
Whitelabel
How they do it: Although a customer can run its IT on AWS cloud computing, AWS is usually not branded in the company’s product but running for the product in the background.
Virtualization
How they do it: As part of Amazon Web Services, Amazon WorkSpaces moves your Windows or Linux desktop with all its features into the cloud, accessible from all major devices and suitable for various infrastructure scenarios (desktops, cell phones, bring-your- own devices).
Learn from this company and apply the same patterns to create your own successful business model!