Brief - The Hustle

To win the cloud, Amazon and Microsoft are giving startups free sales support

Written by Trung T. Phan | Sep 18, 2020 8:24:37 AM

Here’s an amazing cloud computing stat.

According to investor Jon Sakoda, Amazon Web Services (AWS) would be worth ~$2-4T as a standalone business if it was valued at the same multiple as other public cloud firms.

As presently constituted, $AMZN is worth $1.5T.

The cloud prize is huge and Big Tech has a new way to go after it.

If you’re a startup, Microsoft or Amazon will sell you services 

As long as you agree to use their cloud offering, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Earlier this week, Abnormal Security Corp. moved its operations over to Microsoft’s Azure cloud in exchange for enterprise sales assistance.

This was Microsoft’s first such arrangement, following a similar deal Amazon struck with Apptio Inc. in January.

You got to get them early 

Changing cloud providers is a costly exercise on both the time and money fronts.

For the biggest cloud players, partnering with startups is a great way to capture their booming cloud use as the firms grow and spend — collectively — billions a year.

In fact, Amazon launched AWS Connections 3 years ago to link startups with its biggest customers. According to WSJ, Amazon has facilitated 2k meetings between startups and potential customers since 2019.

Both sides benefit 

WSJ says these new cloud partnerships are giving access to “a range of customers many startups and small enterprises could struggle to reach independently.”

As they say in my ancestral home of Vietnam, that’s a “nguyen-nguyen” arrangement.