Amazon Web Services has brought in nearly $5.5 billion of revenue in its first six months this year, Amazon just reported, putting it on track to be the first company making $10 billion a year in revenue from cloud services.
There's a lot of chatter between Salesforce and Oracle about their own race to $10 billion. Salesforce's CEO Marc Benioff thinks his company will be the first cloud-only company to hit $10 billion in revenue. He's on track to do it in 2017.
Oracle just spent $9 billion to buy NetSuite, a cloud company Oracle chairman Larry Ellison mostly owned, to try and beat Salesforce to that $10 billion revenue number, possibly in 2017 as well.
In the meantime, Jeff Bezos promised at the start of this year that AWS will hit $10 billion, "doing so at a pace even faster than Amazon achieved that milestone."
And, if that milestone isn't enough, this quarter AWS also mentioned that it's landing bigger and bigger customers who are running their classic SAP financial software as a service on Amazon's cloud.
SAP, Oracle's biggest rival, makes software that has traditionally been run in a company's own data center. And it is often a huge, complex piece of software to deploy.
Amazon said that customers running SAP on AWS now include names like GE Oil & Gas, Kellogg’s, Brooks Brothers, Ferrara Candy Company, Lionsgate and others.
Amazon announced in May that it was now renting access to bigger, faster, more expensive servers in part to encourage companies to run big enterprise apps like SAP on AWS. Microsoft's cloud, considered the No. 2 player to AWS, can also be used for SAP apps.
So naming these marque customers is a way of hitting back at Microsoft, and an indication that AWS keeps gaining prestige among big corporate users.
