AWS shakes up the private cloud infrastructure market with Outposts

Outposts enable AWS to meet clients’ demand for private cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS) unveiled at re:Invent in Las Vegas its new Outposts on-premises cloud infrastructure, which will enable AWS to become the sole cloud infrastructure provider for its clients. The underlying Outposts infrastructure closely resembles AWS’ public cloud data center infrastructure. Since the infrastructure will be similar, it is conceivable AWS will be able to tie customers’ public and private clouds together seamlessly, fulfilling customers’ desire to deal with one less vendor for their IT needs. AWS will deliver, install and maintain Outposts for customers.

The sheer volume of AWS public cloud customers creates a large base to sell Outposts to and takes aim directly at private cloud data center providers. Outposts will also directly compete with Microsoft Azure, and will generate accretive hardware revenue for AWS.

An advantage AWS has over infrastructure vendors is economies of scale, which will enable AWS to sell massive infrastructure volumes for low margins — much like an original design manufacturer — and become a price leader against OEMs such as Dell EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). AWS also plans to arm its channel partners with the necessary capabilities to sell these infrastructure solutions, further enabling large sales volume. Moreover, AWS is better equipped than other infrastructure vendors such as Dell EMC and HPE to attach the necessary services to provide connectivity between public and private cloud environments due to its expertise in the public cloud space — and will gain the higher-margin sales to boot. IBM has strong services capabilities but lacks the commoditized infrastructure and customer volume to match AWS’ strategy. TBR notes that pricing details of Outposts have not yet been determined.

VMware gets a piece of the AWS Outpost pie with the VMware Cloud variant

VMware and AWS collaborated to provide VMware Cloud on a variant of AWS Outposts, which will be offered by VMware as a managed service. As this creates a conflict of interest for Dell Technologies, TBR believes Dell Technologies has its sights set on the higher-margin sales generated from VMware Cloud and will forego the loss of lower-margin hardware sales to gain it.

Although AWS’ announcement may seem like bad news for the private cloud infrastructure OEMs, the good news for them is that AWS’ Outposts will not hit the market until 2H19, giving the infrastructure players some time to develop solutions that can compete with AWS as it moves into the data center hardware market.