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The following content is from an older version of this website, and may not display correctly.Amazon, the online retailer as well as one of the largest public cloud providers, said its first-quarter revenue was up by almost 50 percent year-over-year.
The company did not provide details on how much of its revenue came from Amazon Web Services - the cloud division.
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said in a conference call Amazon Web Services continued to accelerate.
Amazon's CFO Tom Szkutak said the company had increased its capital expenditures to $140 million during the quarter, which reflected additional investments in infrastructure, including infrastructure that supports AWS.
The company reported revenue of $2.78 billion during the quarter and net income of $299 million, which was a nearly 69 percent increase from its income in the first quarter of last year.
Besides expanding infrastructure, AWS lowered pricing for outbound data transfer by up to 40 percent during the quarter.
The provider also started to offer Elastic Compute Cloud Windows instance reservations to customers that wish to pay an upfront fee in exchange for guarantee of VM availability at a future time.
According to Amazon, customers that exercise this option get a discount on the hourly usage rate.
Another addition Amazon made to its cloud services during the quarter was the Simple Notification Service, which enables developers to publish application messages and send them to subscribers or other applications instantly.
Bezos addressed the elephant in the room - Apple's early-April release of iPad, an instant blockbuster and competitor to Amazon's own reading device Kindle - only by saying Kindle was still selling. "Kindle remains our number-one bestselling product and earlier this week, Kindle selection reached 500,000 titles."
March also concluded third fiscal quarter for Microsoft, whose Azure services compete with AWS on the cloud front. Microsoft has also been vague about the extent of its cloud services' take-up by customers, saying only that it has been growing.
"Windows 7 continues to be a growth engine, but we also saw strong growth in other areas like Bing search, Xbox Live and our emerging cloud services," Microsoft CFO Peter Klein said in a statement.
The company's total revenue for the quarter was $14.5 billion - a six percent increase year-over-year. Its net income was about $4 billion - nearly $1 billion more than the net income reported for the same period one year ago.
Microsoft obviously uses its own data centers to offer cloud services and, interestingly, on the list of investment risk factors in a statement it filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the company included weather as it relates to cooling computer equipment.
It was clearly referring to air-side economizers, which rely on outside air temperature staying within a certain range to be economically beneficial.
"Changes in weather where we operate may increase the costs of powering and cooling computer hardware we use to develop software and provide cloud-based services," the statement read.
The company did not provide details on how much of its revenue came from Amazon Web Services - the cloud division.
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said in a conference call Amazon Web Services continued to accelerate.
Amazon's CFO Tom Szkutak said the company had increased its capital expenditures to $140 million during the quarter, which reflected additional investments in infrastructure, including infrastructure that supports AWS.
The company reported revenue of $2.78 billion during the quarter and net income of $299 million, which was a nearly 69 percent increase from its income in the first quarter of last year.
Besides expanding infrastructure, AWS lowered pricing for outbound data transfer by up to 40 percent during the quarter.
The provider also started to offer Elastic Compute Cloud Windows instance reservations to customers that wish to pay an upfront fee in exchange for guarantee of VM availability at a future time.
According to Amazon, customers that exercise this option get a discount on the hourly usage rate.
Another addition Amazon made to its cloud services during the quarter was the Simple Notification Service, which enables developers to publish application messages and send them to subscribers or other applications instantly.
Bezos addressed the elephant in the room - Apple's early-April release of iPad, an instant blockbuster and competitor to Amazon's own reading device Kindle - only by saying Kindle was still selling. "Kindle remains our number-one bestselling product and earlier this week, Kindle selection reached 500,000 titles."
March also concluded third fiscal quarter for Microsoft, whose Azure services compete with AWS on the cloud front. Microsoft has also been vague about the extent of its cloud services' take-up by customers, saying only that it has been growing.
"Windows 7 continues to be a growth engine, but we also saw strong growth in other areas like Bing search, Xbox Live and our emerging cloud services," Microsoft CFO Peter Klein said in a statement.
The company's total revenue for the quarter was $14.5 billion - a six percent increase year-over-year. Its net income was about $4 billion - nearly $1 billion more than the net income reported for the same period one year ago.
Microsoft obviously uses its own data centers to offer cloud services and, interestingly, on the list of investment risk factors in a statement it filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the company included weather as it relates to cooling computer equipment.
It was clearly referring to air-side economizers, which rely on outside air temperature staying within a certain range to be economically beneficial.
"Changes in weather where we operate may increase the costs of powering and cooling computer hardware we use to develop software and provide cloud-based services," the statement read.