Tech

AWS CEO targets Microsoft, eyes $3.7tn enterprise IT market

Las Vegas, Dec 4 (IANS) Shocked at the US government’s decision to award $10 billion Pentagon Cloud project to Microsoft despite being the favourite, Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO has now targeted Satya Nadella-led tech giant with criticising its licensing practices and making a pitch for open-source Linux operating system over Windows.

Quoting IDC numbers that in 2020, about 80 per cent of the workloads deployed will be Linux workloads, Jassy in his keynote address at ‘AWS re: inven’ conference here said customers are not so keen about having one company’s operating system any more.

“We see a lot of monetisation decisions around moving windows to Linux. And this has been happening for several years now. There’s such a vibrant community around Linux and we’re finding that all the features and all the security things happen much quicker than with OS like Windows,” Jassy told the gathering on Tuesday.

Surprisingly, Jassy did not attack Microsoft Azure directly, but rather focused on the 3.7 trillion enterprise IT market where Microsoft is the leader.

He attacked Windows and SQL Server software in the Cloud using existing licenses.

“If you look at Windows, 57 per cent of Windows in the cloud runs on AWS operating system rather than Azure. You see this return to the ways of old from Microsoft where they’re not prioritising what matters to you guys, the customers. People are sick and tired of being pawns in this game,” the AWS CEO emphasized.

AWS is currently a $36 billion business for Amazon. AWS has garnered 47.8 per cent of the global market for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) while Microsoft is just around 15.5 per cent, according to Gartner.

Rattled by the US government’s decision, the Amazon’s Cloud arm has already filed a lawsuit challenging the Department of Defence’s move.

AWS lost the JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure) contract on October 25 that will provide enterprise level, commercial Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) to support Department of Defence business and mission operations.

US President Donald Trump, who has been a critic of Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos over the company’s tax arrangements and the reportage in The Washington Post owned by Bezos, got involved during the bidding process, saying the government was looking at the contract after “getting enormous complaints” from the competitors.

In a conversation with CNBC at the AWS event, Jassy said that JEDI Cloud contract was not adjudicated correctly.

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