While focusing on my IP communications start-up, (Nuclei Networks) I have learned a great deal and one company that keeps appearing on my radar again and again when contemplated opportunities for new business models and improvements in infrastructure performance, Amazon.com!
No, I am not crazy and I have not been drinking too much Norwegian Aquavit.
Amazon.com, the epitome company of the early bubble is innovating with web services like no other. Utilizing their physical and virtual assets to create new models and opportunities for everyone who gets over the old Amazon.com book seller image. (Seriously, forget it!)
The new Amazon services (Amazon S3 and EC2) isn't just about selling books, its about selling you access to its own infrastructure farm and web services libraries so you can build ontop of them, any business model you wish, for pennies.Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.
What does this means to Telcom/IP communications is revolutionary!
For example, Vodafone spends tens-of-millions of dollars per-month storing customer type data in each of its international companies. This customer data resides on physical computers owned, maintained and operated by Vodafone. This is no longer necessary.
Vodafone (or any Telco/service provider) could migrate their entire global user database, to Amazon S3 and eliminate the costs associated with storing all this critical information locally. Its cheaper, faster, (and possibly more reliable) and now that this data is within a web service environment, it has the ability to be accessed via new web services so that Vodafone (or any Telco/service provider) can offer new services that they could not have offered before because of the limitations of their own antiquated infrastructure.
How does Amazon S3 lower your Opex?
This means storing 1 terabyte of customer data cost only $150/month. Savings: no hardware cost, no SW licensing, no maintenance, no dedicated personnel monitoring the HW/SW, no electrical charges, no air conditioning failure issues, etc (if you operated a NOC then I'm sure your list is longer then my entire blog). The biggest savings to operations is the reductions of uncontrollable HEADACHE issues that are a necessary/vital to your business.Pricing
- Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
- $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
- $0.20 per GB of data transferred.
Get your CFO and CIO director to perform their own comparison, don't leave out the small but incredibly important intangibles like what it costs for someone to be get out of bed at 4:00am when a server alarm goes off and travel to the NOC (half-asleep) to trouble shoot, reboot and then monitor for a few more hours to make sure that it is stable.
Amazon S3 services is built on Amazon's legendary web services capabilities. Their business is not only to be available 24 hours a day but to provide their data for the developer community (Telcos, Open Source community, customers, etc.) offload you of that burden and giving you back the freedom of innovation.
Small VoIP companies to large Telcos should be migrating their data infrastructure to Amazon right now! The cost savings associated with this move is guaranteed to reward the individual who presents this to management, with a nice Christmas bonus (appealing to the vanity of the IT community). This is only the tip of the iceberg. If your a small company desperate for attention, issuing a press release announcing your migration and cost savings seems to Amazon S3, seems to be a guaranteed way of getting your company recognized (at least this week).
There is more, just 48 hours ago Amazon announced Amazon EC2. Amazon EC2 service provides virtual computing services.
Implications: More cost savings and improved performance. Your company doesn't need to invest in a server farm to crunch numbers (example - monthly CDR conversions to customer bills), you can now via Amazon have Amazon S3 take your stored CDRs and send them to Amazon's EC2 service (this is free...Amazon doesn't care if this transfer of data is multi-terabytes...it's still free) and EC2 will do the number crunching to generate your monthly customer bills. In fact, you could create an additional web service that automatically sent the completed bills via email to all your customers and upon special request, a printed copy would be sent to the customer. (Of course, the special request itself, would be a web service that automatically dips into Amazon's S3 service to extract the necessary data).Pricing
- Pay only for what you use.
- $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
- $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).
- $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).
Data transferred within the Amazon EC2 environment, or between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB).
How much did the above scenario cost you (or any customer oriented company), a few dollars. How much does it cost you using today's mechanisms...millions-of-dollars? How much time and resources are necessary to perform this human error prone function???
Amazon's S3 and EC2 web services are the foundation building blocks that can potentially shift the IT prowess of nations. We all joked about start-ups that came from people's garages. Well in some countries they are too poor to even have a garage (or know what it is), but for $0.15 per GB-month they now can provide services to the entire world without any infrastructure, only some code.
"AMAZON!" "AMAZON!" "AMAZON!"
This is Telco 2.0/Web 2.0. Its happened. Costs have been redefined to pennies, time to market has been reduced to pico-seconds, excuses for not doing something has been reduced to absolute-zero.
Amazon has provided it, now what are you going to do with it?
4 comments:
We just launched Cruxy.com and we never would have been able to do it without the simple variable pricing model of Amazon S3. Instead of spending our start-up's limited resources on servers, cages, routers and dedicated circuits, we spent the money on design and user interface (we still have to pay the lawyers like everone else;-)) www.cruxy.com
Hey Jon,
You just made me a huge fan of Cruxy.com. Thats the way to innovate as a start-up. Great job!
Your whole team has my full respect...good luck!
"...the eppitamy company..."
Ouch. That would be "epitome" (though "prototype" would be a better word).
Though "ePitamy" would have been a great bubble-era web startup company name. :-)
Thank you for cathing the spelling mistake.
How did you like the post?
Post a Comment