Amazon.com Inc.
(
AMZN
) recently announced a cloud storage solution from Amazon Web
Services (AWS), further expanding its cloud offerings.
This new service is named Amazon Glacier and is a low-cost
solution for data archiving, backups and other long-term storage
projects where data is not accessed frequently but needs to be
retained for future reference.
The cost of the service starts from one cent per gigabyte per
month, with upload and retrieval requests costing five cents per
thousand requests and outbound data transfer (i.e. moving data from
one AWS region to another) costing 12 cents per gigabyte.
Companies usually incur significant costs for data archiving.
They initially make an expensive upfront payment, after which they
end up purchasing additional storage space in anticipation of
growing backup demand, leading to under-utilized capacity and
wasted money. With Amazon Glacier, companies will be able to keep
costs in line with actual usage, allowing managers to know the
exact costs of their storage systems at all times.
Cloud storage came into prominence in 2009, with Nirvanix and
Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) being two of the major
pioneers. Since then, Amazon has continued to dominate the space,
with other players like Rackspace (RAX) and Microsoft (MSFT)
offering their own solutions.
Amazon is one of the leading players in the extremely
fast-growing retail ecommerce market. The strong growth prospects
are making the market more competitive by the day. Additionally,
the company serves developers through Amazon Web Services (AWS),
which provides access to technology infrastructure that developers
can use to enable various types of virtual businesses.
Amazon is expanding Amazon Web Services (AWS) internationally
and investing heavily in technology infrastructure to support rapid
growth in AWS. We remain extremely positive about AWS's growth and
expect Amazon to remain one of the leading players in the
fast-growing ecommerce market. Though these investments could
suppress near-term margin growth, Amazon is expected to benefit in
the long term, given that there is significant growth potential in
domestic and more so in international ecommerce.
At the moment, however, most of Amazon's competition (whether
direct or indirect) continues to come from
eBay Inc.
(
EBAY
),
Apple
(
AAPL
),
Barnes & Noble, Inc.
(
BKS
) and
Google
(
GOOG
).
Currently, Amazon has a Zacks #3 Rank, which implies a Hold
rating in the near term.
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