What 3 Other Companies SayAbout Amazon.com

Photo: Amazon.

"We are definitely seeing [Amazon] in the marketplace. We see them in all of our market research, gaining share. We know our customers shop there even if it's just a price compare. So they are a very formidable competitor to us."

-- Shira Goodman, president of Staples Inc'sNorth American commercial operations

Photo: Staples.

Obviously, Goodman and Staples have a healthy respect for Amazon's retailing prowess.

These days, a traditional retailer can hardly sneeze without seeing another glimpse of the rising e-tailer threat.

That being said, Staples is no slouch in online sales.

Ripping a page straight from Amazon's playbook, Staples has moved beyond being a pure-play office supply store.

These days, Staples.com sells everything fromgarden rakes to guitars.

Imitation is the purest form of flattery.

"Distil is a perfect example of a customer for whom our high performance value proposition resonates and what we call an AWS graduate. They found that Internap's bare-metal cloud provides a superior price performance for their high-performance applications as compared to AWS, while our suite of hybridized Internet infrastructure provides them greater flexibility."

-- Michael Ruffolo, Internap CEO

Photo: Internap.

In short, Ruffolo says that Internap gives cloud clients a better experience thanAmazon Web Services.

If nothing else, clients should appreciate the bare-metal hardware access that Internap provides.

And it's always a good idea to have a second source for critical services. So why not Internap?

Hybrid clouds can indeed be powerful tools. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with Internap's product suite.

Still, Ruffolo's company can't hold a candle to Amazon's economies of scale.

Internap's annual sales stop at roughly $330 million these days.

Amazon Web Services are pulling down revenues of $1.6 billion per quarter.

"We've had customers literally tell us, 'I want to move from the state where I am today where it is almost all Amazon to a 50-50 mix, because I want two suppliers that are battling it out. And if you can prove to me that you could do the things that you say you could do, we're very happy to get to a steady-state of half our business with Amazon, half our business with you.'

"So I don't know that we need to doaggressive switcher tools."

-- Chris Capossela, Microsoft'schief marketing officer

Photo: Microsoft.

Capossela's argument is not very different from Ruffolo's.

He's simply shining a different spotlight at the same business conundrum.

In short, the cloud computing market is large enough to support several healthy, thriving suppliers -- and Microsoft Azure hopes to be one of them in the long run.

Azure may be a smaller rival, but appears to be growing faster than AWS these days.

Redmond is an instant contender in every computer-related business.

You can bet that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will keep a close eye on Microsoft's every move in this sector.

The world's biggest tech company forgot to show you something at its recent event, but a few Wall Street analysts and the Fool didn't miss a beat. We think this stock has nearly unlimited room to run for early-in-the-know investors!

/

/

Click to edit Master title style

Click to edit the outline text formatSecond Outline LevelThird Outline LevelFourth Outline LevelFifth Outline LevelSixth Outline LevelSeventh Outline LevelSmall header

Click to edit the outline text formatSecond Outline LevelThird Outline LevelFourth Outline LevelFifth Outline LevelSixth Outline Level

Seventh Outline LevelClick icon to add picture