by Angela Guess
Barb Darrow of GigaOM reports, “If you want a good debate, just ask a group of pundits about the size and profitability of Amazon Web Services then sit back with some popcorn. There are two main schools of thought: One holds that AWS is a business with razor-thin margins that is underwritten by the Amazon retail juggernaut and should that business take a tumble, AWS will fall with it. The other holds that Amazon makes good dough off of AWS, and that it could be a viable standalone business unit.”
Darrow continues, “Count Macquarie Capital in the second camp. In a new research note, Macquarie estimates that the overall cloud market will hit $71 billion in 2015 and pegged AWS’ addressable part of that market at $38 billion. Those numbers are considerably larger than Gartner’s previous estimates of $56 billion for the overall cloud market size and $28 billion for AWS’ piece of the pie. In the note, analyst Ben Schachter said AWS could now be worth $19 billion as a standalone entity, based on a 5X multiple of Macquarie’s 2013 AWS revenue estimate of $3.8 billion, or $30 billion using an 8X multiple.”
photo credit: AWS
