I am, and have been, unabashedly and enthusiastically bullish on cloud computing. The cloud is faster, cheaper, and - despite what you may have heard - more secure than traditional IT. By 2020, Gartner predicts the corporate shift from mainframe to cloud will attract more than $1 trillion in IT spending. The writing is on the wall: The cloud is here for the long run, and we are confident there will be very big winners in this market - and very big losers.
All of this led me to being long Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Web Services (AWS) years ago. (Read my article way back in 2013 on the subject). It was clear to me then that Jeff Bezos saw the shift happening early. Unencumbered by legacy business models, he began expanding Amazon's AWS division at a rapid clip.
According to recent research by Canalys, AWS now owns 33.8 percent of the global market share for cloud spending - while Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), and IBM (NYSE:IBM) own 30.8 percent, combined. According to our own internal estimates, the AWS worldwide cloud has 10 million servers connected across 125 datacenters. That's huge.
