AWS brings in $2.4 billion in revenue in the last quarter of 2015

Over the past couple of years, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud services arm of Amazon, has grown in prominence along with the thriving ecommerce business. The recent fourth quarter results of AWS show that it generated about 40% of the consolidated segment operating income of Amazon despite contributing just 7% of the sales.

Overall, in the year 2015, AWS made nearly $8 billion in revenues and earned almost $1.9 billion in profits. In fact, AWS profits are now nearly equal to the entire e-commerce division of Amazon in North America. “Twenty years ago, I was driving the packages to the post office myself and hoping we might one day afford a forklift. This year, we pass $100 billion in annual sales and serve 300 million customers,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.

Amazon reported $35.7 billion in sales for quarter, compared to $29.3 billion during the same quarter last year, and AWS generated $687 million as the operating income which nearly tripled from the $240 million last year.

The company’s cloud business, which counts Netflix amongst its biggest customers, continues to do well.  Amazon Web Services grew to $2.4 billion in sales during the most recent quarter, compared to $1.4 billion during the same quarter a year ago. For the full year of 2015, AWS generated around $7.9 billion in revenue, compared to $4.7 billion a year ago.

AWS remains the top choice of many companies who are increasingly shifting a majority of their infrastructure components to the cloud. Clearly, AWS has emerged as the top cloud service provider for many companies and is way ahead of its competitors which include Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and IBM SoftLayer.

Other highlights that caught my eye in the recent AWS report include:

• Only eight months after launch, Amazon Business, a marketplace with features and benefits tailored to businesses, serves more than 200,000 businesses ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.

• AWS announced the general availability of AWS IoT, a managed cloud platform that lets billions of connected devices – such as mobile phones, cars, factory floors, aircraft engines, sensor grids, and more – easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices. AWS IoT can support trillions of messages, and can process, route, and keep track of those messages to AWS endpoints and other devices reliably and securely, even when the devices aren’t connected.

• The AWS Cloud is now available from 32 Availability Zones across 12 geographic regions worldwide, with another five AWS Regions (and 11 Availability Zones) in Canada, China, India, Ohio, and the U.K. expected to be available in the coming year.

For now, we can safely say AWS is at the top in cloud services with major companies as its clients, but its other competitors, particularly Microsoft Azure may gradually be catching up with it , especially if we consider Azure saw a massive 140% increase in revenues for Microsoft.

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