Amazon's latest cloud product is dangerous for Cisco and Dell, but really scary for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, analyst says
- When Amazon Web Services announced a new product called Outposts, the tech world stood up and took notice.
- They saw Amazon entering into the one cloud computing market where it had no game: "Hybrid" computing, the segment of the cloud where Microsoft dominates.
- But a new report by UBS analyst John Roy points out that the true disruption of Outposts is this: Amazon will be putting its own home-grown data center hardware - originally designed for its own use - into customers' private data centers.
- He believes that Cisco and Dell could be hurt by the move, but Hewlett Packard Enterprise is at the highest risk.
Cisco, Dell and most especially Hewlett Packard Enterprise are facing yet another big threat from cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services, according to a new report by UBS analyst John Roy.
And the name of that threat is Amazon Outposts.
Outposts was among the scores of new products and services announced by Amazon at its giant customer conference in November. Outposts is a service where Amazon puts tenacles of its own cloud into a company's own private data center, slated to be available on the second half of 2019.
An AWS Outpost is a hardware appliance, combining servers and storage, that Amazon will plunk into customers' private data centers. The customer only rents their Outposts; Amazon manages it remotely. For IT teams, it means that they can manage their own computing infrastructure and their Amazon cloud infrastructure from the same interface, while still keeping some applications and data sequestered in their own servers.
By the same token, Outposts do integrate tightly with the main Amazon Web Services cloud, making it an easy way to transition from one to the other - another way to bring cloud holdouts into the Amazon fold.
This was such an unusual move for the cloud computing giant, that Outposts made a splash when it was announced.
The idea isn't unique: Far from it. What Outposts does is called hybrid computing and it is exactly what all of AWS's top competitors do, particularly Microsoft Azure. Hybrid computing means using the cloud for some stuff, and your own servers for other stuff. The likes of Microsoft and IBM have invested heavily in hybrid computing as a way for their customers to bridge their existing investments in the data center with the cloud.
For Amazon, however, they didn't have such concerns - Amazon Web Services all but invented the modern notion of cloud computing, and didn't have existing customers to support. As such, it spent a long time pooh-poohing hybrid cloud, choosing instead to focus its energies on the so-called public cloud.
So, when Amazon announced Outposts, the world was quick to notice that AWS is now moving into the last big cloud market that it had virtually (but not totally) ignored: hybrid computing.
Outposts is one of the results of Amazon's two-year partnership with VMware - a former competitor, turned friend, which has teamed up with Amazon Web Services to appeal to big businesses.
Who stands to lose from AWS Outposts?
All of this may seem like Outposts is supposed to threaten Microsoft. Microsoft is the biggest competitor of both AWS and VMware.
But, should Outposts succeed, the losers will actually be those that make data center hardware tech like Dell, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, points out Roy. Even Microsoft Azure relies on servers and networking gear from the major manufacturers to build its own cloud.
That's because Amazon has invested heavily in making its own servers, storage and network hardware - innovations in which Outpost customers will be able to take part. The more those customers rely on AWS Outposts, writes Roy, the less they'll need from the usual suspects in server manufacturing.
"With AWS Outpost it uses AWS hardware, which is custom designed and built by ODM [original design manafacturers, aka contract manufacturers] for AWS. For its own public cloud AWS uses its own: routers, CPU chips, storage servers, compute servers, and high-speed network. No hardware from brand name computer makers like Dell, HPE, IBM and Cisco," Roy writes.
Of those companies, Roy believes that Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the one who could be hurt most hurt and has attached a roughly "negative 86%" metric to HPE's exposure. His reasoning is that almost all of HPE's business comes from selling hardware to private data centers, and customers who turn to Outposts will have less reason to keep buying it.
Data center hardware companies have spent the last decade battered by the rise of cloud computing. Some of them, like EMC, have not survived as independent companies. EMC, in particular, is now owned by Dell.
This will be a watershed year for such companies, too, Roy writes. This is the year that cloud revenue will equal and begin to surpass the revenue of legacy hardware companies.
"The AWS Outpost effort will start putting AWS custom (non-branded) hardware on-premises, cutting even further into branded enterprise hardware sales," Roy warns.