Specialist
Former Director at Oracle Corp
Agenda
- Competitive landscape and intensity by customer type, and strategy towards customer acquisition between providers
- Market share evolution between key cloud provides
- Pricing environment between providers – pockets of pricing pressure and areas providers can realise higher-margin additional services
- Customers' core decision-making criteria and demand for multicloud deployments
- Customers' core decision-making criteria and demand for multicloud deployments
- Technological comparison between AWS (NASDAQ: AMZN), Azure (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Google Cloud Platform (NASDAQ: GOOGL), and evolution of the innovation gap
Questions
1.
How would you compare the customer bases for AWS [Amazon Web Services], Azure and Google Cloud Platform? Do they differ in terms of customer size or industry vertical?
2.
You mentioned Google Cloud Platform has done well with start-ups and is starting to gain traction with enterprise customers. As Google starts to increase its cloud computing workload, will it struggle to scale and drive customers away to Azure or AWS?
3.
There’s a perception that retail companies are sceptical of AWS, given Amazon’s competitive threat to their businesses. How much does that happen in the industry? Are retail customers a big opportunity for Google Cloud Platform and Azure?
4.
Do you think AWS’s total addressable market is shrinking or is constrained in a way Azure’s and Google Cloud Platform’s aren’t?
5.
Do AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform tend to have stronger positions in certain industry verticals?
6.
Are any of the three major cloud providers focusing on any particular industry vertical or geographies? Does competitive intensity differ across regions or industry verticals?
7.
Do you think market share dynamics between the three core players differ in France and Germany relative to the UK?
8.
With the major cloud vendors focusing on France and local European markets, do you think there is room for local players such as OVHcloud in the coming 2-3 years?
9.
Do you think local cloud providers will only be relevant for industries where there has to be some level of specialisation or where there’s a big security consideration, such as banking? Do you think companies such as OVHcloud will have to specialise in highly regulated industries?
10.
What are your thoughts on Chinese players, such as Alibaba Cloud? What do you think of the threat of that company moving into the European market? Is there much demand or are these companies viewed with scepticism?
11.
Do you think Chinese players are ahead of AWS, Azure and Google on the innovation front, especially around things such as AI?
12.
What kind of timeline do you think Chinese cloud providers can start to grow and gain scale in Europe? Do you think that in five years’ time, Chinese players will have 10% of the European market?
13.
How do you assess cloud penetration workloads in Europe? How do you assess growth rates? How much of the market has been penetrated?
14.
You mentioned 70% of the market is still untapped. Do you have a sense of how often companies are refreshing? Of that 70% of the market that’s untapped, what proportion will refresh their workload and shift onto the cloud each year?
15.
Are there any industry verticals with a higher propensity for customers to shift workloads to the cloud, or where that acceleration is higher than other industries?
16.
How do you think revenue is splitting out for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform across IaaS vs PaaS?
17.
It seems pricing for infrastructure-as-a-service is becoming more commoditised, but are there any pockets within infrastructure-as-a-service where providers can realise higher margins across compute, storage or network?
18.
Do you think clients actually base their decisions on pricing? Do you think pricing has further to fall?
19.
Where do you think infrastructure-as-a-service margins will move to over the next 2-3 years? Do you think this will almost be a loss leader, and AWS and Azure will be either 0% margin or even negative margin to initially land customers?
20.
How do you assess the growth of customers increasingly wanting to use more than one provider?
21.
Do you think Google’s new offering and expansion into the hybrid cloud appeals to a certain type of customer? Or will any customer be interested in what Google’s doing?
22.
Who do you expect to benefit from the increasing shift towards multi-cloud deployment? Who is at a threat for? Do you think this is a threat to AWS as they will increasingly lose wallet share? Does it impact customer lock-in? You mentioned AWS can get customers on three-year contracts. Do you think this will impact customer longevity with AWS?
23.
Which cloud provider do you think has the best offerings to cater to the increasing demand for platform-as- a-service and SaaS?
24.
How quick will AWS, Google and Azure be in cross-selling additional services to a client? Once they do, what kind of margins can they achieve within that customer and how quickly?
25.
How do you expect margins per deal to evolve for the big three players in Europe as they can increase additional services within deals?
26.
Why do you think cloud providers have been less effective at building out their own data centres in Europe than in the US, and have had to rely more on data centre and colocation providers?
27.
Where do you think spend on infrastructure-as-a-service vs platform-as-a-service will rest in the coming 2- 3 years? You mentioned that for AWS, it’s about an 80/20 split. When do you think we’ll get to 60/40 or 50/50?
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