I consult or have consulted multiple tech startups that suddenly found themselves competing against an AWS service like CloudWatch, Glue, Sagemaker, and so on.
In every one of those cases, nothing bad happened. Here's why:
- These AWS products are more like single-purpose utilities than complete solutions. They cover just the basic use cases. If your competing product is also single-purpose then yes, you should be worried. But if you're selling a platform, suite, or an enterprise product (like the companies I work with), then you're probably fine.
- These products are meant to plug into a developer's workflow, like one piece of a larger puzzle. That means requiring technical expertise. If your product is used by both practitioners and managers then you're fine.
- AWS tools are for AWS users. Does your product support Google Cloud and/or Azure?
- AWS products are provided "as is." Most users will have little to no input into the product roadmap and have little hope for getting their feature requests fulfilled. As a (presumably) smaller company, your agility and ability to implement customer feedback is an advantage.
There's more to say on this but the tl;dr is don't worry. For every utility product AWS offers, there are dozens of alternative solutions that are thriving.
Edit to clarify my statement and to reconcile with the other stories where companies were pushed out of the market by AWS: If you're selling infrastructure such as email servers, data storage of any kind, etc, then yes you should be worried if AWS moves in. Doesn't mean AWS will win by default (see: Snowflake vs Redshift), but the amount of resources Amazon puts behind those things is significantly greater than their add-on solutions. With that said, even a company the size of Amazon can't grab an entire market immediately; there's plenty of business to be won by both sides if you play things right... That's what makes it fun!
In every one of those cases, nothing bad happened. Here's why:
- These AWS products are more like single-purpose utilities than complete solutions. They cover just the basic use cases. If your competing product is also single-purpose then yes, you should be worried. But if you're selling a platform, suite, or an enterprise product (like the companies I work with), then you're probably fine.
- These products are meant to plug into a developer's workflow, like one piece of a larger puzzle. That means requiring technical expertise. If your product is used by both practitioners and managers then you're fine.
- AWS tools are for AWS users. Does your product support Google Cloud and/or Azure?
- AWS products are provided "as is." Most users will have little to no input into the product roadmap and have little hope for getting their feature requests fulfilled. As a (presumably) smaller company, your agility and ability to implement customer feedback is an advantage.
There's more to say on this but the tl;dr is don't worry. For every utility product AWS offers, there are dozens of alternative solutions that are thriving.
Edit to clarify my statement and to reconcile with the other stories where companies were pushed out of the market by AWS: If you're selling infrastructure such as email servers, data storage of any kind, etc, then yes you should be worried if AWS moves in. Doesn't mean AWS will win by default (see: Snowflake vs Redshift), but the amount of resources Amazon puts behind those things is significantly greater than their add-on solutions. With that said, even a company the size of Amazon can't grab an entire market immediately; there's plenty of business to be won by both sides if you play things right... That's what makes it fun!