AWS has grown over the past decade into a front-runner in the race to build a big business in cloud-computing services. It offers to replace traditional corporate computing—a complex assemblage of hardware and software housed in a company data center—with a la carte services over the Internet.
That innovation set in motion an information-technology shift that is squeezing the sales and margins of vendors of hardware, such as Dell, EMC Corp., and Cisco Systems Inc., and of software, including Oracle Corp. and VMware Inc. Along the way, it attracted direct competition from Google Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., International Business Machines Corp. and Microsoft Corp. that, by all accounts, it is winning handily.
