AWS is looking to reduce customers’ bills for cloud services, but the company clearly has its own reasons for doing so.
AWS is the leading provider in the cloud market, with roughly a third of the overall market. In spite of its lead, according to Business Insider, the company has a reputation for surprise bills, hidden costs, and “artificially high” fees. In fact, Insider goes so far as to call AWS “a poster child for the surprise cloud bill that customers now dread.” The company now says it is working to address the issues and help lower bills.
“When the pandemic started, we started to work with a lot of customers on how they can reduce their cloud costs,” said Mark Schwartz, an enterprise strategist at AWS. “But that’s not just special for the pandemic.”
While the cost decreases will be welcome for most customers, Amazon definitely has a long-term plan behind the change.
“Our view is that if we can make customers more successful in the cloud, that is going to determine the future of the cloud,” Schwartz told Insider. “I’m going to customer executives and saying, ‘How can I help you be more successful?’ And that’s really the long game for us.”
In other words: Save the customer money now and they’ll spend more over the long term.
“They’re very happy to see a customer’s cloud consumption go down over two or three quarters,” Neil Lomax, the president of sales at AWS IT partner SoftwareONE, told Insider. “They know that if they do that, the customer will come back stronger because they get way more confidence in that cloud environment.”
