Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN):
-- Altexa, Amazon.com, Elephant Drive, Jungle Disk, LA NACION,
MediaSilo, Microsoft, and SmugMug among companies storing more
than 800 million total data objects using Amazon S3 from
Amazon Web Services
Early World Cup victories by Argentina triggered a flood of
website traffic for the country's second-largest newspaper, LA NACION.
Uncertain whether its banner ads would survive the traffic spike,
LANACION.COM searched for a better solution to store and serve ads
that was cheap enough not to cut into advertising profits, simple
enough to get up and running immediately, and massively scalable in
case the team kept winning. That's when LANACION.COM discovered Amazon
Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Within hours, the site started
storing ads in Amazon S3 to ease the load on its servers. After seeing
how well Amazon S3 performed and how much the paper saved by using the
service, LANACION.COM moved all of its ads to Amazon S3.
Nearly 7,000 miles away in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft wanted
to expand its MSDN Direct Student Download program. "We needed a
storage and delivery solution that made it simple, fast, and
dependable for students in hundreds of countries around the world to
download our software at any time," said Joe Wilson, Director of
Academic Initiatives in the Developer Marketing division at Microsoft
Corp. Microsoft wanted to scale the program up without any upfront or
increased ongoing expenses, which is why it chose Amazon S3. Microsoft
expanded the program while managing to cut storage costs by more than
90 percent since switching to Amazon S3. "In addition to being easy
for our users, Amazon S3 allows us to deploy and scale up in a very
cost-efficient manner," said Wilson.
Growing photo-sharing company SmugMug was on the brink of becoming
the victim of its own success in early 2006. Growth was accelerating
rapidly and CEO Don MacAskill was concerned his storage solution for
the hundreds of millions of images SmugMug managed would not reliably
or cost-efficiently meet the scaling requirements he would soon have.
With just one programmer and a tight budget, SmugMug needed storage
that was inexpensive, simple and reliable. "We looked at Amazon S3's
pricing, design and ease-of-use, and were blown away. Amazon S3 is
simple and elegant, so much so that it was basically a drop-in
addition to our current infrastructure," said MacAskill. SmugMug took
just five days to integrate with Amazon S3 and has saved $500,000 in
storage expenditures since starting to use the service in March while
adding more than 10 terabytes of images each month - all with zero
increase in staff or data center space. "Amazon S3 makes it possible
for SmugMug to compete with huge, deep-pocketed companies without
having to raise massive amounts of cash for hardware," said MacAskill.
These examples represent the breadth of companies choosing to use
the web-scale storage offered by Amazon S3. Global enterprises like
Microsoft are using Amazon S3 to dramatically reduce their storage
costs without compromising scale or reliability. On the opposite end
of the spectrum, small but fast-growing businesses such as SmugMug
that depend on storage are using Amazon S3's benefits of scale and
cost-efficiency that were previously only available to large
companies. Amazon.com continues to use Amazon S3 for its own business
as well, recently launching new digital initiatives (described below
under "Amazon.com") that store and retrieve large data files using
Amazon S3.
Amazon S3 (http://aws.amazon.com/s3) provides a web services
interface that lets businesses simply and quickly store and retrieve
any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Amazon S3
uses the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, and inexpensive data
storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network
of web sites. There is no minimum fee and developers pay only for what
they use at a rate of just $0.15 per gigabyte of storage per month and
$0.20 per gigabyte of data transferred. Amazon S3 is available from
Amazon Web Services (http://aws.amazon.com), a subsidiary of
Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN). Launched on March 14, Amazon S3 now holds
more than 800 million total data objects.
"Scaling successfully is becoming a business requirement for
building a business or application on the Web," said Adam Selipsky,
Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations, Amazon
Web Services. "We're delighted to see such a wide variety of
businesses discovering that with Amazon S3 they can have web-scale
storage and cut costs, without compromising reliability."
Below are other examples of businesses that are using Amazon S3:
Altexa
Altexa Software used Amazon S3 to overhaul its Altexa Backup
product, which aims to make data backup an easy, automated and
consistent task for consumers and small businesses. Amazon S3 replaced
Altexa's in-house storage system that was becoming expensive and
unreliable as their business grew. Altexa switched over to Amazon S3
in just two days and now offers its customers a storage product that
costs 15 times less than competitive solutions.
"As soon as we heard about Amazon S3 we were intrigued with its
possibilities for Altexa," said Altexa CEO Mark Walker. "When we
learned of the pricing model and saw for ourselves its ease of use and
scalability, we knew it was the best choice for Altexa. Amazon S3 has
taken away the burden of back-up storage and freed-up our development
team to concentrate its efforts on our product offering."
Amazon.com
Amazon.com continues to use Amazon S3 for its own business. Among
the many new company initiatives and customer features using the
service is "Amazon Upgrade." The new program lets customers who
purchase or have previously purchased the physical copy of a book to
also buy 24x7 online access to the book for approximately 10 to 20
percent more. Customers can search the entire text of the book, take
notes, add highlights and bookmarks, and print specific pages from any
web browser. The full content of the tens of thousands of books
available through Amazon Upgrade is stored in Amazon S3. Amazon
securely stores the encrypted book contents using the same Amazon S3
hardware, interface and services available to any developer.
ElephantDrive
Online storage provider ElephantDrive started using Amazon S3 as
backup during its datacenter migration. The company was so pleased
with Amazon S3's performance and ease of use that it quickly moved to
integrate the storage solution into its regular business operations.
Free to focus on marketing and sales instead of issues like storage,
ElephantDrive has more than doubled its user base and quadrupled its
number of digital assets since moving to Amazon S3. This growth comes
with zero increase in capital costs and no concerns about reliability
or scale.
"Our business plan relied in part upon the availability of massive
commodity-based storage provided by an established and trustworthy
enterprise. So when Amazon S3 launched, we were ecstatic. It is
precisely the sort of service we anticipated, offered by precisely the
kind of player we hoped to partner with," said ElephantDrive
Co-Founder Ben Widhelm. "We are in the business of providing the best
online storage service possible. And since Amazon S3 has enabled easy
access to world-class storage, we can concentrate on delivering a
world-class service."
Jungle Disk
Jungle Disk built a simple, reliable and affordable online data
back-up service using Amazon S3. Amazon S3's pay-as-you-go pricing
model allowed Jungle Disk to offer their customers the same benefit -
to only pay for the storage they use instead of paying a flat fee for
storage space that they may or may not use. The simplicity of the
Amazon S3 API meant that Jungle Disk was up and running with its new
service in less than 30 days from start to finish. The popularity of
Jungle Disk's product has grown tremendously in the past 60 days, with
thousands of customers already signed up.
"From a developer's perspective, the ease of use of Amazon S3 is a
huge benefit," said Jungle Disk Lead Developer Dave Wright. "For our
customers, the affordable pricing is key, as is the peace of mind they
have in knowing their important data is stored with Amazon - a company
they can trust to safeguard it for years to come."
MediaSilo
Digital asset management solution provider MediaSilo uses Amazon
S3 because it makes their video downloads cheaper and quicker for
customers. Amazon S3 allows MediaSilo to offer a service to video
professionals that frees them to collaborate and manage
post-production projects over the Internet without having to download
any software or pay MediaSilo for costly storage. With the ability to
offer its customers virtually unlimited storage at a cheap rate,
MediaSilo expects to service upwards of 300 accounts with up to 50
gigabytes of data each by the end of the year.
"Amazon S3 has had a profound impact on our business," said Kai
Pradel, MediaSilo president. "The business implications are
significant. If we offer our subscribers large amounts of storage, we
have to plan accordingly and purchase hard drive space, perform
backups and regular maintenance. With Amazon S3, we pay for what we
use and can shift our focus to the other important elements of our
business."
Full case studies on the companies above and their use of Amazon
S3 are available on the Amazon Web Services website under "Success
Stories" at http://aws.amazon.com.
Other news: Amazon Simple Queue Service
Also today, Amazon Web Services released the Amazon Simple Queue
Service (Amazon SQS) for developers. Amazon SQS offers a reliable,
highly scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel
between computers. By using Amazon SQS, developers can simply move
data between distributed application components performing different
tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component to be
always available. Using Amazon SQS queues frees developers from
worrying about how to transport or store information, allowing them to
focus on building distinctive applications for their customers. Amazon
SQS works by exposing Amazon's web-scale messaging infrastructure as a
web service at extremely low cost to developers. Any computer on the
Internet can add or read messages without any installed software or
special firewall configurations, no matter where it is or when it is
available. Developers can get started using Amazon SQS today at
http://aws.amazon.com/sqs.
Additionally, Microsoft has built functionality for Amazon SQS
that allows software developers who use the Windows Communication
Foundation (WCF) to send their messages through Amazon SQS without
having to change their application code. This functionality makes it
easy for WCF applications to pass messages to other systems that are
not in their network, such as remote browser-based applications and
systems run by their business partners.
About Amazon Web Services LLC
Launched in July 2002, Amazon Web Services exposes technology and
product data from Amazon and its affiliates that enable developers to
build innovative and entrepreneurial applications on their own. More
than 160,000 developers have signed up to use Amazon Web Services
since its inception. Amazon Web Services recently launched the
Solutions Catalog where developers can list the businesses,
applications, and solutions they have built using Amazon Web Services.
The catalog is available at http://solutions.amazonwebservices.com.
Amazon Web Services LLC is an Amazon.com company.
About Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in
Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers
Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com seeks to be Earth's most
customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover
anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its
customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers
offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories
such as health and personal care, jewelry and watches, gourmet food,
sports and outdoors, apparel and accessories, books, music, DVDs,
electronics and office, toys and baby, and home and garden.
Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including
www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp,
www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and www.joyo.com.
As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms
include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context
indicates otherwise.
Forward-Looking Statement
This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the
meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E
of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ
significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking
statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others,
risks related to competition, management of growth, potential
fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes
of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization,
seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic
transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, significant
amount of indebtedness, inventory, limited operating history,
government regulation and taxation, payments, fraud, consumer trends,
and new business areas. More information about factors that
potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in
Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission,
including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December
31, 2005, and all subsequent filings.
