This is clearly not an apples to apples comparison, but Amazon.com is apparently having great success moving beyond its core business (e-commerce) into what is often called “cloud computing.”
Mashable has the breakdown on Amazon’s latest earnings report, including these juicy nuggets on areas of new revenue growth:
Amazon’s S3 service now hosts more than 10 billion files, doubling in just the past six months. Meanwhile, an additional 25,000 developers signed up for the company’s web services program in the past quarter, bringing the total to 290,000. Additionally, sales from third-party merchants (aka, affiliates and people selling via Amazon’s web services) made up 32% of total sales. All of these factors point to Amazon diversifying its revenue, as well as in the long-run reducing the amount of money it spends on marketing as more people build applications that link into the company’s huge product database and fulfillment capabilities.
These gains reflect the promise of telecom service providers “opening up” their networks and 1) offering core services (storage, API access to call management and other services) and 2) allowing others to mashup applications that use carrier services among the piece parts.
To me, the interesting question is this: can telcos combine their never-ending, triple/quad-play-based effort focus on increasing ARPU — average revenue per user — with new revenue streams based on open access-driven scale and volume?
In Amazon’s case, open access-driven scale equals 10 billion files and 250,000 developers consuming its APIs.
What are the analogous telephony 2.0 metrics of scale and volume success?
