Back in early 2013, the COO of VMWare once said the following about Amazon “I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books”. Well, it wasn’t a happy ending for the COO and we know how the story turned out. Amazon is the clear cut leader in cloud – whatever the percentage is, its a lot, and more than everyone else combined. Fortunately for Akamai, they are in such a great market position that if even IBM or Cisco announced to the world they plan on dethroning Akamai, there would be yawns all over the place.
Amazon is Cloud and Akamai is traditional Content Delivery (caching & streaming), but in Cloud Security, there is no one with a similar pedigree. It doesn’t mean vast riches can’t be earned in Cloud or Content Delivery for everyone not name Amazon and Akamai, its just these two giants dwarf everyone else in market share and revenue. The Cloud Security market is up for grabs, and in the next 3 years, we’ll begin to see the Amazon and Akamai of Cloud Security, whoever it will be. As far as who will it be, this is a difficult question we’ll try to answer in the coming weeks. But whoever it is, this is going to be one lucky company, kinda.