I haven’t been impressed with any answers about why Amazon would do this. It seems to come down to “why not?” But maybe even more so, this is what AWS is. I just remembered this great post from a couple months ago:
According to rdutt, Amazon Cognito competes with Okta, Amazon Connect competes with Twilio, AWS Quicksight competes with Alteryx, and Amazon Cloudwatch competes with New Relic.
We know these companies have other (large) competitors as well, including Microsoft for Okta, Tableau for Alteryx, and Cisco (AppDynamics) for New Relic.
Sounds a lot like what amazon has been doing for several years with Amazon Basics…they mine their own data to see what sells, copy the idea and sell it themselves.
Bear, left off that list is the one market where Amazon does have the best product and that is in programmatic advertising. They will do more than $10 billion this year and have grown faster than even TTD. They are now taking business from Facebook and Google.
This is a direct competitor to TTD. My concern here is we all thought TTD was #3 but now it is clear they are #4 and will always be a puny pea in the scheme of things. No one has better data than Amazon for advertisers.
Fortunately Amazon continues to make their product Amazon focused and not neutral like TTD. But this is the one area that Amazon is not just a lesser “me too” but perhaps the leading product in the field.
Only so many markets one can hyper focus on. Even Amazon cannot keep up w all. But in ads they are going all out.
NoSQL seems to be a hugely growing market, and Amazon might take a bit of it. But I’ll continue to bet on the rapidly growing leader, MDB.
Pretty much my own opinion. In one post I wrote that DocumentDB will be one of a long list of also rans (or words to that effect). In databases there is one leader and a long tail of other players. Until the market decides otherwise, MongoDB will remain the leader in NoSQL.
Am wondering if perhaps buying or adding to amazon is the wise thing to do here…
I feel that is almost always a wise thing to do, at least it has been for almost any time in the past 20 years (except for about the last 6 months). They’re getting more profitable all the time (as that has always been the biggest knock on them), and especially taking into account Tinker’s post about Amazon, TTD, and programmatic advertising.
I agree with most here that MDB should be fine as long as they keep innovating and improving and I will continue holding my position (which fell from 2nd to 5th in my portfolio with yesterday’s drop).
AWS have always done this. They did it with RDS (SQL databases that run Postgres/Mysql/Aurora etc), ElasticSearch (with both their managed ElasticSearch instance, and their proprietary CloudSearch service), and every other part of the cloud compute stack.
This MongoDB is the leader in the NoSQL space, so they will provide that service because people who use AWS want it.
So I think the “This is what AWS is” is the answer.
Will it be as good as the alternative? in my experience, no (experience with Quicksight, CloudWatch, Cognito, ElasticSearch in particular).
RDS (databases) works pretty well, although can get expensive.
I think ultimately, AWS want to provide ‘good-enough’ for 80% of the usecases, and leave the 20% to the MDBs and ESTCs, Tableaus, etc of the world.
I’d expect a similar offering at some point from Google, Microsoft and Baidu.
I think this Q is fine. But next Q Atlas growth should prove a clue on how many customers get attracted by the 6 months free/lower price offer from documentdb. I am holding.
Bear, left off that list is the one market where Amazon does have the best product and that is in programmatic advertising. They will do more than $10 billion this year and have grown faster than even TTD. They are now taking business from Facebook and Google.
This is a direct competitor to TTD. My concern here is we all thought TTD was #3 but now it is clear they are #4 and will always be a puny pea in the scheme of things. No one has better data than Amazon for advertisers.
Fortunately Amazon continues to make their product Amazon focused and not neutral like TTD. But this is the one area that Amazon is not just a lesser “me too” but perhaps the leading product in the field.
Only so many markets one can hyper focus on. Even Amazon cannot keep up w all. But in ads they are going all out.
I think it might be too early to count TTD out. My take is that TTD is really a 5G play because when 5G hits is when connected TV will start to grow and connected TV has always been the opportunity for TTD. They’ve always said that long term they see China as their largest opportunity and it just so happens that China is where there are so many competing streamers and where 5G should hit first. I’m excited about TTD because they are doing quite well even as their largest market opportunity has yet to emerge in a big way.