When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition
The announcement skirts around technical details, as usual, but contains a worrying amount of buzzwords that overlap with the company’s product. Somebody responds with a grimace emoji 😬. Others reply with all the ways AWS FooBar is totally not like our product and, anyway, ours is better, and, and… The flurry of replies betrays their true collective emotion: We’re screwed.
As a marketing consultant to enterprise software startups for the past six years, I’ve helped companies navigate and succeed in this scenario at least eight times.[1] In this article I explain why every software startup should be prepared for this scenario, why the initial panic is justified, and how to position products against alternatives from “Big Cloud” (AWS, Azure, GCP).
This is especially true if your product is in the serverless, stream processing, machine learning, containerization, IoT, data warehousing, or batch processing space. Those are the fastest growing cloud services—according to a survey from Rightscale—and Big Cloud companies know it.
