In 2013, the Central Intelligence Agency awarded a $600-million contract to Amazon Web Services Inc., seriously ticking off competitor IBM Corp., which took it all the way to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

“The judge in the ruling actually said, ‘Amazon has a better product.’ That was what I call the shot heard around the cloud,” said John Furrier (@furrier) (pictured, right), in a discussion with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21) (pictured, left), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio.

That win for Amazon planted seeds that have grown steadily, as evidenced by the 10,000-strong turnout for the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C., this week.

“This is a new growth pillar — unpredicted by Wall Street — a new growth predictor for revenue for Amazon,” said Furrier, citing the government’s new willingness to explore agile cloud information technology.

The government is now having the same epiphany that many enterprises have had over the past few years: Cloud providers can invest in advanced infrastructure that they could never match in their on-premise data centers, Frick explained.

Still, budget-conscious data centers may not be entirely sold on cloud yet.

“The other thing we always hear about cloud is at some point it’s cheaper to own rather than rent,” Frick said.

A one-word answer to this might be “Netflix,” which still runs on Amazon despite its astronomical bandwidth requirements.

Cloud’s trump card in cost comparisons is that it lets users’ dial resources up or down depending on usage, Frick added.

“Again, you have to manage it; you don’t want that expensive bill,” he said.

Budging the budget

So what’s not to love about cloud for the private sector?

Even if the majority in a given government agency favors cloud, all it takes is a stiff high-level bureaucrat to deny funding for it, Walls stated.

“You might have the best mousetrap in the world, but somebody says, ‘Nah, you can’t write that check this year. Maybe next year,'” he said.

Nonetheless, Amazon’s prospects look bright here, in Furrier’s view; but, “They have to start getting the cadence of re:Invent launches into the public sector,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit.

Photo: SiliconANGLE