There are plenty of technology companies with hefty revenue, tens of thousands of employees and a sizable global customer base. There are also smaller, nimble firms with modest profits that can innovate fast and keep larger competitors scrambling to keep up. And then there is that rarely seen third category that combines size, massive revenue and dizzyingly fast innovation. Welcome to Amazon Web Services Inc.

“Amazon is not only the 800-pound gorilla, but they are the cheetah in the marketplace, because they move faster,” said Stu Miniman (@stu, pictured, right), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio.

Miniman along with co-host John Furrier (@furrier, center) and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren, left) weighed in during this week’s AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas. They discussed AWS’s position in the information technology market, the company’s legitimate role among verticals, its moves to capture cloud services business, and the competitive response.

Blending the IT ecosystem

In a week that featured 22 product and services announcements (according to Andy Jassy, AWS chief executive officer), industry analysts were left to assess the significant position in the IT ecosystem that AWS has staked out for itself. “This is a real merging of application developers and the more traditional kinds of companies,” Warren said. “It feels like re:Invent this year is a blending of the entire IT ecosystem.”

A key message that emerged from the various AWS releases is that the company has made major strides to debunk “fear, uncertainty and doubt” that it could not be taken seriously as a major player in enterprise cloud computing. “The big story this year is legitimacy across the board in every vertical and every category,” Furrier said. “Re-engineering and re-imagining are happening, and Amazon is just feeding the marketplace.”

As IT applications are increasingly being offered “as a service,” AWS is clearly positioning itself to be a major provider in this competitive space. The company made several announcements at AWS re:Invent in this area, including the new AWS SaaS Factory for companies looking to build software as a service solutions on AWS. “The battle is not infrastructure as a service,” Miniman said. “It is SaaS and PaaS [platform as a service].”

The intriguing question coming out of a busy week in Las Vegas will be how the other major cloud players, such as Microsoft, Google and Oracle (which took a few barbs from Jassy), respond to the latest innovations. “If the other vendors are reacting to what Amazon already announced this week, they are already too late,” Warren said. “They need to look at where Amazon is going to be in the next two to three years, and they need to start planning for that.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent.

Photo: SiliconANGLE