Analysts forecast revenue growth for Amazon's cloud

Amazon's web services division could become an important earner for the company, according to a report released today by UBS Investment Research.

Analysts Brian Pitz and Brian Fitzgerald predict AWS revenues of $500m (£313m) in 2010, rising to $750m (£470) by 2011. They single out AWS's EC2 and S3 platforms for future growth. The EC2 - the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud - and the S3 - Amazon Simple Storage Service - are heavy hitters in the market. UBS summarise the services as being like a rentable IT infrastructure, allowing companies to both create and run applications in the cloud, and store big chunks of data.

Amazon is also absent from the recent OpenStack scheme which is open-sourcing a lot of cloud technology, unlike some competitors. RackSpace, which is according to the UBS report, AWS's main competitor described its involvement in OpenStack to ZDNet UK as "a win-win situation for our competitors".

AWS has also recently bulked out its infrastructure by hosting AWS services in a datacentre in Singapore. Previously the AWS platform was only available in datacentres in the USA and Europe, according to Data Centre Knowledge. This will help preserve redundancy and availability in the future.

However, outside the report, there is competition: if OpenStack succeeds, RackSpace could be a leader in an expanding market, claiming the same kind of benefits that Amazon has been able to by being an early provider of cloud computing (EC2 launched in 2006) and at this year's I/O conference Google announced plans for their own online data storage service.