Amazon Building Dedicated Sales Force For CloudFront Delivery Services

With Amazon's content delivery offering now in full swing, Amazon is currently out in the market recruiting account managers and biz dev managers for a dedicated sales force that will focus on selling CloudFront services. Amazon is using the same model for CloudFront as they do for all of their other services, which are mostly self serve, but with additional small, focused teams to work with larger customers who may want more direct interaction with Amazon.

In addition, last week Amazon rolled out "CloudFront Access Logs" which gives customers details on who is consuming their content and Amazon's Elastic MapReduce team has also built a sample application, CloudFront LogAnalyzer that will analyze Amazon CloudFront access logs.

While the functionality of Amazon's delivery services are still pretty bare bones, as soon as Amazon adds streaming capabilities to CloudFront, they will very easily become the de facto standard for those who need very basic video delivery services. While not all content owners will be a fit for CloudFront, Amazon can very easily take over the commoditized portion of the market and it will be difficult for hosting providers to compete with a similar offering, at the same price point. Delivering video is not complex when you're not a major media company and you don't have huge traffic spikes and many video ecosystem pieces. And with the process of sticking a bunch of video clips on a network becoming even easier, Amazon will be in the drivers seat to own the market for small and medium sized content owners who need simple delivery, at a great price.

For Amazon, everything about this business is in their favor. Unlike other CDNs, Amazon does not need to worry about raising money, has many development resources in-house, has a global brand and does not need to rush to get anything out the door by a certain deadline. Amazon has time, money and expertise on their side and in the long run, this is going to be bad news for small regional streaming providers and hosting companies.