Amazon clearly has a powerful B2C platform, where many of us acquire goods online every day. However, Amazon through its AWS cloud capability offers platform capability to larger corporations, and as it becomes better at data analytics, it could become a player in the B2B platform world. Even so it will still need to be able to share and exchange data with other key industrial B2B platforms.
The stark truth of platforms and ecosystems for B2B companies is that there will never be one dominant platform that everyone accepts and leverages. In fact there will almost always be several segmented platforms in any company or industry. This means there is real value in being a platform bridge or connector.

At its annual re:Invent user conference in Las Vegas today, public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Amazon Lightsail, a new way for developers to quickly and easily get access to low-cost virtual private servers (VPS).

They don’t need to worry about provisioning storage, security groups, or identity and access management (IAM) when they want to just get a box to run a simple application. They can just use Amazon Lightsail now.

The thing is, for years companies like Linode and BlueHost have offered cheap VPS options. The startup DigitalOcean has risen to popularity because it made the VPS hip and a simpler alternative to AWS. Now AWS is directly going after the DigitalOcean style of cloud infrastructure — starting at $5, the Lightsail VPS prices are certainly competitive.