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BusinessWeek

The Web retailer is offering its vast computing power to corporations—and big names are starting to sign up

Jeff Bezos made a fortune building Amazon.com (AMZN) into one of the top players in online retailing. Now he’s looking for new ways to cash in on the company’s capabilities. One of the most intriguing, he thinks, is to move into the $1.7 billion corporate computing market, where the Web’s biggest bookstore aims to compete with IBM (IBM), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Oracle (ORCL), and Microsoft (MSFT). “That’s exactly what we’re doing,” says Bezos. “And it’s working.”

His approach is as unconventional as his strategy was when he started Amazon in 1995. The company won’t be making computers or selling software to corporations. Instead it’s offering companies the ability to tap into the vast computing capabilities of Amazon’s own data centers, in a manner almost as easy as buying the latest best-seller. Companies pay only for the computing they need, avoiding the cost of buying and operating their own gear.

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Amazon began the effort six years ago with startups and individual programmers, and more than 300,000 clients have signed on. Now, Bezos is pulling in larger customers, such as the New York Times Co. (NYT) and the Nasdaq stock exchange. “A lot of big companies are starting to believe,” says analyst Sean Hackett of market researcher IDC.

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