Amazon Redshift Available for All

Amazon.com Inc. ( AMZN - Analyst Report ) recently announced a cloud data storage solution from Amazon Web Services (AWS), thus further expanding its cloud offerings.

Amazon Redshift, as this new cloud-based data warehouse service is called, a low-cost solution for managing and automating common administrative tasks like provisioning, configuring, monitoring, taking backups and securing a data warehouse.

The company said that any AWS customer can launch a Redshift cluster from within the AWS management console for $1,000 per terabyte per year.

Earlier, companies incurred significant costs to build their own infrastructure for data storage. They had to make a substantial payment upfront, after which they would invest further to purchase additional storage space anticipating growing backup demand.

This resulted in under-utilized capacity and unnecessary expenses. With Amazon Redshift, companies will not only be able to lower the cost of a data warehouse but also reduce the workload by analyzing large amounts of data very quickly.

Currently, Amazon Redshift is only available in the U.S. East (N. Virginia) Region but will be rolled out to other AWS Regions in the coming months.

Cloud storage came into prominence in 2009, with Nirvanix and Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) being two of the major pioneers. Since then, Amazon has continued to dominate the space, with other players like Rackspace ( RAX - Snapshot Report ) and Microsoft ( MSFT - Analyst Report ) offering their own solutions.

Amazon is one of the leading players in the extremely fast-growing retail ecommerce market. Strong growth prospects here are making the market more competitive by the day. Additionally, the company serves developers through Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides access to technology infrastructure that developers can use to enable various types of virtual businesses.

Amazon is expanding AWS internationally and investing heavily in technology infrastructure to support the rapid growth in AWS. We remain extremely positive about AWS’s growth and expect Amazon to remain one of the leading players in the fast-growing ecommerce market.

Though these investments could suppress near-term margin expansion, Amazon is expected to benefit in the long term, given significant growth potential in domestic and more so in international ecommerce.

Currently, Amazon has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Other stock that has been performing well and are worth looking into include Interdigital Inc. ( IDCC - Snapshot Report ) which carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).