We touched on this in class in b-school, but it will be interesting to see how Amazon fares with their cloud computing business, known as Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is certainly a strong growth opportunity for the electronic commerce company, a company that is now larger than IBM and Walt Disney in market cap, and on the brink of becoming one of the largest conglomerates. Amazon is now a mega-corp made up of an e-commerce company, a hardware and device maker, a government services provider, a cloud computing and marketing company, a transportation and logistics outfit, a lender, a payment processor, and a warehouse operator. WHEW. Earnings were released last Thursday, with $1.56 billion in sales the first quarter, up 49% from the year earlier. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has called AWS a "$5 billion business." Industry experts are watching this roll-out like a hawk. Key success factors will be the adoption of the large enterprise business, which will come hand in hand with businesses trusting Amazon to control mass quantities of valuable corporate data, a cultural shift to boot.

Above: CEO Jeff Bezos.