"The acquisition, which completed on May 1, brings 70 cloud specialists into the wider group”. For comparison, Amazon has 40,000 employees in AWS.
Surely it can't be that many. And if it is, that has to include janitors at their data centers.
Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
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Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#32"The acquisition, which completed on May 1, brings 70 cloud specialists into the wider group”. For comparison, Amazon has 40,000 employees in AWS.
They will probably not attempt to compete against AWS on everything but focus on the core cloud technologies using off the shelf software and hardware. An alternative of EC2, S3, and ELB is already interesting and many companies provide that with fewer employees.
No need to waste resources on products such as AWS Greengrass, or AWS Lumberyard, or even AWS EKS.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#33In Sweden Lidl is know for being suspiciously cheap, they're even playing on it in their ads here. They had a marketing stunt where a chef started a luxury pop-up restaurant and the payoff was that it was all Lidl ingredients. "You can cook good food EVEN though you're using Lidl stuff" I'm not 100% sure that's what I want of a cloud provider.
I wonder if the self-deprecation might be a corporate branding thing? In Portugal a couple of years back there was a "marketing war" where one retailer's message went something like: "smart people buy with us" while Lidl's ads expressed something like "you don't have to be smart to buy at Lidl".
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#34I'm currently getting a 500 on the link. Here's [1] an alternative source, originally in German but put through Google Translate. There's three things to note there: it's not Lidl itself, but the parent company doing this, and the plans were announced late last year. Also they're building out the infrastructure for internal use first and are not necessarily looking to offer a cloud to customers, though they may work…
If this is the case it would make more sense. Just a note your link is still pointing to the same source.
Huh, that it did. I have legitimately no idea how that happened, other than "copy paste shenanigans on my phone". I fixed it now.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#35In Sweden Lidl is know for being suspiciously cheap, they're even playing on it in their ads here. They had a marketing stunt where a chef started a luxury pop-up restaurant and the payoff was that it was all Lidl ingredients. "You can cook good food EVEN though you're using Lidl stuff" I'm not 100% sure that's what I want of a cloud provider.
That is literally something Amazon could do.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#36I'm pretty sure they could do it, on a German-speaking scene, which is sheltered in and of itself.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#37This seems sufficiently unlikely that I wonder if something has been lost in translation. My guess would be that Lidl does expect to do something innovative in e-commerce (around, say, augmented reality) and is planning to offer that as a service to other retailers, hence the comparison with Amazon's strategy. I can't believe that Lidl is planning to compete with S3 or EC2.
LidlCloud?
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
The resources Schwarz group has are quite large. Also, EU has zeigeist that they need their own massive cloud providers. So think it as a new flavour of Boeing vs Airbus, if you will. Hopefully with not so many state subsidies.
How large are their resources? Keep in mind we are talking about clod computing here where the big 3 themselves should be doing 60-70 billion dollars in sales yearly, so large has to be relative to the Industry.
According to Wikipedia, Schwarz group had revenue of €104 billion in 2018/2019, while Amazon had revenue of $280 billion in 2019. The employee count of Schwarz group is 429k while for Amazon it's 840k.
So Amazon is double in size overall. It's not an impossible thing for them. That being said, I think their current ambitions are more limited by just running their own infrastructure.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The resources Schwarz group has are quite large. Also, EU has zeigeist that they need their own massive cloud providers. So think it as a new flavour of Boeing vs Airbus, if you will. Hopefully with not so many state subsidies.
How large are their resources? Keep in mind we are talking about clod computing here where the big 3 themselves should be doing 60-70 billion dollars in sales yearly, so large has to be relative to the Industry.
The Schwarz-Group (which operates the LIDL brand among a few others) is huge. They do about 100 billion in revenue annually and have half a million employees or so.
However, I've never heard of them venturing into tech, although I guess it's possible. Walmart is pretty solid when it comes to tech, and there's certainly enough talent across Germany and Europe.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
The resources Schwarz group has are quite large. Also, EU has zeigeist that they need their own massive cloud providers. So think it as a new flavour of Boeing vs Airbus, if you will. Hopefully with not so many state subsidies.
How large are their resources? Keep in mind we are talking about clod computing here where the big 3 themselves should be doing 60-70 billion dollars in sales yearly, so large has to be relative to the Industry.
Schwartz Groupe Revenue quoted as €104.3 billion (18/19) and 420,000 employees (per wikipedia)
edit: we all answered together!