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Being an early mover on a particular technology or service doesn’t always mean that a company will jump out in front of the crowd and stay there, but in the case of Amazon’s online storage business, it certainly did.
Amazon debuted its Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), its first publicly available Web service, in March 2006 and in Europe a year and a half later. By the end of 2006, or within nine months of its launch, S3 was storing 2.9 billion objects.
The number of stored objects has been growing at 155 percent to 185 percent each year since-to 14 billion by Q4 2007, 40 billion by Q4 2008, 102 billion by 2009, and 262 billion by 2010.
Amazon is now projected to store some 668 billion objects by the end of this year and way more than 1 trillion (1.72T) by the end of 2012, according to new statistics published by the Amazon Web Services department.
There’s no question among analysts, trade journalists who cover the sector regularly and market researchers that Amazon S3 currently is the top-of-mind Web-storage service in the world, with all others being compared to it.
That being said, there is no shortage of need to store the exploding amount of data being created around the world by everybody with a connected device, be it a PC, a camera, a handheld device or something else.
Competing service providers that include Box, Dropbox, Carbonite, CommVault, Asigra, EMC Mozy, Iron Mountain Digital, i365, SugarSync, Backblaze, iDrive, LiveDrive and a number of others are smaller, but virtually all of them are also growing at healthy rates.