The New Guard

Amazon Web Services has built a $6 billion-plus run-rate cloud business by doing things differently from what its executives often describe as "old guard" enterprise vendors. It's easy to see why: Amazon's roots are in retail, so it's approaching the cloud from a much different perspective than vendors like IBM, HP, Oracle and Microsoft, to name a few.

In many ways, AWS isn't selling just technology, but a new way of buying and consuming technology.

"We view what we're doing as changing the enterprise -- it's allowing them to move much more quickly, it's allowing them to innovate at a time where a lot of enterprises have stopped feeling like they were able to innovate," Andy Jassy, senior vice president of AWS, told CRN in a recent interview.

Following are six examples of why AWS does things differently from traditional enterprise vendors.