Big tech companies haveen grown immensely over the past two decades. Companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google have become household names with consumers and investors alike as they relentlessly increase their product offerings and revenue. Looking at the size and scale of these companies, it is easy to draw the conclusion that small and medium businesses (SMBs) are a dying breed. However, the pioneering of large tech firms has trailblazed a landscape of easily accessible, cloud-based services that can drive growth for SMBs. While they may be reluctant to adopt these new cloud-based services, SMBs that do so are setting themselves up to stay ahead of their competition.
Behind the scenes, cloud providers are responsible for propping up the back end of many of the most trafficked websites. Pinterest, Netflix, and even Apple all use cloud services to run parts of their operations. But it’s not just business-to-consumer companies that are making use of the cloud, it’s industry-specific organizations as well. A new crop of vertical business-to-business (B2B) companies have emerged in the past decade—all making use of the cloud to offer streamlined versions of existing services. These verticalized companies can trace their origins back to the original cloud computing platform: Amazon Web Services (AWS).