SEATTLE — About a month ago, Microsoft touted in a news release what appeared to be a sales victory: Symantec would use Microsoft’s cloud-computing services to help power its Norton-branded cybersecurity products.
On Wednesday, Amazon Web Services returned fire. The Amazon unit said Symantec had chosen AWS for “the vast majority of its cloud workloads,” appearing to trump its biggest rival in the emerging market for on-demand computing infrastructure.
Businesses are increasingly running their software programs and storing their data on servers rented from Amazon, Microsoft or Google, rather than using their own corporate data centers. That’s set up a marketing war, as cloud-computing providers seek to demonstrate their expertise by trumpeting the business they get from well-known customers.
Sometimes, as in Symantec’s split business, the news can seem contradictory. That’s partly because sprawling corporate customers use hundreds or thousands of software services built by many vendors.
Monday is the kickoff of re:Invent, the AWS conference in Las Vegas that draws tens of thousands of developers, customers and technology partners. The trade show features a set of AWS announcements of new features and customers.
