Amazon Courts Hedgies

TechFlash reports: Amazon.com has targeted its cloud-computing services at startups, Fortune 500 companies, government, and scientists. It's also quietly looking to hedge funds as another customer base. Amazon is holding a cloud-computing event specifically for hedge funds in New York City on October 19. It's selling the cloud as a cost-effective way for hedge funds to process the large amounts of data required for their often complex trading strategies. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos could certainly talk shop with the hedge fund crowd. He helped build hedge fund strategies on Wall Street before heading west to found Amazon.

Here's the Amazon Web Services pitch to hedge funds, which are investment vehicles for wealthy individuals and institutions:

For many hedge funds, being successful in today’s economic environment requires the ability to process large quantities of data quickly to arrive at good investment decisions. Traditionally, a fund’s ability to process this data has been limited by the amount of computing and storage resources it could acquire. This meant funds often had to make large upfront investments in servers, storage, networks, and facilities, with limited flexibility to handle variable needs. Every dollar spent on computing infrastructure meant less was available for the more mission-critical activity—investing. Today, cloud computing is changing the paradigm of how IT resources are acquired and consumed. Instead of purchasing IT infrastructure with upfront capital investment, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is enabling companies to access only what is needed, and pay for the hours used (e.g. servers), or gigabytes consumed (e.g. storage).

Amazon executives have said in the past that some hedge funds—which they decline to name—already use the company's cloud services. Clearly Amazon sees more growth opportunity here. Bezos, according to his official Amazon bio, helped "build one of the most technically sophisticated quantitative hedge funds on Wall Street for D. E. Shaw & Co." before founding Amazon.com.