Amazon dominant in cloud services, too Today, it is a dominant player in a cloud services sector that research outfit Gartner forecast would grow almost 20 percent to $109 billion worldwide in 2012. Craig Labovitz , a veteran Internet researcher and CEO of analysis group DeepField, points out that while the market is skyrocketing, it is also quickly consolidating to a few major players - the way railroads once reduced from many to a few operators. Maintaining software and servers that underpin websites, businesses and government agencies is an expensive task. Electronics manufacturer Samsung, picture sharing website Pinterest, and even NASA use it for their computing needs. Amazon keeps most usage statistics a secret, but an analysis by DeepField in April estimated that over one-third of Internet users visit a website powered by Amazon each day, and that more than 10 percent of the top 10,000 websites, as ranked by analytics firm Alexa, use Amazon cloud infrastructure. While there are many specialties, cloud computing services like Amazon typically offer some combination of three types of services: computing power, so that businesses can ramp up service when there is high demand; storage, essentially external hard drives for reams of data; and a platform to build and maintain software applications.