Amazon's e-commerce site is planning to move into Amazon Web Services. Jen Boden is Amazon's e-commerce IT director.

"Boden said her organization is in the preliminary stages of moving into AWS -- she started with some simple, homegrown applications, such as a list maintained for HR, which her team moved to AWS successfully. Larger sections of IT operations will move later with the financials likely to be last, since they are the most sensitive to security and compliance needs. Planning began last year, and the whole process might take another year and a half."

From the article it is interesting to see the confirmation that Amazon's own enterprise IT needs to go through the same transformation as any other enterprise IT team that has decades of old applications and data silos to support.

This effort is a great shot in the arm for cloud computing. The past year, most enterprise class IT shops have started pilot programs to figure out how to incorporate cloud storage and cloud computing into their roadmaps. When leaders like Amazon can point to solutions that others can follow, the laggards will come on board and we can finally move to the next phase in cloud computing and that is standards. With standards, utility computing will come one step closer.