By Jeffrey Dastin
LAS VEGAS (Reuters) -Amazon.com Inc on Tuesday announced software drawing on its retail expertise in an effort to boost sales to businesses and remain the largest cloud-computing provider ahead of Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Inc's Google.
Taking lessons learned over years of delivering online orders to shoppers' doorsteps, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN)'s cloud division unveiled a service called AWS Supply Chain to alert businesses when inventories are low and help them address supply issues that were chronic during the pandemic.
At its annual Las Vegas conference, the cloud unit also showed off AWS Clean Rooms, which allows businesses to tailor ads to customers while maintaining their privacy, among other applications. Amazon in recent years has developed its own major advertising business.
The services are part of Amazon's long-time strategy to develop functions for its e-commerce arm and then offer them to other companies. At the same time, Amazon's cloud has lost out on sales to brick-and-mortar retailers which are reluctant to hire a company that is also their e-commerce competitor.
Other new services it announced include Amazon Omics for genomic analysis and Amazon Security Lake, which helps businesses assemble data from cybersecurity vendors and other sources.