Amazon (AMZN) is the world's largest online retailer and also runs the largest cloud-computing platform, called Amazon Web Services.

The platform has gained an amazing amount of traction in the last couple of years, but it still gets the cold shoulder from large companies. Those corporations understandably prefer to lock up data on their own servers where they can secure it.

Amazon's cloud platform competes primarily with Microsoft's (MSFT) Azure, Google's (GOOG) App Engine, offerings like Heroku and Force.com by Salesforce.com (CRM) and Rackspace (RAX). (Microsoft owns and publishes Top Stocks, an MSN Money site.)


Amazon is trying to change that, and recently entered into an agreement with Eucalyptus Systems, which helps companies develop cloud services on their own premises. The new deal with Amazon enables compatibility between Amazon Web Services and the on-premise cloud environments powered by Eucalyptus.

Customers will be able to efficiently move their workloads and data between their private cloud environments and Amazon's cloud. They can switch to Amazon's cloud and back without any changes in code, as both services will use a common API.

This could increase the adoption of Amazon's cloud infrastructure in the enterprise. Large companies will have an easy way to scale up as needed while keeping more sensitive data on their private clouds.

We expect Amazon's revenue from cloud and other web services to increase steadily in the coming years.

Cloud and other Web services account for nearly 3% of Amazon's total value. We currently have a $205 Trefis price estimate for Amazon, which stands nearly 5% above its market price.