Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Amazon (AMZN) Pushes into Cloud, Rating Maintained by Lazard

Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian likes what he sees with the push by Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) into building a “cloud-based” digital music store, saying it's “the next logical step for Amazon in facilitating digital media consumption” and that “The service also pre-empts similar services likely coming from Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG).”

"Amazon’s move confirms that a land grab is playing out between Apple, Amazon, Google and, more recently, Facebook, racing to secure market share in all forms of digital media: music, videos, books and other content. Critically, the common denominator for all these services is the requirement for a large-scale web-based infrastructure, which all of these companies possess. We believe that Amazon is particularly well situated here, able to leverage its AWS infrastructure for these services," Sebastian concluded.

Amazon.com customers will be empowered to store music purchases they make on the servers of the company and play them back on their mobile devices.

Sebastian maintains a "Buy" rating on Amazon, with a price target of $220 on the online retailer.

Amazon was trading at $174.34, gaining $4.99, or 2.95 percent, as of 2:38 PM EDT.

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