I bring this up because I just read some new data released by research firm ChangeWave Research ( a division of The 451 Group) that suggests the new Amazon Kindle Fire is already much more of a threat to the iPad in just a month of existence than the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which has been on the market for a year.

The report is based on surveys of 3,043 consumers during early November. It shows the Amazon Kindle Fire represents a serious competitive threat to the iPad, at least in North America, where the poll was conducted. Approximately two-thirds of those surveyed expressed an interest in buying the iPad, while about 22 percent said they were interested in a Kindle Fire. No other tablet garnered more than 1 percent of the responses, according to the report.

The data is just another demonstration that Amazon is far, far more than a really efficient online retailer.

Whether it was by accident or design, the company is now at the center of the hottest technology segment since the original personal computers prompted businesses to rethink the way their employees did work. With its vast knowledge of consumer behavior, Amazon represents a far more credible threat to Apple than many of the technology vendors that got their start on the business-to-business side of the world.

Yes, you’re right. No IT service provider will get rich selling either tablets or e-readers, but there are rich managed services opportunities in the field of mobile device management. The Apple iPad, as an example, is a serious factor in healthcare IT environments as doctors and other clinical professionals seek ways to increase patient satisfaction. I expect the Kindle Fire will soon begin becoming a factor, especially when you consider all the text books and medical journals that the healthcare industries consults and reads.

Amazon is very relevant for another reason, of course: It is a serious contender in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) portion of the cloud computing marketplace.

There are few companies in the channel that could hope to compete with Amazon’s ability to scale; although, on the flip side, Amazon will find it tough to contend with the channel’s ability to offer cloud infrastructure specifically customized for certain verticals along with the personalized service and support that many SMBs need. Of course, Amazon might also be a very relevant infrastructure partner for some aspects of the IT solution provider channel.

The emergence of the Amazon Kindle Fire is another reminder that Amazon is far more than just another e-commerce company. This is a technology company to be reckoned with in both mobility and cloud infrastructure, and IT solution providers are advised to keep close tabs on its plans.

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Microsoft execs, including server and tools chief Bob Muglia, have long maintained that the Azure price model was sound and clear as a bell. This despite developers and other would-be Azure-ites moaning about its complexity and complaining that Azure was too pricey compared to Amazon Web Services.

Well, those developers weren’t crazy after all.  Yesterday at Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC), Microsoft announced new  Azure Extra Small Instances for five cents per hour. Now in beta, this bite-sized computing morsel doesn’t promise fast I/O and is limited to 20 gigabytes of storage per instance. The next smallest nugget of computing is the Azure Small Instance at 12 cents per hour for up to 225GB storage per instance. Clearly there was pressure for cheaper Azure.

In other potentially big news, Microsoft also previewed Virtual Machine (VM) role that promises to ease the move of legacy Windows apps to Azure. The PDC news was all glommed under the usual customer-feedback rationale

Muglia told CNet that while this will make it easier to run some Windows Server apps on Azure, not to assume that every app will carry over. And, apps not written for azure will not take full advantage of Azure.

This move blurs the line between Azure PaaS and Amazon Web Services’  which are lumped into the Infrastructure-as-a-Service camp. Andrew Brust, a long-time Windows developer and CTO of Tallan said last week he fully expected Azure to move more towards IaaS and AWS to move more to PaaS over time.

John Landry, former CTO of Lotus Development Corp., who went on to found startups working with the Microsoft stack, is impressed overall with Azure. A major advantage is that it targets the true-believer .NET, Windows development community and that is a very large group.

“I think [Microsoft] is directionally correct with Azure [but] they’ve got a built-in conflict –are they Infrastructure-as-a-service or Platform-as-a-Service and they can’t seem to figure it out. But the correct answer is they should be both.”

Check out more PDC news on SearchCloudComputing.com.

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