Instead, there are plenty of established vendors who already offer such services, he said. 'I'd rather go to someone whose core competency is managing or storing data,' Foster said. 'As an SMB, I just don't think it's a good precedent to be storing your data with Amazon. From the vendor point of view, I don't think they're any threat' to established storage vendors such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. or Sun Microsystems Inc., he said.

Ronald Schmelzer, a Web services analyst at Waltham, Mass.-based ZapThink LLC, said that Amazon is trying to get users to look at the company as a technology platform, rather than just as an e-commerce site. 'It's a stretch of the business plan,' Schmelzer said. 'The question is, Does Amazon see this as a growth opportunity?'

The company has leveraged its IT infrastructure before, he said, by providing online infrastructure for companies such Minneapolis-based retailer Target Corp.

'It's really up to developers to see if this is going to hold, if this is going to provide traction, if this is going to work,' Schmelzer said.