Powerset, Inc. ("Powerset"), a natural language search engine company, announced today that it is using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) web service from Amazon Web Services for the computing capacity necessary to run its business. Amazon.com Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos highlighted Powerset's use of Amazon EC2 in his keynote address at the Web 2.0 conference today in San Francisco.
Amazon EC2 is a web service currently in beta that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It provides developers with complete control of their computing resources and lets them run on Amazon's proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing them to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as their computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing developers to pay only for capacity that they actually use.
"Powerset's use of Amazon EC2 represents an important shift in the competitive dynamics within the Search industry. Amazon has delivered a distributed computing service that finally matches the economics needs of startups," says Barney Pell, Founder and CEO of Powerset. "In the past, the upfront capital required to build out a datacenter big enough to scour the entire web and serve queries for millions of users was a significant barrier to seriously competing with companies like Google and Yahoo!"
"I'm very pleased with our relationship with Amazon," says Steve Newcomb, Powerset's Founder and COO. "By using Amazon EC2, Powerset is able to match the infrastructure of large scale search companies on a startup budget. Amazon EC2 is a key enabler for Powerset's business strategy now and in the future."
From a product perspective, Lorenzo Thione, Powerset's Founder and Product Architect, says, "Amazon EC2 is a tremendous boost for scaling our infrastructure. Relying on Amazon EC2 for most of our datacenter needs allows us to focus on building a great product." By using Amazon EC2, Powerset is able to treat Amazon's datacenter as if it were its own. Powerset can run a large distributed computation infrastructure, monitor and tune its performance, and scale usage along with its own needs on a fine-grained basis.
"Innovative, customer-focused companies like Powerset are ideal for the web-scale computing solutions offered by Amazon Web Services," said Steve Rabuchin, Director of Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services. "Powerset can focus on their mission to build a revolutionary, highly-differentiated, game-changing search product for their customers, while we focus on making sure Powerset's undifferentiated, non-customer-facing, yet mission critical computing needs are met at a highly-affordable cost to them."
About Powerset, Inc.
Powerset is a San Francisco company building a transformative consumer search engine based on natural language processing. Powerset is leading the next generation of Internet search. Powerset's unique innovations in search are rooted in breakthrough technologies that take advantage of the structure and nuances of natural language. Using these advanced techniques, Powerset is building a large-scale search engine that breaks the confines of keyword search. By making search more natural and intuitive, Powerset is fundamentally changing how we search the web, and delivering higher quality results. For more information, visit http://www.powerset.com.
NOTE: Powerset is a registered trademark of Powerset, Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.