Instead of spending billions to be a distant #5 in the public cloud market, IBM's CEO acquired Red Hat. This strategic pivot allowed IBM to become a valuable partner to all major cloud providers, leveraging their growth instead of competing with it directly.

To overcome political hurdles and NVIDIA's dominance, Cerebras partnered with AWS by creating a joint architecture that combined its chip with AWS's own Tranium IP. This turned a potential internal competitor into a champion and gave AWS a unique, competitive offering.

OpenAI's record-breaking funding round, led by Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank but not Microsoft, signals a strategic diversification. By committing to AWS and Amazon's chips, OpenAI secures capital and compute resources beyond its core Microsoft partnership, creating a competitive "frenemy" dynamic among its key infrastructure providers.

High-profile outages at market leader AWS highlight the risk of single-vendor dependency. Competitors' sales teams leverage these events to aggressively push for diversification, arguing for better reliability and accelerating the enterprise shift to multi-cloud infrastructure.

While network effects drive consolidation in tech, a powerful counter-force prevents monopolies. Large enterprise customers intentionally support multiple major players (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure) to avoid vendor lock-in and maintain negotiating power, naturally creating a market with two to three leaders.

Don't try to compete with hyperscalers like AWS or GCP on their home turf. Instead, differentiate by focusing on areas they inherently neglect, such as multi-cloud management and hybrid on-premise integration. The winning strategy is to fit into and augment a customer's existing cloud strategy, not attempt to replace it.

The narrative of startups "destroying" incumbents is often wrong. As shown by MongoDB coexisting with Oracle and HubSpot with Salesforce, disruptive companies can create massive value by expanding the total market, allowing both new and old players to grow simultaneously.

Hyperscalers are new ecosystem marketplaces, not just advanced distributors. They have fundamentally changed the B2B customer journey, invalidating traditional sales and marketing playbooks. Established tech companies must adapt to new co-selling motions or risk becoming obsolete.

Instead of scaling a costly direct sales team, SpeedSize focused early on partnerships with major cloud providers. Their strategy targets platforms like AWS that lack a built-in image and video compression solution, positioning SpeedSize as the essential add-on, despite a multi-year setup time.