Less than fifty seats with two resources?

Scale that up to five thousand seats. Five thousand seats is big? Not really.

Every day a piece of hardware dies. Every month someone rolls out a new software package. There are many different user profiles, accounting, sales, warehouse, IT, marketing, executive. Then there's that one guy that needs that program that only runs on XP SP1....

Every IT department has to justify its cost per user. Once you get above 1K seats, a lot of things that seem like overkill start to make sense really quickly.

All Amazon is offering is a managed version of what larger companies have been doing internally for years. Just like their server business, it seems expensive until you actually work out how much it would cost to do it yourself.