Scott Webb, president of Chicago-based solution provider Avionos, an Amazon Web Services partner, on the prospect of large retailers pushing their cloud technology vendors away from AWS, especially after Amazon's recent acquisition of retail supermarket chain Whole Foods.

"If you're going to have retailers as clients, you need to think about what your technology framework is and have the ability to host on multiple platforms. You need to know where things are running all the way through your stack [and] be able to articulate all the way through your service."