Amazon offers cloud apps at hourly rates from IBM, SAP, others [Video]

The Amazon Web Services marketplace could give customers better ability to try-before-they-buy

Credit: Prathmesh T / Shutterstock

Amazon Web Services on Thursday announced a new online marketplace that allows customers to buy software and services from a variety of vendors at hourly rates through its cloud infrastructure platform.

Commercial software vendors including IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and CA Technologies are offering products for sale on the site. A variety of open-source software is also available, including the Drupal content management system, SugarCRM and a number of application development stacks.

In some cases, the software is available at no charge, with customers only paying for the amount of Amazon compute power and storage they use.

Software can be launched either with Amazon’s 1-Click technology or the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute …