This has helped enterprises replace up-front capital infrastructure expenses with low variable costs.

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Ruiz's urgency stems from his stated goal of moving AMD's (nyse: AMD - news - people ) variable costs to 30% of operating expenses, from a current 20%.

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You can be clever with capital expenses and still get killed by your variable costs if you don't know how to hold them down.

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As one of the world's most reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient web infrastructures, AWS has changed the way businesses think about technology infrastructure--there are no up-front expenses or long-term commitments, capital expense is turned into variable operating expense, resources can be added or shed as quickly as needed, and engineering resources are freed up from the undifferentiated heavy lifting of running onsite infrastructure - all without sacrificing operational performance, reliability, or security.

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Further, the AWC alleges that during the period from May 2008 through July 2008, Abern provided five Cambridge customers with variable annuity expense disclosure forms that contained inaccurate information, in that the forms understated the annual expenses that would be charged.

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