There are five major cloud infrastructure service providers growing more rapidly than Amazon Web Services (AWS), but the market leader remains well ahead of the chasing pack.
According to new data from Synergy Research, during the first quarter of 2017 the worldwide market leader held steady amidst rising levels of competition, reporting 33 per cent share of the industry.
While Microsoft, Google, IBM, Alibaba and Oracle all achieved Q1 growth rates that were substantially higher than that of AWS, the tech giant’s revenues are still comfortably bigger than the other five combined.
Specifically, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba all achieved annual growth rates of 80 per cent or more, with Salesforce and Rackspace also featuring among the list of top cloud providers.
“While they have lower growth rates than the other providers, they are maintaining strong positions in particular market niches,” Synergy Research Group chief analyst and research director, John Dinsdale, said.
With most of the major operators having now released their earnings data for Q1, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services) have now reached almost US$10 billion and continue to grow at well over 40 per cent per year.
While AWS, Microsoft and Google are the lead providers in IaaS and PaaS, IBM continues to lead in hosted private cloud, where Rackspace and some traditional IT service providers feature more prominently than they do in public cloud.
“At the top end of the cloud provider market we’re now seeing a clear stratification featuring AWS, a group of higher-growth chasers, and a couple of more focused niche players,” Dinsdale added.
“Beyond those leading companies, the cloud market features a long tail of small-to-medium sized providers or companies that have only a minor position in the market, typically based on either a specific country or focused application area.
“There are decent growth opportunities for some of these smaller players, but they are unlikely to make much impact in terms of overall worldwide market share.”
