Microsoft, Google and Alibaba are all growing their revenues much more rapidly than Amazon and they continue to gain market share, but the reality is that in this market Amazon remains bigger than its next five largest competitors combined. Meanwhile IBM maintains its position as the third largest cloud provider in the market thanks primarily to its strong leadership in hosted private cloud services. Rounding out the top eight cloud providers, Oracle continues to grow strongly, albeit from a small base, while Salesforce and Rackspace maintain a strong position in specific niche segments of the market.
With most of the major operators having now released their earnings data for Q3, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services) have now reached $12 billion and continue to grow at well over 40% per year. The cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world, and a key feature of the market is that it is truly global in nature with the ranking of leading players being somewhat similar in all regions – with China being the one notable exception.
“While we forecast 40% growth in the total market for 2017, there’s still something a little shocking about seeing a business unit the size of AWS consistently growing its revenues by over 40%,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “Microsoft and Google too deserve plaudits for the growth rates they are achieving, while IBM is gaining market share in its sweet spot of hosted private cloud services. It is becoming increasingly difficult for cloud providers outside of the leading pack to make an impression on the market share rankings.”
