AWS is Leading the Public Cloud Market in all Major Regions

RENO, NV, June 21, 2018

New Q1 data from Synergy Research Group shows that in the public cloud services market, worldwide leader AWS is also the clear leader in all four of the world’s major regions, ranked by public IaaS and PaaS service revenues. Microsoft is ranked second in three of the four regions, and Google is ranked third in three of them. Asia Pacific is the one region where the ranking differs, thanks to the prominence of the Chinese market and the dominance of local cloud providers in China. That results in Alibaba being ranked second in the APAC region and fourth worldwide. IBM, Salesforce and Tencent fill out the other top five slots in the regions, the latter thanks to its position in China. Public IaaS and PaaS are the most prominent segments of the cloud infrastructure services market and account for the bulk of the revenues, with the balance coming from managed or hosted cloud services. Within public cloud, the dominance of AWS, Microsoft and Google is even more marked than in the larger cloud market. AWS alone accounts for almost 40% of the market and the three in aggregate account for well over 60%. In marked contrast to the rest of the world, in China the top five cloud providers are all local companies. China now accounts for a third of the total APAC market and its share of the regional total is increasing each quarter.

“Despite some local data sovereignty and regulatory issues, in most meaningful ways public cloud computing is essentially a global market. This is a game of scale and to be a market leader demands vast ongoing investments, a global presence and a global brand,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “Of course there will often be local issues that might enable local companies to carve out niche positions for themselves, but they will remain small local players in a specific country or sub-region. It is also true that in such cases the global leaders can usually deploy different local strategies to enable them to succeed. With the glaring exception of China, we view this as a truly global market.”