The Leading Cloud Providers Continue to Run Away with the Market

RENO, NV, July 27, 2017

New Q2 data from Synergy Research Group shows that the four leading cloud providers all continue to maintain or grow their share of the worldwide cloud infrastructure services market. Microsoft and Google have almost doubled their quarterly revenues since Q2 of 2016 and both have increased their market share substantially; but market leader AWS also continues to grow its revenues more rapidly than the overall market, so it too has increased its share despite its much larger scale. AWS market share now stands at 34%, compared to 11% for Microsoft and 5% for Google. IBM held its market share steady at 8%, thanks primarily to a strong showing in hosted private cloud services. Among the next 10 top-ranked cloud providers, Alibaba and Oracle are achieving the highest growth rates. Continuing recent trends, it is the lower ranked sized cloud providers who in aggregate are losing share to the market leaders. With most of the major operators having now released their earnings data for Q2, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services) have now reached almost $11 billion and continue to grow at well over 40% per year. While AWS, Microsoft and Google are the lead providers in IaaS/PaaS, IBM continues to lead in hosted private cloud, where Rackspace and some traditional IT service providers also feature more prominently than they do in public cloud. Alibaba has now become the fourth ranked provider in IaaS, thanks to very strong growth in its home Chinese market, helped by aggressive expansion abroad.

“The increasing dominance of hyperscale players continues to play out, with all four leading companies having cause to celebrate,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “While Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform are doubling in size, IBM continues to dominate in hosted private cloud and AWS is still over three times the size of its nearest competitor. Some of the numbers are actually pretty spectacular. The year-on-year market growth rate is nudging down as we expected in such a large market, but it remains at comfortably over 40% and AWS alone generated revenue growth of $1.2 billion over the last four quarters.”