AWS, Microsoft and Google extend cloud dominance

AWS, Microsoft and Google are continuing to pull ahead of the chasing pack in the cloud infrastructure services market, with Microsoft and Google almost doubling their quarterly revenues in the past year.

New figures from Synergy Research Group show the increasing dominance of the hyperscale players, with AWS now holding 34% of the cloud infrastructure services market; Microsoft on 11%; IBM 8%; and Google 5%.

The IT market tracking firm says both Microsoft and Google recorded significant increases, with AWS also continuing to grow its revenues more rapidly than the overall market. IBM held steady with its market share.

John Dinsdale, Synergy Research Group chief analyst and research director, says while Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform are doubling in size, IBM continues to dominate in hosted private cloud, while AWS is still more than three times the size of its nearest competitor.

"Some of the numbers are actually pretty spectacular," Dinsdale says.

"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 US$1.2 billion over the last four quarters," he says.

Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure services revenues, which include infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and hosted private cloud services, have now reached almost US$11 billion, growing at 'well over' 40% per year.

AWS, Microsoft and Google are leading the pack in IaaS and PaaS, while IBM takes the lead in hosted private cloud, which is also seeing strong plays by Rackspace and some other traditional IT service providers.

China's Alibaba, meanwhile, has become the fourth ranked IaaS provider, following 'very strong' growth in the Chinese market and helped by aggressive expansion abroad, Synergy says.

For the overall cloud infrastructure services market, Synergy says the next 10 vendors beyond the top four hold a combined share of around 19%, down 1% over the last four quarters.

Among those 10 vendors it is Alibaba and Oracle who are achieving the highest growth rates, Synergy Research says.

Lower ranked cloud providers are losing share to the market leaders, continuing a trend seen in recent time.