Bumper growth for Amazon competitors no threat to AWS dominance

Amazon Web Services' competitors are closing the gap on the cloud infrastructure service provider giant, recording significantly higher growth in the last quarter, but it's not hampering AWS as the market hits nearly US$10 billion – with 40% growth.

New figures from Synergy Research Group show Microsoft, Google, IBM, Alibaba and Oracle all achieved first quarter growth rates 'substantially higher' than that of AWS, with Microsoft, Google and Alibaba all clocking in with growth of 80% or more.

However, despite the big growth from its competitors, Synergy Research says AWS remains 'in a league of its own' with revenues 'comfortably bigger' than all five competitors combined.

John Dinsdale, Synergy Research Group, says the top end of the cloud provider market is now showing a clear stratification featuring AWS, a group of higher-growth chasers and then a couple more focused niche players, in Salesforce and Rackspace.

While Salesforce and Rackspace have lower growth rates than the other companies, Synergy says the two are maintaining strong positions in their market niches.

"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," Dinsdale says.

"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," he adds.

Synergy Research estimates quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues, which include infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and hosted private cloud services, have reached 'almost' US$10 billion, and are continuing to grow at well over 40% per year.

AWS, Microsoft and Google are leading in the IaaS/PaaS space, while IBM continues to lead in hosted private cloud.

Synergy says hosted private cloud is also where Rackspace and some traditional It service providers feature more prominently than they do in public cloud.