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Research: Amid Public Cloud Globalization, AWS Dominates Market

• By David Ramel
• 07/11/2018

A new report from Synergy Research Group says the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud platform continues to dominate the increasingly globalized public cloud computing space.

Confirming past research, the new study shows it still remains mostly a three-horse race, with AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform leading the pack -- except in the Asia Pacific region, where newcomer Alibaba continues to make some noise.

In that region, the increasing globalization of the public cloud space isn't holding true as it is in the three remaining regions studied by Synergy.

"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," the company said. "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."

Whereas Synergy said public cloud computing is essentially a global market with little local differentiation, the top five cloud providers in China are local companies.

Synergy measured revenue for public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) in its Q1 2018 report, published last month.

"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. “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.”