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Overall Cloud Revenues Jumped 25 Percent in First Half of 2021
Cloud vendors collectively raked in $235 billion in revenues over the first six months of the year, according new data from Synergy Research, with the biggest gains coming from cloud infrastructure services -- the domain of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google.
The Synergy report, released Tuesday, put 2021's year-over-year cloud growth so far at 25 percent, a marker of cloud computing's ever-growing ubiquity in today's IT environments.
"Cloud-associated markets are growing at rates ranging from 15% to over 40% per year and our forecasts show that annual spending on cloud services will double in under four years," said Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale in a prepared statement. "Cloud is increasingly dominating the IT landscape, benefitting companies throughout the cloud ecosystem."
Not surprisingly, the most lucrative vendors of the year so far are the cloud infrastructure providers -- in other words, cloud's perennial Top 3 of AWS, Google and Microsoft. Their products, which span Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and hosted private clouds, collectively drove year-over-year revenue growth of 37 percent, topping $150 billion in the first half of 2021.
These vendors' growth also drove spending in other cloud-related services, according to Synergy.
"In the first half of 2021, total spend on hardware and software used to build cloud infrastructure was over $70 billion, with public cloud spending now being substantially bigger than private cloud," the report indicated. "Their cloud infrastructure also supports internet services such as search, social networking, email, e-commerce, gaming and mobile apps. Those cloud providers need somewhere to house their infrastructure, so their substantial spending on data center leasing, colocation services and data center construction also continued to grow."
Other cloud segments' year-over-year growth rates were also provided:
- Enterprise SaaS (Microsoft, Salesforce and Adobe): 24 percent
- Datacenter IT Hardware and Software (ODMs, Microsoft, Dell and HPE): 16 percent
- Public Cloud Datacenter Colocation and Construction (Digital Reality, Equinix and NTT): 17 percent