News

Research Report Outlines Cloud Market Leadership

• By David Ramel
• 10/31/2016

A new Q3 report from Synergy Research Group shows the market leaders in three distinct areas of cloud computing, and -- surprise -- Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) actually lags in one.

That would be the "managed private cloud" space, where IBM is the leader, followed by AWS, Rackspace and NTT. Of course, when it comes to "public Infrastructure-as-a-Service" (IaaS), AWS is the unreachable behemoth, more than doubling the market presence of the next three competitors -- Microsoft, Google and IBM -- combined.

In the third category -- "public Platform-as-a-Service" (PaaS) -- things are a bit tighter. AWS is the unquestioned leader, but the next three competitors -- Salesforce, Microsoft and IBM -- can at least match Amazon when their markets are combined.

AWS hold a 45 percent share in the public IaaS space, even though Google and Microsoft sported higher growth rates in the third quarter. Combined, AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google -- who keep growing market share -- still account for well more than half of the worldwide market.

"Scale is the name of the game, especially in the public cloud markets," said Synergy exec John Dinsdale in a statement yesterday. "Amazon, Microsoft and Google continue to invest huge amounts in their hyperscale data center infrastructure, and all three have recently expanded their data center footprints and also announced plans to open up more geographic regions in the coming months.

"This scale is the prime reason why they are able to gain market share and pressure smaller players into consolidation or refocusing their cloud activities. Some tier 2 players are looking to buck the trend and at least some are seeing particularly strong growth, including Alibaba (particularly in IaaS) and Oracle (in PaaS)."