Microsoft, IBM and Google are catching up, but Amazon has an enormous lead in cloud infrastructure market share. And the other 20 contenders are falling behind.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

April 29, 2016

2 Min Read
Amazon & Other 'Big 4' Cloud Providers Crushing Competitors

Microsoft, IBM and Google are starting to close the cloud infrastructure gap, but Amazon is still light-years ahead of everybody else in terms of market share, according to recent research.

Synergy Research, which tracks infrastructure cloud market share, released its Q1 report Thursday and found that Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) alone has a 31% worldwide market share. Its three largest followers -- Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) -- have 22% of the market combined.

The next 20 top-ranked cloud providers account for 27% market share.

But Microsoft and Google are growing fast, with growth rates well over 100%. So they're gaining ground, says Synergy. The next 20 cloud providers are growing at an average 41% per year -- which is fantastic growth -- but they're losing ground, as the overall market is growing over 50%.

Figure 1: Crushing It Source: Synergy Research Source: Synergy Research

Quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues for providers "have now comfortably passed the $7 billion milestone," Synergy says. That includes IaaS, PaaS and private and hybrid cloud. The US accounts for half the worldwide market, with growth rates similar across regions.

"This is a market that is so big and is growing so rapidly that companies can be growing by 10-30% per year and might feel good about themselves and yet they'd still be losing market share," John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group, said in a statement. "The big question for them is whether or not they are building a sustainable and profitable business. This can be done by focusing on specific regions or specific services, but the bulk of the market demands huge scale, a broad footprint, very deep pockets and a long-term corporate focus."

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About the Author(s)

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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