Microsoft is the fastest-growing of the four big US cloud service providers, with revenue up 90% year-over-year in the third quarter. But Amazon Web Services still commands more of the market than the next five-biggest players, according to market research.

While Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the fastest-growing cloud provider, Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) are doing very well too -- up 42% and 76%, respectively. IBM also gained – but not a lot, according to recent research from Canalys.

Figure 1:

Microsoft, Google and Alibaba are all growing their revenues faster than Amazon and are gaining market share as of the third quarter, according to a report from Synergy Research Group.

IBM is the third largest cloud provider, due primarily to strong leadership in hosted private cloud, according to Synergy.

Of the rest of the top eight cloud providers, Oracle is growing strongly, but from a small base, and Salesforce and Rackspace "maintain a strong position in specific niche segments," Synergy says.

Figure 2:

The Canalys and Synergy reports follow most major operators releasing their most recent quarterly earnings last week. (See For Amazon & Microsoft, the Cloud Keeps Giving.)

Synergy estimates quarterly cloud infrastructure revenues, including infrastructure, platform, and hosted private cloud, have now reached $12 billion, and are growing at more than 40% per year. That's similar to Canalys's findings of 43% growth on a $14.4 billion market.

"While we forecast 40% growth in the total market for 2017, there's still something a little shocking about seeing a business unit the size of AWS consistently growing its revenues by over 40%," said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group, in a statement. "Microsoft and Google too deserve plaudits for the growth rates they are achieving, while IBM is gaining market share in its sweet spot of hosted private cloud services. It is becoming increasingly difficult for cloud providers outside of the leading pack to make an impression on the market share rankings."

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— Mitch Wagner Editor, Enterprise Cloud News

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