Google and Alibaba are seeing better than 100% year-over-year growth in public cloud revenues, but they have a long way to go to catch up to the market leaders, according to recent research.

Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), second-ranked in market share, is growing pretty fast itself, at 98% annually, according to the report from financial analyst firm Jefferies & Company Inc. released last week.

Overall, the top seven public cloud infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service (PaaS and IaaS) cloud providers are all seeing double-digit growth and account for two thirds of total global public cloud revenues, according to Jefferies.

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The findings present a piece of the overall cloud market share picture -- but only a piece. By limiting its estimates to public Iaas and PaaS, Jefferies excludes software-as-a-service (SaaS), which is a significant part of the public cloud market, including Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce.com and Oracle's array of SaaS offerings. The estimates also exclude hosted private cloud -- Jefferies notes that IBM has a big part of its business in that market. And the estimates exclude private and hybrid cloud infrastructure hardware and software, where Dell EMC, Cisco, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise dominate.

Still, the Jefferies estimates provide a useful and interesting perspective on the pubic cloud race.

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— Mitch Wagner Editor, Enterprise Cloud, Light Reading