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Amazon Web Services Continues to Dominate Public Cloud Field
It still laps the competition twice, according to a Synergy report.
Microsoft and Google continue to make inroads in the public cloud space, but Amazon Web Services (AWS) isn't yet ready to cede the high ground.
That's the upshot of recent data from Synergy Research Group, which monitors trends in cloud computing and other IT fields. In calculating the market shares of the top cloud infrastructure providers for the second quarter of 2017, Synergy found that not much has changed on the leaderboard: AWS still dwarfs its closest competitors, despite signs that its growth may be starting to taper off.
AWS' market share currently stands at 34 percent, while runner-up Microsoft Azure has less than a third of that, with 11 percent.
Trailing distantly are IBM, with a market share of 8 percent (which Synergy attributes to its private cloud practice), and Google Cloud Platform, with 5 percent.
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Synergy noted that both Microsoft and Google have made significant strides over the past year in the public cloud space -- Microsoft, for example, reported a 97 percent year-over-year increase in Azure revenues during its latest financial report -- but that they have not been enough to overtake AWS.
"Microsoft and Google have almost doubled their quarterly revenues since Q2 of 2016 and both have increased their market share substantially; but market leader AWS also continues to grow its revenues more rapidly than the overall market, so it too has increased its share despite its much larger scale," the research firm said.
Synergy estimates that the overall cloud infrastructure services market has grown by 40 percent year over year. In comparison, AWS grew by 42 percent year over year, according to its latest quarterly earnings report.
While that's AWS' lowest year-over-year revenue increase to date, its entrenched lead and consistent double-digit revenue growth make it very difficult to challenge.
"While Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform are doubling in size, IBM continues to dominate in hosted private cloud and AWS is still over three times the size of its nearest competitor," said Synergy Chief Analyst John Dinsdale. "Some of the numbers are actually pretty spectacular. The year-on-year market growth rate is nudging down as we expected in such a large market, but it remains at comfortably over 40% and AWS alone generated revenue growth of $1.2 billion over the last four quarters."