The cloud market is dominated by four players who made about $17 billion in the third quarter according to Synergy Research Group.
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba all grew faster than the cloud market. Overall spend increased 45 per cent year on year in the quarter, with AWS maintaining its huge market lead.
Synergy said that AWS has a market share of 34 per cent with Microsoft its biggest challenger at 15 per cent.
Synergy places IBM as the third-largest player, with a share of seven per cent, ahead of Google and Alibaba.
John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, said: “This is another really strong set of numbers both for the leading cloud providers and for the market as a whole.
“The growth rates are tailing off at some of the leading cloud providers but that is just the law of large numbers kicking in. You cannot keep on growing at 100 per cent when you reach massive scale.”
The role model for sustainable growth is market leader Amazon. Over the last 10 quarters the AWS year-on-year growth rate in these markets has been steady and has averaged just a little under 50 per cent. Given the need for huge scale, most cloud providers outside the top five are being forced to focus on market niches or specific geographic regions.”
Synergy’s $17bn revenue estimate includes infrastructure and platform-as-a-service sales, along with hosted private cloud services.
Public IaaS and PaaS make up the “bulk of the market”, the firm added, with growth in these areas hitting 51 per cent.
The top five providers (AWS, Microsoft, IBM, Alibaba, and Google) hold around three quarters of the market, Synergy claims.
