Every cloud has a silver lining—AWS and Microsoft are basking in the strong global pandemic-driven demand for ubiquitous computing.
Despite a tumultuous start, this year’s Q1 spend on cloud infrastructure services actually reached US$29 billion, up 37% from the first quarter of 2019.
According to Synergy Research Group, this growth was in line with the expected market growth rate and showed no meaningful negative impact as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Anecdotal evidence does point to some COVID-19-related market tailwinds as additional enterprise workloads are pushed onto public clouds. Meanwhile, Amazon growth continued to largely mirror overall market growth and its worldwide market share was 32% in the quarter.
Growth at second-ranked Microsoft once again outpaced the overall market by over twenty percentage points and its market share increased by almost three percentage points in the last four quarters, reaching 18%.
Behind the two market leaders, Google, Alibaba and Tencent are substantially outpacing overall market growth and are gaining market share. All three saw revenues increase by 45% or more year-on-year. Four other cloud providers have substantial market share but are somewhat niche players and typically have lower growth rates: IBM, Salesforce, Oracle and Rackspace. There is then a long tail of cloud providers, each with a small market share.
With most of the major cloud providers having now released their earnings data for Q1, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services) were US$29 billion, with trailing twelve-month revenues reaching US$104 billion.
Public IaaS and PaaS services account for the bulk of the market and those grew by 39% in Q1. The dominance of the top five providers is even more pronounced in public cloud, as they control over three quarters of the market. Geographically, the cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world.
Said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group: “While COVID-19 is having a devastating impact on communities and economies around the world, indications are that it is having a mildly positive impact on the cloud infrastructure services market. For sure, the pandemic is causing some issues for cloud providers, but in uncertain times the public cloud is providing flexibility and a safe haven for enterprises that are struggling to maintain normal operations. Cloud provider revenues continue to grow at truly impressive rates, with AWS and Azure in aggregate now having an annual revenue run rate of well over US$60 billion.”
