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Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and Tencent reported significant cloud infrastructure gains during the first quarter of 2019, but Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains a clear market leader.
New findings from Synergy Research Group highlight a chasing pack with revenue increases each of 70 per cent or more year-on-year, in a market buoyed by rising customer investments.
But despite such gains, AWS once again experienced faster growth than the overall market, a feat which has now spanned eight consecutive quarters.
Behind the front five cloud providers are “somewhat niche players”, according to findings, housing lower growth rate vendors such as IBM, Salesforce, Oracle and Rackspace.
“As the market goes from strength to strength the pack of cloud providers that are chasing Amazon has bifurcated into high-growth challengers and lower growth niche-oriented providers,” said John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group. “But Amazon retains its strong leadership position and continues to control a third of the worldwide market.”
Collectively, first quarter spending on cloud infrastructure services increased 42 per cent from the first quarter of 2018.
Credit: Synergy Research Group According to Dinsdale, this growth rate was "somewhat lower" than that seen throughout 2018 as the “massive scale” of the market now forces growth rates to moderate.
“This is another impressive growth quarter for the cloud market,” Dinsdale added. “The decline in growth rate should not be viewed as a weakening market but as an inevitable consequence of a market that has now reached massive scale.
“For the eighth consecutive quarter the market size has increased by well over a billion dollars over the previous quarter.”
With most of the major cloud providers having now released their earnings data for the first quarter of 2019, the analyst firm estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues - including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services - totalled in excess of $21 billion, with revenues for the last four quarters now reaching over $75 billion.
Furthermore, public IaaS and PaaS services account for the bulk of the market, growing by 48 per cent during the period.
“In public cloud the dominance of the top five providers is even more pronounced, as they control over three quarters of the market,” Dinsdale explained. “Geographically, the cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world.”
