Gartner Ranks IaaS Public Cloud Market Vendors in Size and Growth

October 2, 2017

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Analytics, Automated & MarTech | Brand-Related | Customer-Centric | Industries | Technology | Top Brands

Amazon was easily the largest infrastructure as a service (IaaS) vendor in the public cloud market last year, with almost $9.8 billion in revenues. That equates to 44.2% share of the $22.1 billion market, which grew by 31.4% year-over-year, according to Gartner.

Amazon’s 45.9% growth year-over-year was enough to allow it to capture a greater share of the market, from roughly 40% in 2015.

Microsoft is the clear-cut second-largest IaaS vendor, though it trails distantly with 7.1% share of the market. Nonetheless, it achieved more than 61% year-over-year revenue growth, to almost $1.6 billion.

Interestingly enough, the fastest-growing provider is Alibaba. This vendor – predominantly focused on China, but expanding internationally – enjoyed a 126.5% increase in its cloud revenues, to $675 million (3% market share). In so doing, it widened its lead over Google, which itself doubled its revenues in 2016 to $500 million.

Alibaba isn’t only growing in the public cloud market; it’s advertising business is also surging. In fact, Alibaba alone accounts for one-eighth of global online advertising revenue growth, according to new data from Forrester Research.

While one might expect that cloud revenue growth rates would be higher among companies such as Alibaba and Google with smaller market share, that isn’t uniformly the case.

The 5th-largest vendor, for example (Rackshare), saw just 5% revenue growth in 2016, well below the market average. And the aggregate of all other vendors didn’t far much better, with their 13.2% average growth also below the 31% average.

What does that mean? While Amazon dominates the IaaS market, it’s increasingly consolidating among the top 4 vendors.

Earlier this year, research from Salesforce found that 62% of small businesses reported a great deal of trust or some trust in cloud-based technology services, versus 38% who maintain little or no trust. Roughly two-thirds (65%) of small business owners surveyed were using some cloud-based technology, with these businesses averaging 27% of their technology in the cloud.

A separate survey from Clutch suggested that within the US, enterprises favor Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, while SMBs show a preference for Google Cloud Platform.

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