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New data from Synergy Research Group released April 30 shows that global Q1 spend on cloud infrastructure services reached $29 billion, up a whopping 37% from the first quarter of 2019. This was in line with the expected market growth rate and showed no meaningful negative impact from the COVID-19 pandemic.
In fact, anecdotal evidence points to COVID-19-related market tailwinds as additional enterprise workloads are pushed onto public clouds. Meanwhile, Amazon growth continued to mirror overall market growth, and its worldwide market share was 32% in the quarter.
Growth at second-ranked Microsoft has increased by almost three percentage points in marketshare in the last four quarters to 18%.
Behind these 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 still niche players with lower growth rates: IBM, Salesforce, Oracle and Rackspace. There is then a long tail of cloud providers, each with a small market share.
Other metrics from the Synergy research:
- 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 $29 billion, with trailing 12-month revenues reaching $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.
“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,” John Dinsdale, Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group, said in a media advisory. “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 $60 billion.”
Reno, Nev.-based Synergy provides quarterly market sizing and segmentation data on cloud and related markets, including company revenues by segment and by region.