In the burgeoning world of cloud-based infrastructure service providers, the rich are apparently getting richer.
New second-quarter 2015 data from Synergy Research Group released July 24 finds that the cloud big four—Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, IBM and Google—as a group control well over half of the worldwide cloud infrastructure service market.
Their combined market share ascended to 54 percent in the latest quarter, compared with 46 percent in Q2 2014 and 41 percent in Q2 2013. While their year-over-year revenue growth rate averaged 84 percent in Q2, the remainder of the market only grew by 33 percent.
Other infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers fighting it out for the remaining 46 percent of the market include AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, GoGrid, Rackspace, Eucalyptus, Terramark, Savvis, Verizon and Joyent, among others.
In Q2 2015, each of the big four cloud providers increased their share of the worldwide market, with AWS maintaining its clear No. 1 ranking with 29 percent market share.
With most of the major operators having now released their earnings data for Q2, Synergy Research Group estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, platform-as-a-service [PaaS], and private and hybrid cloud) are now approaching $6 billion, while trailing 12-month revenues are close to $20 billion.
North America continues to account for more than half of the worldwide market; the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia-Pacific (APAC) regions ranked second and third, respectively.
“The cloud infrastructure services market is quite clearly bifurcating, with a widening gap between the big four cloud providers and the rest of the service provider community,” John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group, said in a media advisory.
“Developing the necessary global hyperscale data center infrastructure along with the required marketing and operations support is simply beyond the reach of all but a very small number of players. This is not going to change,” he said. “The good news for the plethora of small-to-medium-sized cloud providers is that there does remain a wealth of opportunity for those that are focused on specific market niches or local geographic areas.”
Synergy Research Group provides quarterly market tracking and segmentation data on IT- and cloud-related markets, including vendor revenues by segment and by region. Market shares and forecasts are provided via Synergy’s own online database tool, which enables easy access to complex data sets.