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Some people could see back in 2008 that the cloud IT market was going to be a hit, but we seriously doubt any of those clairvoyants foresaw the incredible explosion in this business that we’re seeing now in 2018.
Synergy Research Group reported July 27 that for the second successive quarter the cloud market growth rate was right at 50 percent year over year, far surpassing already strong growth rates seen in 2017. This is a very unusual phenomenon for such a large market.
As the cloud market expands, Amazon Web Services continues to control the sector as it has since 2006–larger than its next four competitors combined. AWS actually increased its worldwide market share by almost a full percentage point in Q2 to 34 percent.
The rapid growth of Microsoft, Google and Alibaba shows that they have all increased their market shares, but not at the expense of AWS. The actual Q2 marketshare numbers are Amazon 34 percent, Microsoft 14 percent, IBM 8 percent, Google 6 percent, Alibaba 4 percent.
(To see a larger version of the chart, right-click on it and select “View Image.)
Revenue growth at Microsoft, Google and Alibaba far surpassed overall market growth rate, so all three gained market share, but they won’t be catching up to AWS anytime soon.
As these four cloud providers increase their grip on the market, it is the small-to-medium sized cloud operators who collectively have seen their market shares diminish, John Dinsdale, Chief Analyst at Synergy, said in a media advisory. Among the top 25 cloud providers, only three other companies have seen their market share increase significantly, though none of the three has yet broken through the 1 percent market share threshold, Dinsdale said.
Meanwhile IBM’s market share has been relatively stable at around 8 percent, thanks primarily to its strong leadership in hosted private cloud services.
With most of the major cloud providers having now released their earnings data for Q2, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services) are now more than $16 billion. The Q2 growth rate of 50 percent compares with a full-year 2017 growth rate of 44 percent and a 2016 growth rate of 50 percent.
Public IaaS and PaaS services account for the bulk of the market, and those grew by 53 percent in Q2. In public cloud, the dominance of the top five providers is even more pronounced, because they control almost three quarters of the market. Geographically, the cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world, Synergy said.