Amazon Dominates Public IaaS and Ahead in PaaS; IBM Leads in Private Cloud

RENO, NV, October 30, 2016

New Q3 data from Synergy Research Group shows that Amazon Web Services (AWS) still has a 45% share of the worldwide public IaaS market, despite Microsoft and Google having much higher growth rates. Amazon remains more than twice the size of the next three public IaaS providers combined. Competition is tighter in the public PaaS market but Amazon still has a big lead over Salesforce, Microsoft and IBM. In the managed private cloud segment IBM is the market leader, followed by Amazon, Rackspace and NTT. In aggregate the big four cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Google – continue to control well over half of the worldwide market and all continue to grow their market share. With most of the major operators having now released their earnings data for Q3, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including public IaaS, public PaaS and managed private cloud) have now reached well over $8 billion and continue to grow at 50% per year. While public IaaS is the biggest of the three main cloud segments, public PaaS is growing much more strongly. The database, IoT and analytics sub-segments within PaaS are all growing by 100% or more per year.

“Scale is the name of the game, especially in the public cloud markets,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “Amazon, Microsoft and Google continue to invest huge amounts in their hyperscale data center infrastructure, and all three have recently expanded their data center footprints and also announced plans to open up more geographic regions in the coming months. This scale is the prime reason why they are able to gain market share and pressure smaller players into consolidation or refocusing their cloud activities. Some tier 2 players are looking to buck the trend and at least some are seeing particularly strong growth, including Alibaba (particularly in IaaS) and Oracle (in PaaS).”