Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba Strengthen their Grip on the Public Cloud Market

RENO, NV, October 29, 2019

New data from Synergy Research Group shows that the leading four providers of public cloud services accounted for 72% of the worldwide market for IaaS and PaaS in Q3, up from 57% at the beginning of 2016. Throughout that period Amazon’s worldwide market share has held steady at around 40%, while Microsoft, Google and Alibaba have all steadily gained share. The four market leaders are followed by Salesforce, IBM, Oracle, Tencent, Sinnet-AWS and a large group of companies with minor market shares. Total worldwide spending on public IaaS and PaaS reached $20 billion in Q3, representing over 80% of the total cloud infrastructure services. The rest of the market is comprised of hosted and managed private cloud services, where IBM is the market leader and companies like Rackspace and OVH feature more prominently.

With most of the major cloud providers having now released their earnings data for Q3, Synergy estimates that total cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services) were well over $24 billion in the quarter, with revenues for the last four quarters now reaching $89 billion. The total market grew by 37% from the third quarter of 2018. The public IaaS and PaaS part of the market continues to grow more rapidly than private cloud services, with Q3 growth coming in at 40%. Geographically, the cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world.

“It has taken just eight quarters for the public IaaS and PaaS markets to double in size and our forecast shows them doubling in size again over the next eleven quarters,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group. “It is particularly noteworthy that as spending on public cloud services continues to grow rapidly, the top four cloud providers are strengthening their grip on the market. Some of the companies outside the top four are actually growing at a reasonable pace, but the reality is that in aggregate they continue to lose ground to the market leaders. Outside of some niche services and geographic regions, this is a game where scale of operations, geographic footprint and global brand are key competitive advantages."