Amazon, Salesforce and IBM Lead in Cloud Infrastructure Service Segments

RENO, NV, March 25, 2014

New Q4 data from Synergy Research Group shows that Amazon (AWS), Salesforce and IBM are the market leaders in the three key cloud infrastructure services market segments. Amazon remains in a league of its own in the public IaaS market, while IBM has a clear lead in private & hybrid cloud infrastructure services. Meanwhile the public PaaS market is hotly contested with Salesforce holding a slim lead over Amazon and Microsoft in Q4. In aggregate Amazon is the clear number one in cloud infrastructure services with a 28% share in Q4, followed by IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, Google and Rackspace.

Quarterly revenues for the three segments passed the $3 billion milestone, having grown 49% year-on-year. IaaS is growing the most strongly, followed by PaaS and then private & hybrid cloud infrastructure services. (The latter includes private IaaS/PaaS-type offerings and excludes software and business processing sold as cloud services).

“While Amazon’s lead in public cloud services is widely acknowledged, the battle for leadership in the private & hybrid cloud segment is less well understood” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “IBM has been aggressively investing in the private & hybrid market and has now achieved a clear leadership position with revenues more than double those of any other operator. In Q4 there were eight tightly-grouped operators fighting for the number two position with Orange and Fujitsu slightly ahead of the pack, but I fully expect this to change as the market rapidly expands over the next five years.”