Hyperscale Operators Continue Ramping Up Share of Cloud Markets

RENO, NV, April 11, 2017

New data from Synergy Research Group shows that hyperscale operators are aggressively growing their share of key cloud service markets, which are themselves growing at impressive rates. Synergy’s new research has identified 24 companies that meet its definition of hyperscale, and in 2016 those companies in aggregate accounted for 68% of the cloud infrastructure services market (IaaS, PaaS, private hosted cloud services) and 59% of the SaaS market. In 2012 those hyperscale operators accounted for just 47% of each of those markets. Hyperscale operators typically have hundreds of thousands of servers in their data center networks, while the largest, such as Amazon and Google, have millions of servers. In aggregate those 24 hyperscale operators now have almost 320 large data centers in their networks, with many of them having substantial infrastructure in multiple countries. The companies with the broadest data center footprint are the leading cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft and IBM. Each has 45 or more data center locations with at least two in each of the four regions (North America, APAC, EMEA and Latin America). The scale of infrastructure investment required to be a leading player in cloud services or cloud-enabled services means that few companies are able to keep pace with the hyperscale operators, and they continue to both increase their share of service markets and account for an ever-larger portion of spend on data center infrastructure equipment – servers, storage, networking, network security and associated software.

“Hyperscale operators are now dominating the IT landscape in so many different ways,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “They are reshaping the services market, radically changing IT spending patterns within enterprises, and causing major disruptions among infrastructure technology vendors. Our latest forecasts show these factors being accentuated over the next five years.”

Synergy’s latest hyperscale cloud market data is available as a standalone data file or as part of an annual subscription. Some details can also be found in in the Complimentary Reports section of Synergy's website.