Microsoft and IBM Chase Amazon while Google Falls Off the Pace

RENO, NV, July 28, 2014

New Q2 data from Synergy Research Group shows that Microsoft and IBM are clearly leading the growth in cloud infrastructure services. While Amazon (AWS) remains in a league its own, it can no longer claim to be bigger than its closest four competitors combined. Faced with tougher competition, AWS did not grow its cloud revenues on a sequential basis, and consequently saw its at year-on-year growth rate drop to 49%. Meanwhile Google is not managing to keep pace with its larger rivals.

With most of the major operators having now released their earnings data for Q2, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and private & hybrid cloud) have reached $3.7 billion, with trailing twelve-month revenues comfortably exceeding $13 billion. With the total market growing at over 45%, Microsoft and IBM have gained market share over the last four quarters while the share of AWS and Google is essentially unchanged from a year ago. Total Amazon AWS revenues are now well in excess of $1 billion per quarter, with nearly all of that coming from cloud infrastructure services. IBM and Microsoft also both claim quarterly cloud revenues of around $1 billion, but in their cases much of the cloud revenue comes from software/SaaS, cloud-related hardware products or associated professional and technical services.

“It has become clear that AWS finally has some tough competition to face” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “Until this quarter it could claim that it was bigger than its four nearest competitors, but now at least one jewel has fallen from its crown. While it remains a formidable leader of the market, Microsoft is making some huge strides in IaaS and PaaS while IBM now has clear leadership in the private & hybrid infrastructure services segment.”