Microsoft Cloud Revenues Leap; Amazon is Still Way Out in Front

RENO, NV, October 29, 2014

New Q3 data from Synergy Research Group shows that Microsoft clearly has the highest growth rate among the leading cloud infrastructure service operators, while Amazon (AWS) remains the dominant cloud service provider. Microsoft grew its revenues by 136% on a rolling annualized basis, resulting in its worldwide market share growing to over 10% in Q3. AWS’s cloud revenues jumped again after a relatively soft second quarter, resulting in its market share nudging back up to 27%. It is notable that although AWS’s percentage growth rate may be substantially lower than Microsoft’s, in absolute terms AWS revenue growth over the past four quarters is greater than Microsoft’s total cloud infrastructure revenue over the same period - AWS remains in a league of its own for scale. Behind the two leaders IBM is ranked third largest cloud operator with a 7% market share, followed by Google, salesforce and Rackspace. With most of the major operators having now released their earnings data for Q3, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and private & hybrid cloud) have now passed the $4 billion milestone, with trailing twelve-month revenues exceeding $14.5 billion. On a rolling annualized basis the market grew by 49%, but it is notable that all four leading operators grew more rapidly than that, resulting in all of them gaining market share.

“Given the level of competition in the market, Microsoft’s growth rate has been truly impressive, reflecting a strong corporate focus on cloud and huge ongoing investment levels” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “The other main feature of the Q3 market was the return to strong sequential revenue growth at AWS following a relatively weak second quarter. While prices continue to fall, Q3 did not see the huge pricing disconnect that caused AWS growth rate to falter in Q2.”