AWS bigger than cloud rivals Google, Microsoft, IBM and Salesforce combined
Tue 28 Apr 2015
Amazon’s AWS cloud has beaten competition from its closest rivals Microsoft Azure, IBM, Google and Salesforce, with its revenue outstripping the others’ combined total.
According to analyst group Synergy Research, although the virtualised infrastructure industry is growing rapidly as a whole, Amazon’s public cloud offering is shooting ahead of its counterparts and is currently larger than its four main rivals put together.
“On a strict like-for-like basis AWS remains streets ahead of the competition in cloud infrastructure services […] Furthermore, this part of the cloud market is growing much more rapidly than SaaS or cloud infrastructure hardware and software,” explained chief analyst John Dinsdale.
Referring to data pulled from AWS’ latest quarterly results, Dinsdale underlined that the public cloud division had seen a 49% year-on-year increase and had hit $1.6bn in revenue for the first three months of 2015. A set of financials which led Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to say that “AWS is a $5bn business and still growing fast – in fact it’s accelerating.”
However, the analyst company did also find that in their own specific areas of cloud infrastructure AWS’ competitors excelled individually. “There are now six companies that can lay a valid claim to having annual cloud revenue run rates in excess of $5 billion – AWS, IBM, Microsoft, HP, Cisco and salesforce – and all are able to claim leadership in different parts of the cloud market,” said Dinsdale.
Although AWS’ market share currently stands at an enviable 29%, Microsoft Azure has displayed faster growth, with its 96% explosion dwarfing Amazon’s 49%.
“Customers continue to choose Microsoft to transform their business and as a result we saw incredible growth across our cloud services this quarter,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Dinsdale added: “IBM remains the king of the private and hybrid services segment. Google is quietly gaining share though it remains just half the size of Microsoft in this market, while Salesforce, once the unquestioned leader in PaaS, rounds out the top five ranked companies.”
