Dive Brief:

• Demand for cloud services is so large that there will be "multiple successful players," though it's not clear yet who they will be, according to Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy, speaking at the University of Washington last week.
• Jassy said the biggest surprise to him so far is how long it took other companies to come after AWS. "I don't think in our wildest dreams we ever thought we'd have a six- to seven-year head start," he said.
• Jassy said ultimately AWS was so disruptive to other companies that they eventually had to do something.

Dive Insight:

Starting fast and betting big paid off for AWS. The company now controls about 40% of the cloud market, according to Q4 data from Synergy Research Group. To put that in perspective, Microsoft, Google and IBM together only control about 23%. That's quite a gap, and though Jassy believes other companies will offer AWS some competition in cloud, much work remains to be done to "find the type of functionality that you have in AWS today," he said.

Overall, total cloud infrastructure equipment revenues — including public and private cloud, hardware and software — are poised to reach $70 billion in 2016 and continue to grow at a double-digit pace, according to a recent report from Synergy.