Dive Brief:
- Amazon Web Services on Thursday reported revenue of $2.87 billion for the second quarter, a 58% jump from the same quarter last year and the most revenue the segment has captured in a quarter.
- AWS continues to lead in the public cloud services arena, but IBM, Microsoft and Google are all working hard to catch up.
- Growth in AWS’ second quarter was slower than the two previous quarters, however, signaling that the company’s hot streak of growth could be cooling.
Dive Insight:
AWS saw growth of 64% in the first quarter and 69% the quarter before that. Experts say slower growth is typical as a company gets bigger, however.
Investment firm Oppenheimer said last month that AWS is building on operating efficiencies that will allow it to continue dominating its competitors in the cloud market, estimating AWS revenue will exceed $57 billion by 2023. Oppenheimer believes AWS is building an efficient cloud model that will allow it to keep capital spending low even as it continues to grow its customer base.
Lately, Microsoft appears to be gaining some ground on AWS. A survey from HyTrust last month found Microsoft Azure was the number one choice among enterprises looking to move systems to the public cloud, with 32% of respondents planning to pursue the platform. Amazon Web Services was chosen by just 22% of respondents.
Across its segments, Amazon touted net sales of $30.4 billion, up 31% from $23.2 billion in the second quarter of 2015.
