AWS takes home gold in IaaS, PaaS worldwide

Dive Brief:

In terms of public Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service Revenues, Amazon Web Services is the clear public cloud leader, taking the top spot in worldwide rankings as well as regional ones for North America, EMEA, APAC and Latin America, according to a Synergy Research Group report.
With the exception of the APAC region, Microsoft swept all No. 2 spots while Google took home No. 3 rankings in worldwide and regional leadership. Alibaba beat both vendors out for the No. 2 spot in APAC, pushing Microsoft to No. 3 and Google to No. 4. Remaining fourth and fifth place rankings were divided between Alibaba, IBM, Salesforce and Tencent.
AWS alone accounts for almost 40% of the cloud market, while AWS, Microsoft and Google together account for more than 60%, according to the report.

Dive Insight:

Synergy's rankings reiterate the dominance of AWS, Microsoft and Google in the global cloud market as seen in Gartner's 2018 IaaS Magic Quadrant. Google eked out of the visionaries column and into the leaders category this year, while eight smaller vendors dropped off the rankings altogether, leaving only Alibaba, Oracle and IBM in the niche players group.

Continued dominance of Alibaba and Tencent in Asian markets is expected, as is the dominance by Amazon, Microsoft and Google elsewhere, in the coming years. If the last few quarters have shown anything, it's that surprises in major vendor performance in the public cloud market are far and few between.

Dominance of a few players can lead to vendor lock-in problems for customers. While Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recognizes such worries for customers, cost and time associated with switching can be high, reinforcing reliance on top vendors.

Infrastructure hardware and software spending in the public cloud market reached new heights in Q1, growing 37% year-over-year — the highest rate in nine quarters, according to another Synergy report. Revenues are now more than $11 billion, with a 95% majority going to servers, storage, networking, virtualization software and operating systems.