Dive Brief:

• Businesses are likely to select more than one public cloud provider to meet their various needs, a new survey of cloud computing customers found.

• The survey of 314 public cloud customers by Cowen & Co. found the typical public cloud customer uses 2.86 of the six service providers asked about in its survey, which include Google, Rackspace, Amazon Webs Services, IBM, VMware and Microsoft.

• More than half of the respondents indicated they were planning to use an additional public cloud vendor in the future.

Dive Insight:

Public cloud providers offer different perks and benefits, and customers are not afraid of choosing more than one company to meet all of their needs, the study found. Common areas of differentiation include cost, support and APIs.

The survey found AWS was the most commonly used cloud provider, followed by Microsoft Azure. AWS consistently rated low in one area, however.

"The most notable area of competitive weakness was in quality of IT support, where AWS was identified far more frequently than its peers," said Cowen analysts John Blackledge and Gregg Moskowitz.

VMware was viewed unfavorably in terms of APIs. Developer tools are one of the ways competitors bait customers into using their services. In March, for example, Google launched new artificial intelligence-based tools and products for its cloud platform. The tools will allow data scientists and developers to build intelligent applications and employ deep learning techniques, while Microsoft said it now has 4 million developers registered to use its developer tools.