Dive Brief:
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A new report from Synergy Research found that the overall cloud market grew by an astonishing 50% in the first quarter of 2016.
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The report, released Friday, found the cloud market pulled in over $7 billion in the first three months of the year, dominated by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM and Google.
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Microsoft and Google both doubled their revenues in a year, but still trail AWS significantly.
Dive Insight:
The top four cloud providers—AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google—grew faster than the market as a whole, according to Synergy.
"This is a market that is so big and is growing so rapidly that companies can be growing by 10-30% per year and might feel good about themselves and yet they'd still be losing market share," said John Dinsdale, Synergy's chief analyst and research director, according to a CRN report.
According to Synergy, AWS currently has 31% market share, while Microsoft, IBM and Google together share 22% of the cloud market. The latter three are growing their businesses far faster than all others, however, together posting 93% year-over-year growth in Q1, according to the report.
The next biggest group includes players like Alibaba, CenturyLink, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NTT, Oracle, Rackspace, Salesforce and VMware. Together, those 20 companies held roughly 27% market share in Q1. Together, they grew 41%. In other words, most of them lost share in a market growing faster than 50%, Dinsdale said.
No matter who has the most market share currently, the good news overall is that all of these companies are enabling enterprises to move to the cloud, and that trend does not look likely to slow down anytime soon. Last week, Amazon announced that its revenue was up 28% over last year, driven primarily by the strength of AWS. In total, AWS was responsible for 56% of the entire company’s profit in Q1. Microsoft too reported strong earnings from the cloud, with its cloud revenue growing 120% in its third quarter.
