Synergy Research: Salesforce emerges as a top 5 global cloud leader, ties with IBM

Dive Brief:

Salesforce cracked into the top five global public cloud leaders in Q3 2018, tying for the No. 5 spot with the incumbent IBM, according to a Synergy Research Group report.
Salesforce also bumped IBM from fourth place in North America and maintained its penultimate standing in Latin America and No. 5 standing in the Europe-Middle East-Africa region.
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google collectively account for almost 65% of the global market and the top three spots in every region except Asia-Pacific, where Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent continued to hold on to the No. 2 and No. 5 spots, respectively.

Dive Insight:

Since Q1 2018, the top three providers increased their share of the global market from around 60% to almost 65%.

The study of public infrastructure and platform as a service demonstrates the Amazon's continued stranglehold on the global market and China's slight disruption of the top providers in the Asia-Pacific region. Amazon also continues to dominate the cloud infrastructure services market with a 34% global share, outstripping No. 2 Microsoft at 14%.

Salesforce has been tying key business platforms and data points together across the cloud, pushing for cross-platform ties and working with other providers such as AWS to integrate and sync data. The CRM giant is looking to bring "intelligence to the masses" and improve accessibility to advanced technologies such as AI.

Recent acquisition and leadership announcements will affect some of the providers in 2019.

IBM recently made a hybrid cloud power play with the $34 billion acquisition of open source leader Red Hat, expected to close in the second half of 2019. The acquisition would help build up Red Hat's partnership's with major cloud providers including Amazon, Google and Microsoft, deepening IBM's ties in the hybrid and multicloud environment.

Google Cloud is undergoing some major leadership shifts at the close of 2018 with the departure of the unit's CEO Diane Greene. Former president of product development at Oracle Thomas Kurian will step into Greene's shoes at the end of November.

Fei-Fei Li is also winding down her leadership of GCP's AI and ML department in favor of an advisory role, with the dean of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, Andrew Moore, to fill her shoes at the end of the year.

Google Cloud recently broke into Gartner's leadership category for IaaS, but the No. 3 cloud provider still has a steep path ahead catching up to Amazon and Microsoft's leads, especially with enterprise customers.