New data from Synergy Research Group shows that Q1 enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services was in excess of $39 billion, having increased by well over $2 billion from the previous quarter and up 37% from the first quarter of 2020.
Notably, for the third successive quarter, the year-on-year growth rate increased, which is unusual for such a large, high-growth market.
Microsoft has been slowly gaining ground on Amazon and the gap between their market shares has narrowed by two percentage points over the last year.
Cloud revenue
Together these two market leaders continue to account for over half of worldwide cloud revenues. Beyond Amazon and Microsoft, top twelve players whose growth rates surpassed overall market growth are Alibaba, Google, Tencent and Baidu.
Synergy Research Group Chief Analyst John Dinsdale Amazon and Microsoft have earned their leadership positions as they focus aggressively on growing their cloud services, quarter after quarter, year after year.
“They continue to invest billions of dollars every quarter in expanding their global data center footprint, while at the same time enhancing their cloud service portfolios,” said John Dinsdale.
Competition
John Dinsdale also pointed out that these two companies don’t have to spend too much time looking in their rearview mirrors and worrying about the competition.
“However, that is not to say that there aren’t some excellent opportunities for other players. Taking Amazon and Microsoft out of the picture, the remaining market is generating over $18 billion,” said John Dinsdale.
The top twelve rankings is rounded out by IBM, Salesforce, Oracle, NTT, SAP and Fujitsu. All can be considered to have somewhat specialised, niche positions in the market compared to the biggest cloud providers.
Infrastructure
With most of the major cloud providers having now released their earnings data for Q1, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services) were $39.5 billion, with trailing twelve-month revenues reaching $140 billion.
Public IaaS and PaaS services account for the bulk of the market and those grew by 39% in Q1. The dominance of the major cloud providers is even more pronounced in public clouds, where the top five control 80% of the market.
Geographically, the cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world.
