Research: Microsoft Leads Pack Chasing AWS to Cloud Supremacy

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), fresh off another stellar earnings report, has consolidated its position as No. A new report by Synergy Research Group shows that Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) is the No. 1 cloud service provider, despite being chased by three main competitors.
Microsoft and its Azure cloud are leading the chase pack, followed by IBM and Google, in cloud infrastructure services, according to the report on Q2 market share for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and hosted private clouds. The market share of the next 20 cloud providers is still lower than AWS’s market share of around 31 percent.
Google leads the way in year-over-year growth with a 162 per cent growth rate, while AWS is fourth with a 53% rate.
John Dinsdale, an analyst at SRG, stated that Amazon and the other three major players have continued to narrow the gap in this market in a variety ways. Their global presence, marketing power, ability to invest in large data centers, and determination to succeed in this market are what make them stand out. There are some interesting companies in the ranking of the top 20 cloud providers. Oracle and Alibaba are growing strongly, but they all start from a far behind Google, which is growing by well over 100 per cent per year, while remaining only a sixth of Amazon’s size.
The company’s previous reports, such as this one in May or this one February, were mirrored by the new SRG findings. Compare the Cloud ranked cloud providers in March last year, and indicated that AWS was losing mindshare. That’s why it hasn’t been reflected in market share rankings.
Microsoft may be trying harder to be No. Microsoft, perhaps trying harder to be the No. 2 cloud player, claimed last Sept that Azure differentiates itself with AWS by being present in more regions and having an advantage in hybrid and PaaS areas.
SRG says that it doesn’t seem to be a competitive race between the cloud leaders and their challengers.
The company stated that the “big four” cloud infrastructure service revenue grew by 68 percent in Q2, while those of the next 20 largest cloud providers grew 41 percent, and all smaller providers grew 27 percent. The market as a whole grew 51 percent. Amazon is still a leader in the market, with a market almost three times larger than its nearest competitor. It also has a clear lead across all major regions and segments. While Google and Microsoft can both point to significantly higher growth rates, IBM continues to be prominent due to its leadership in hosted private cloud.