Research Report Highlights Cloud Market Leadership

A new Synergy Research Group Q3 report shows three market leaders in cloud computing. Surprise! Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), actually lags in one.
This would be the “managed cloud”, where IBM is the leader, followed closely by Rackspace, AWS, and NTT. Of course, when it comes to “public Infrastructure-as-a-Service” (IaaS), AWS is the unreachable behemoth, more than doubling the market presence of the next three competitors — Microsoft, Google and IBM — combined.
In the third category — “public Platform-as-a-Service” (PaaS) — things are a bit tighter. AWS is the undisputed leader, but the next three competitors — Salesforce.com, Microsoft.com, and IBM — can at most match Amazon when their markets are combined.
[Click on the image to see a larger view.] Cloud Leaders (source : Synergy Group) AWS holds a 45 percent share of the public IaaS market, despite Google and Microsoft having higher growth rates in third quarter. AWS, Microsoft and IBM still make up more than half the global market.
Yesterday, Synergy executive John Dinsdale stated that scale is the key to success in public cloud markets. “Amazon and Google continue to invest enormous amounts in their hyperscale infrastructure. All three have recently expanded their data centers footprints and announced plans to open more geographic regions in coming months.
“This scale is the main reason they are able gain market share and pressure smaller competitors into consolidation or refocusing cloud activities. Some tier 2 players are trying to buck the trend, and at least some of them are seeing strong growth, such as Alibaba (especially in IaaS), and Oracle (in PaaS).