Amazon has been credited as being a contributing factor to the high growth. As market leader its AWS division achieved the highest the highest growth since late 2016. The company has retained a 33% global market share for the past twelve quarters despite the fact that the market has almost tripled in size.
“Cloud growth in the last two quarters really has been quite exceptional,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group. “Normal market development cycles and the law of large numbers should result in growth rates that slowly diminish – and that is what we saw in late 2016 and through most of 2017.”
Competitors Microsoft, Google and Alibaba have all grown their market shares quite significantly, but this has not affected AWS and its market leading position. IBM’s market share has remained relatively stable with a consistent share of approximately 8% - driven by its strong leadership position in hosed private cloud services. According to figures it is largely the small-to-medium sized cloud operators that have seen their market shares reduced.
Based on the recently released Q1 earnings by global cloud providers, Synergy predicts that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues – including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and hosted private cloud services – now totals nearly $15 billion.
“But the growth rate jumped by three percentage points in Q4 and by another five in Q1. That is good news for the leading cloud providers, whose historically high levels of capex are helping to ensure that they are the main beneficiaries of that exceptional market growth,” added Dinsdale.
The 51% from Q1 of 2017 growth rate, compares with a full-year 2017 growth rate of 44% and a 2016 growth rate of 50%. Public IaaS and PaaS services make up the majority of the market and those grew by 56% from Q1 in 2017. In public cloud the dominance of the top five aforementioned providers is even more visible, as they control almost three quarters of the overall market.
