Synergy Research Group shows that all three have increased their market share, with Microsoft in particular increasing more than the others. The actual third-quarter market share numbers are: Amazon 34%, Microsoft 14%, IBM 7%, Google 7%, and Alibaba 4%.
“This is another really strong set of numbers both for the leading cloud providers and for the market as a whole,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group. “The growth rates are tailing off at some of the leading cloud providers but that is just the law of large numbers kicking in. You cannot keep on growing at 100% when you reach massive scale.”
Amazon, Google and Alibaba each increased their market share by one percentage point in the last four quarters, with Microsoft going up 2.5 points. IBM’s market share went down half a percentage point, continuing a trend noted by Synergy in the past.
The next 10 – including Fujitsu, NTT, Oracle, Rackspace, Tencent and Salesforce – also each went down by one percentage point, according to the Synergy figures.
Dinsdale added: “The role model for sustainable growth is market leader Amazon. Over the last ten quarters the AWS [Amazon Web Services] year-on-year growth rate in these markets has been pretty steady and has averaged just a little under 50%. Given the need for huge scale, most cloud providers outside of the top five are being forced to focus on market niches or specific geographic regions.”
The cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world, said Synergy.
