Based on quarterly revenues AWS leads the pack in four of the five APAC sub-regions, while Alibaba leads in China and is also has a strong presence in the rest of East Asia, South & Southeast Asia and Oceania.
Following closely behind is Microsoft which is ranked second in three of the sub-regions, has a strong position in Japan and is in third across the APAC region. After them, the rest of the highly ranked cloud providers are either global players with a position in multiple markets like Google and IBM, or companies with a strong position in their home markets.
In China, after Alibaba the next five cloud providers are all local companies. As the largest market in the region, China has helped Tencent and Baidu to feature among the region’s leaders. After China, the largest country markets in the region are Japan, India, Australia and South Korea.
In Japan, Fujitsu and NTT hold strong positioned, Naver and KT feature heavily in South Korea, and Telstra is a strong challenger in the Australian market.
“China is a unique market and remains dominated by local companies, but beyond China there is strong competition between a range of global and local companies. Amazon is the leader in four of the five sub-regions, but it is not the market leader in every country,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group.
“The challenge for local players is that in most ways cloud is a truly global market, requiring global presence, leading edge technology, strong brand name and credibility, extremely deep pockets and a long-term focus. For any local cloud companies looking to expand significantly beyond their home market, that is an extremely challenging proposition.”
South & Southeast Asia are seeing the highest growth rate, thanks in large part to India, although all sub-regions are growing.
In total, cloud infrastructure services revenues in APAC were over $9 billion in Q2 and are growing at a rate of over 40% a year.
Specially, public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is the largest segment in the region, followed by public platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and managed private cloud services.
Public IaaS also experienced the highest growth rate in the quarter, though managed public cloud also features strongly due to particularly high growth in VPC and bare metal cloud services.
Interestingly the data found that although APAC region does not yet account for a third of the worldwide market, it is growing much faster than the North American or EMEA regional markets.
