The big get bigger in cloud

If customer spending on cloudy infrastructure and platform services in Q3 was a tin of beans, then a full-bellied AWS might have used the resulting wind to power its bit barns.

The global IaaS and PaaS markets grew to a little more than $10bn during the quarter, up 53 per cent year on year, and AWS accounted for almost one third of that.

This is according to Canalys estimates, which showed Amazon’s cloud subsidiary turned over $3.23bn, up 55 per cent growth on the year ago period, and held 32 per cent market share.

Microsoft Azure hauled in $1.736bn, up 116 per cent, giving it a 17 per cent share of the spoils; Google Cloud hauled in $764m, up 80 per cent year on year, giving it an eight per cent share.

Over at Big Blue, IBM Software sold $654m worth of services, up 51 per cent, and this handed it a seven per cent slice of total market sales, while Chinese outfit Alibaba sold $221m, up 128 per cent and taking a market share of two per cent.

Much like in the world of on-premise tech, the cloud giants keep getting bigger and bigger, equating to 66 per cent of all money splashed on IaaS and PaaS.

Matthew Ball, principal analyst at Canalys, told us that beyond the top five “the remainder of the market is highly fragmented between smaller global providers and more local providers”.

He said the next string includes CenturyLink, Dimension Data, Fujitsu, NTT Communications, Rackspace and Virtustream.

Canalys doesn’t track industry breakdowns in terms of adoptions, but Ball said consumer cloud services/apps continue to make up a large chunk of the cloud market.

“We see applications like dev and test, backup and DR moving to the cloud among most business. Mission-critical applications still remain under the control of IT departments,” he said. ®