Cloud Companies “Might Feel Good About Themselves” But Good Luck Reaching AWS Heights: Report

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By The WHIR

After the “big four” public cloud providers, the next 20 companies are growing at an average of 41 percent per year – and still losing market share. The overall cloud infrastructure services market (including IaaS, PaaS, private and hybrid) is growing by 50 percent a year, according to the latest quarterly report from Synergy Research Group. Synergy estimates that overall quarterly revenues have “comfortably passed” $7 billion.

Amazon Web Services, which just named a new CEO, maintains a dominant position with 31 percent of the global market share for cloud infrastructure services, with 57 percent year-over-year growth. Microsoft, IBM, and Google account for a combined 22 percent, and while IBM had what would normally be considered strong quarterly growth, Microsoft and Google’s infrastructure services revenue grew by over 100 percent on an annualized basis. The next 20 companies (which include Alibaba, Rackspace, HPE and others) make up 27 percent of the total market for cloud infrastructure.

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“This is a market that is so big and is growing so rapidly that companies can be growing by 10-30 percent per year and might feel good about themselves and yet they’d still be losing market share,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “The big question for them is whether or not they are building a sustainable and profitable business. This can be done by focusing on specific regions or specific services, but the bulk of the market demands huge scale, a broad footprint, very deep pockets and a long-term corporate focus.”

The “next 20” includes Alibaba, Century Link, Fujitsu, Orange, Rackspace, HPE, NTT, Salesforce, and VMware. Other companies with smaller shares than the biggest 24 companies still account for nearly 20 percent of the world market, with 30 percent growth.

Synergy found growth rates to be similar across regions, so the US continues to represent roughly half of the world market.

Research published last year by Synergy showed that infrastructure services are just one part of a much larger cloud revenue picture, which also includes the cloud infrastructure hardware market, which is led by Cisco and HP.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/cloud-companies-might-feel-good-about-themselves-but-good-luck-reaching-aws-heights-report