According to two recent studies, Amazon Web Services (AWS), despite showing slower than usual growth in its most recent quarter, is still the leader of the public cloud market.
According to new data released by Synergy Research Group, AWS’ market share was just over 40% in the fourth quarter 2016. This is almost double the market share of AWS’ closest competitors, Microsoft, Google, and IBM. Together they made up 23 percent.
AWS reported a year-over-year increase of 47 percent in its Q4 FY2016 earnings last week. This is still impressive, but it is the slowest growth, according to the cloud giant. Synergy data shows that AWS’ market share has remained relatively unchanged between 2015-2016, while the three-vendor chase group behind AWS grew by 5%, “helped particularly by strong growth [by] Microsoft or Google.”
The rest of the public cloud industry is facing a tough race. The next 10 vendors, which include Oracle and Alibaba, saw their market share drop by 1 percent in the fourth quarter. This is bad news for Oracle which has been increasing its IaaS portfolio to challenge AWS. The market’s rest, which includes an unknown number of “small-to medium-sized cloud service providers”, fell by 4 percent.
Source: Synergy Research. John Dinsdale, Synergy Chief Analyst, and Research Director, stated in a prepared statement that while some cloud providers are growing at incredible rates AWS continues to impress as an established market leader that does not intend to lose its crown.
Dinsdale reports that AWS has shown a commitment to expanding its infrastructure and services portfolio. AWS reported last week that it had opened 11 new cloud datacenters and added 1,017 services in 2016. Dinsdale stated that such expansion is crucial to “achieving and maintaining leadership position”.
Canalys, an analyst firm, also highlighted the importance of cloud infrastructure providers expanding their datacenter footprints. Canalys released Monday’s media alert highlighting the need for large-scale datacenter expansions by leading cloud infrastructure providers, especially in countries where data sovereignty laws can be quite strict.
“Strict data sovereignty laws, customer demand, and increasing personal data requirements are driving cloud service providers to create data centers in key markets such as Germany, Canada and Japan. These data centers are located in countries where personal data is more commonly required to be stored in facilities that can be physically located within the country,” Daniel Liu, Canalys Research Analyst, said in a prepared statement. Multi-national customers have found it crucial to expand their data center locations in key economies around the globe in support of their digital transformation efforts.
Although Canalys’ market share numbers differ from Synergys, it is not surprising given the differences in each company’s proprietary datasets and measurement tools, the top standings remain the same. According to the firm, AWS accounted for 33.8 percent of cloud infrastructure market share in Q4. It was followed by Google, IBM, and Microsoft, who together accounted for 30.8 per cent. With 1.7 percent and 2.4 percent, respectively, Oracle and Alibaba were close behind.
Source: Canalys