Just how big is Amazon’s cloud service (AWS) you may ask. It’s been on everyone’s mind. In a RightScale poll last year, 57 percent of responders said they use (Amazon Web Services) which is up from 54 percent in 2014 while another 12% say they use Microsoft Azure which is up from 6 percent in 2014.
It’s now 2016 and it’s time to know how AWS has fared so far this year. In a recent report by Synergy Research Group, they say Amazon’s dominance in the cloud computing market is really big. But how big? We’ll answer that as we go on in the report.
AWS has a 45 percent of the global pubic infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market and this comes as Microsoft and Google both showed signs of growth when they declared their quarterly earnings weeks ago. As it stands now, AWS is bigger than the next three providers combined.
“Competition is tighter in the public PaaS market but Amazon still has a big lead over Salesforce, Microsoft and IBM. In the managed private cloud segment IBM is the market leader, followed by Amazon, Rackspace and NTT. In aggregate the big four cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Google – continue to control well over half of the worldwide market and all continue to grow their market share.”
At this point though, it’s safe to say the aggressive push by other companies into cloud service provision seems to be eating into this lead though. The growth of other services from other big players like Microsoft and Google are on track to achieve just this. They are growing at rates much faster than AWS and let’s not forget timing. Amazon launched AWS in 2006 while Microsoft launched its own public cloud platform in 2010.
AWS revenue was $2.88b in the second and that was a 58 percent year on year increase. In the third quarter, revenue stood at $3.23b versus $3.17b expected and this represents a 54.9 percent increase year on year. So far, Amazon seems to have raked in about $9b in revenue from its web service and is well on track to make that number $12b at the end of 2016.
The report notes though that IBM is the biggest provider of private cloud services. This means that when it comes to individuals and organisations setting up their own infrastructure, IBM seems to be the one selling much of the machines to them. See differences in cloud service provision services and which one might suit your need here.