• Global public cloud infrastructure market grows 37.3% to $44.5b in 2019, Gartner says

Bengaluru: Even though Amazon Web Services (AWS) still maintains its grip on the public cloud infrastructure market, its dominance waned slightly between 2018 and 2019 as Microsoft and Google started to flex muscles.

According to research firm Gartner, AWS earned about $20 billion in IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)  cloud revenue in 2019, leading with a 45% market share compared to 47.9% in 2018, followed by Microsoft Azure with $8 billion and 17.9% market share in 2019 (15.6% market share in 2018), Alibaba with $4 billion and 9.1% market share ($2.5 billion and 7.7% in 2018) and Google with $2.4 billion and 5.3% market share ($1.3 billion and 4.1% in 2018).

Microsoft’s IaaS offering grew 57.8% year on year, using its reach and bundling its platform with other Microsoft products and cloud providers to drive adoption.

China market

Microsoft doesn’t break out revenue for its Azure cloud business but Gartner estimated the company’s cloud infrastructure revenues in 2019, with more than half of its revenue coming from North America.

Tencent, the fifth biggest cloud infrastructure provider, market share increased from 1.9% market share to $2.8 billion in 2019. 

Tencent is the second largest provider of cloud services in China, after Alibaba.

Gartner predicted that Chinese providers such as Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei would continue to gain traction as the market matured, and market share between providers eroded as a result. 

“It will also be hard for other providers, such as the North America-based cloud providers, to enter the China market given the country’s highly regulated market,” Sid Nag, Research Vice-President at Gartner, said.

Oracle: A player to watch

The fastest growth rates were achieved by Tencent with 100%, followed by Google with 80%, Alibaba Cloud with 62.4% and Microsoft with 57.8%. 

In 2019, the top five IaaS providers accounted for 80 per cent of the market, up from 77 per cent in 2018.

The overall IaaS public cloud service market grew to $44.5 billion in 2019, up 37.3% year-on-year.

Industry experts said that Oracle, with its second-generation cloud infrastructure, will be a formidable player to watch as they have won new customers and have attracted customers from other leading platforms.  

Nag said that cloud technology had demonstrated its value for companies during this time, meaning IT leaders would be in no hurry to slow investment in scaling out additional capacity and capabilities to their cloud infrastructure.

“When enterprises were compelled to move their applications to the public cloud as a result of the pandemic, they realised the true benefits of public cloud and it is unlikely that they will change course,” said Nag.

“In the recovery and rebound phase, CIOs are recognising that they don’t need to bring workloads back on premises, which will further increase cloud spending and drive new applications around cloud-hosted collaboration that incorporate emerging technologies such as virtual reality and immersive video experiences.”

At the end of the day, she said that each of these technologies require a scalable, elastic and high-capacity infrastructure platform like public Cloud IaaS, which is why the market witnessed strong growth.

Gartner predicts that more than 80 per cent of the organisations will adopt or have adopted the multi-cloud approach by the end of the year.