• AWS, the market leader, grows 32% in the third quarter while Microsoft grows over 50% and Google by 54%.
• Hyperscalers have now shifted focus to advancing industry-specific service portfolios and growing their channels to successfully bring these increasingly diverse sets of products to market.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), maintaining its leadership position, accounted for 32 per cent of the total cloud infrastructure services spend in the third quarter of this year but Microsoft and Google Cloud grew more than 50 per cent on an annual basis.

AWS grew 39 per cent on an annual basis but Microsoft Azure, the second-largest cloud service provider with a 21 per cent market share, grew over 50 per cent for the fifth consecutive quarter while Google, the third-largest provider with eight per cent of the market, grew 54 per cent in the third quarter.

Blake Murray, Research Analyst at Canalys, said that overall compute demand is out-growing chip manufacturing capabilities and infrastructure expansion may become limited for the cloud service providers.

According to the research firm, cloud infrastructure services spending continued in high demand and grew 35 per cent to $49.4 billion in the third quarter, driven by a range of factors, including the ongoing remote working and learning, and the growing use of industry-specific cloud applications.

 The latest estimates show expenditure has grown $12.9 billion over a year ago and $2.4 billion since last quarter. 

“Cloud services spending are still being affected by the digital transformation efforts required to maintain business continuity during pandemic-related disruptions. In response, the major cloud services providers have emphasized geographic data centre expansion to meet rising demand,” Murray said.

Industry-specific offerings

Due to the imminent shortage of chips, he said that data centre component providers are seeing longer lead times and higher prices that will be passed on to the largest providers. 

“The hyperscalers have now shifted focus to advancing industry-specific service portfolios and growing their channels to successfully bring these increasingly diverse sets of products to market,” he said.

AWS recently announced AWS for Health, which combines industry-specific offerings with cybersecurity and compliance solutions.

It has been successful in the public sector, winning key deals with US and UK governments. It has also led channel development through its competency programs, with its government competency becoming the largest industry-focused competency among its partners. 

Microsoft continued to focus on industry cloud service customisations and expanded capabilities in financial services and manufacturing. It also reported new customer success in its cloud service suites for healthcare and sustainability.

Microsoft has worked on its position around data governance and also announced Azure Purview, a unified data solution designed to support data management in multi-cloud environments while Google Cloud also emphasized its channel partners and released new incentives in its partner program.

It [Google Cloud] advertised a 175 per cent increase in customer engagements through partners during the first half of this year and also advanced its positioning around data sovereignty with the release of Google Distributed Cloud, which gives customers options to extend Google Cloud’s infrastructure to the edge and customer data centres.

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