There’s some bad news for Microsoft, Google and IBM as they look to rein in the market lead of Amazon Web Services in the cloud infrastructure market.
Combined, all three of the cloud challengers aren’t as big as AWS.
That’s according to the latest report from Canalys, which found that AWS brought in a third of all the cloud infrastructure sales globally in the closing quarter of 2016.
On the whole the IaaS sector grew by 49% year-on-year to $10.3bn in Q4, again highlighting the continued move to a cloud infrastructure ahead of on-premises options.
AWS controls 33.8% of the market share, while Microsoft, google and IBM combined only account for 30.8% of the market. The challengers were tailed by Alibaba and Oracle, which make up 2.4% and 1.7% of the total.
The market overall is expected to hit $55.8bn in 2017, a 46% growth from the $38.1bn sized market in 2016.
The continued demand for cloud infrastructure services is having a direct impact on the growth of the cloud data centre. AWS launched 11 new availability zones globally in 2016, while IBM opened a new data centre in the UK, bringing its total cloud data centres to 50 worldwide.
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Microsoft also strengthened its cloud capacity in Western Europe and both Google and Oracle set up their first infrastructure in Japan and China respectively.
Daniel Liu, Canalys Research Analyst said: “Strict data sovereignty laws and customer demand are pushing cloud service providers to build data centers in key markets, such as Germany, Canada, Japan, the UK, China and the Middle East; where personal data is increasingly required to be stored in facilities that are physically located within the country.”
“Expanding data center locations across the world and into key economies has been critical in supporting multi-national customers in their digital transformation initiatives. These services are also providing digital platforms for businesses to access new markets and capitalize on new trade opportunities, such as Alibaba’s Tmall Global.”
