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Australia's infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market grew 34 per cent in 2021 to total $1.89 billion, according to research firm Gartner.
Microsoft Azure once again increased its market share year-on-year to now almost sit level with leader Amazon Web Services (AWS). As of the end of 2021, AWS retained the top position with 32.2 per cent market share, followed by Microsoft at 30.1 per cent.
Meanwhile, Google, IBM and Alibaba rounded off the top five cloud providers with 15.2 per cent, 5 per cent and 4.4 per cent, respectively.
“The next phase of IaaS growth will be driven by customer experience, digital outcomes and the virtual-first world," said VP analyst Sid Nag.
"Emerging technologies that can help businesses bring experiences closer to their customers, such as the metaverse, chatbots and digital twins, will require hyperscale infrastructure to meet growing demands for compute and storage power.”
Globally, the IaaS market grew 41.4 per cent in 2021 to total US$90.9 billion, up from US$64.3 billion in 2020, according to Gartner. AWS retained the top position in the IaaS market in 2021, followed by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and Huawei.
Last year, the top five IaaS providers accounted for over 80 per cent of the market. AWS continued to lead the worldwide IaaS market with revenue of US$35.4 billion in 2021 and 38.9 per cent market share.
“The IaaS market continues to grow unabated as cloud-native becomes the primary architecture for modern workloads,” Nag said.
“Cloud supports the scalability and composability that advanced technologies and applications require, while also enabling enterprises to address emerging needs such as sovereignty, data integration and enhanced customer experience.”
Microsoft followed in second position with 21.1 per cent share, reaching over US$19 billion in IaaS revenue in 2021. Customers' reliance on Microsoft’s enterprise software and services was said to have helped Azure capture opportunities across nearly every vertical market.
Google Cloud saw the highest growth rate of the top five IaaS vendors, growing 63.7 per cent in 2021 to reach US$6.4 billion in revenue. According to Gartner, this growth was driven by steadily increased adoption for traditional enterprise workloads as well as Google’s innovation in artificial intelligence and Kubernetes container technologies, supported by an expansion of its partner ecosystem.
