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Big 4 dominate expanding public cloud market

Chasing pack comprises of Salesforce, IBM, Oracle, Tencent and Sinnet-AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud accounted for 72 per cent of public cloud services revenue during the third quarter of 2019, “strengthening their grip” on the global market.

Findings from Synergy Research Group paint a dominant picture at the top of the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) supply chains, up from 57 per cent at the beginning of 2016.

Unsurprisingly, AWS accounts for the majority share at around 40 per cent, with Microsoft, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud all “steadily gaining” presence during the past three years.

The chasing pack comprises of Salesforce, IBM, Oracle, Tencent and Sinnet-AWS, followed by a large group of vendors with minor market shares.

“It is particularly noteworthy that as spending on public cloud services continues to grow rapidly, the top four cloud providers are strengthening their grip on the market,” said John Dinsdale, chief analyst, Synergy Research Group.

“Some of the companies outside the top four are actually growing at a reasonable pace, but the reality is that in aggregate they continue to lose ground to the market leaders. Outside of some niche services and geographic regions, this is a game where scale of operations, geographic footprint and global brand are key competitive advantages.”

Credit: Synergy Research Group

More generally speaking, total worldwide spending on public IaaS and PaaS reached $20 billion during the quarter, representing over 80 per cent of the total cloud infrastructure services.

According to findings, the rest of the market is comprised of hosted and managed private cloud services, in which IBM is the market leader and Rackspace and OVH feature.

Looking ahead, Synergy estimates that total cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services) total "well over" $24 billion in the quarter, with revenues for the last four quarters now reaching $89 billion.

The total market grew by 37 per cent from the third quarter of 2018. The public IaaS and PaaS part of the market continues to grow more rapidly than private cloud services, with Q3 growth coming in at 40 per cent.

“It has taken just eight quarters for the public IaaS and PaaS markets to double in size and our forecast shows them doubling in size again over the next eleven quarters,” Dinsdale added.

Geographically, the cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world, according to Dinsdale.