Microsoft gains ground on Amazon in the Aussie IaaS arena

Amazon has led the charge once again in both the local and global infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) public cloud services markets for 2020, but Microsoft is hot on the tech giant’s heels in Australia. 

While beating out the rest of its competitors with with 32.3 per cent market share and a revenue increase of 24.3 per cent, according to research firm Gartner, Amazon’s market share for 2020 is less than what it was a year prior — 36.5 per cent. 

Meanwhile, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba — ranks two through four — all recorded market share increases, with Microsoft starting to close gap between it and first place with 27.3 per cent, up from 23.5 per cent in 2019. 

The Redmond, Washington-based tech giant’s boost in the local IaaS market comes as the overall market jumped up by 40.4 per cent year-on-year to over $1.4 billion in 2020, with the top three players holding onto 70 per cent of the market share. 

“Australian organisations accelerated their commitment to public cloud in 2020 and are now investing to support new opportunities in 5G, cloud-native applications, AI [artificial intelligence] and data analytics,” said Michael Warrilow, research vice president at Gartner. 

“Leading cloud providers continue to invest locally to overcome the tyranny of distance,” he said. “It’s no longer just about Sydney or Canberra. They are adding new regional capabilities spanning from Perth in our west, Auckland in the east, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur to our north and Melbourne in the south-east.” 

These local movements are similar to the global trends, which also saw Amazon in the lead with market share of 40.8 per cent and revenue increasing by 28.7 per cent to hit US$26 billion for 2020. 

That growth increase, which was under the overall market rise of 40.7 per cent year-on-year, was attributed to increased customer usage. 

However, most of the major global players — Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and Huawei — saw their market share  rise.

Coming in second place for global market share, Microsoft also saw its revenue increase with a rise of 59.2 per cent year-on-year to US$12.7 billion. According to Gartner, demand for its solutions stemmed from Azure customers wanting to navigate global healthcare crisis and disruption in workplace environments with mission-critical workload migrations. 

This came in the form of healthcare applications with AI-assisted bots, digital twins in manufacturing and e-commerce in retail. 

Meanwhile, Google, which came in fourth place for IaaS market share, experienced revenue growth of 66.1 per cent year-on-year to US$3.9 billion, largely due to spending from the retail, government and healthcare sectors, as well as its focus on developing and deploying cloud applications in hybrid and multi-cloud models.