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Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to dominate the public cloud services market, operating as a “clear” worldwide leader across the world.
That’s according to new data from Synergy Research Group, which ranks the tech giant comfortably ahead of the competition in all four of the world’s major regions, spanning public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) revenues.
The regions include North America, EMEA, Asia Pacific and Latin America, with Microsoft ranked second in three of the four regions, and Google ranked third on three occasions.
But Asia Pacific bucks the trend, with rankings differed due to the prominence of the Chinese market, coupled with the dominance of local cloud providers in China.
Such a market shift has resulted in Alibaba being ranked second in the APAC region and fourth worldwide - IBM, Salesforce and Tencent fill out the other top five slots in the regions, the latter thanks to its position in China.
“Despite some local data sovereignty and regulatory issues, in most meaningful ways public cloud computing is essentially a global market,” observed John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group. “This is a game of scale and to be a market leader demands vast ongoing investments, a global presence and a global brand.
“Of course there will often be local issues that might enable local companies to carve out niche positions for themselves, but they will remain small local players in a specific country or sub-region.
“It is also true that in such cases the global leaders can usually deploy different local strategies to enable them to succeed. With the glaring exception of China, we view this as a truly global market.”
According to Dinsdale, public IaaS and PaaS are the “most prominent” segments of the cloud infrastructure services market and account for the bulk of the revenues, with the balance coming from managed or hosted cloud services.
“Within public cloud, the dominance of AWS, Microsoft and Google is even more marked than in the larger cloud market,” Dinsdale added.
Specifically, AWS alone accounts for almost 40 per cent of the market and the three in aggregate account for well over 60 per cent.
“In marked contrast to the rest of the world, in China the top five cloud providers are all local companies,” Dinsdale explained. “China now accounts for a third of the total APAC market and its share of the regional total is increasing each quarter.”
