Amazon Leads in Public IaaS, IBM Has the Private Cloud Edge

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The third-quarter results are in and Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a commanding lead in the worldwide public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market.

“In many ways, public IaaS is the poster child of cloud computing and in that segment Amazon/AWS absolutely dominates the market, with a worldwide market share of 45 percent in Q3,” said John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group, in a research note sent to Datamation. It’s an impressive feat, given how quickly rival cloud platforms are growing.

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“That market share has been achieved despite Microsoft and Google both continuing to grow their cloud service revenues at well over 100 percent per year,” continued Dinsdale. Nonetheless, Amazon is still more than twice as big as Salesforce, Microsoft and IBM combined.

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AWS also leads the public platform-as-a-service market, although not by as wide a margin. “While Amazon is not quite so dominant in public PaaS it is still almost as big as its three nearest competitors combined,” Dinsdale noted.

Meanwhile, IBM is the private cloud company to beat. “Only in managed private cloud does Amazon have to take a back seat, with IBM being the undisputed leader in that segment,” added Dinsdale.

In total, Synergy Research estimates that cloud infrastructure service revenues were more than $8 billion last quarter and are growing at a rate of 50 percent per year. Public IaaS is the biggest money maker, but growing demand for cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT), analytics and database solutions – segments that are each growing at 100 percent or more per year – is adding momentum to the market for PaaS solutions.

Continued cloud demand is also affecting the IT infrastructure market.

IDC expects cloud IT infrastructure spending on servers, Ethernet switches and enterprise storage to climb 16.2 percent this year, reaching $37.4 billion. By 2020, the analyst firm said that figure will hit $60.8 billion.

“This demand for cloud services will continue to drive the underlying shift in IT infrastructure spending from on-premises to off-premises deployments,” commented IDC research director Natalya Yezhkova, in a statement. “As public cloud data centers represent the major segment of off-premises IT infrastructure deployments, overall spending done by this segment is closely tied to spending by public cloud service providers, in particular, hyperscale [service providers].”

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.