Research firm Canalys has revealed the growth in the global cloud infrastructure revenue of AWS, Microsoft and Google for Q1 2019.
The global cloud infrastructure services market grew 42 percent year on year in Q1. AWS, the Cloud market leader, achieved by far the biggest gain, with sales up by $2.3 billion (+41 percent) on Q1 2018.
Second-placed Microsoft achieved Cloud revenue of $1.5 billion (+75 percent). Google was the fastest growing of the top three in percentage terms, up 83 percent from $1.2 billion to $2.3 billion.
“As enterprises become more selective about which workloads are moved to the cloud, and which remain in their own data centers, cloud service providers must develop new strategies that ensure their continued relevance,” Canalys Chief Analyst Alastair Edwards, said.
AWS will start shipping its first appliance, Outposts, later this year, marking its opening move to deliver hardware into customer data centers. This is primarily to address latency issues, as it seeks to extend AWS cloud from virtual to physical environments.
Google, which announced a 17 percent growth in total revenue, earlier launched Anthos, an application management platform that supports multiple clouds, including rivals AWS and Microsoft Azure, as well as its own Google Cloud Platform. Google will use this as a way to penetrate new enterprise customers where it has lacked presence and is developing hardware partnerships with server vendors to accelerate this move.
Alibaba, the number four cloud infrastructure provider worldwide — thanks to its leadership in China — is increasing its focus on driving business transformation for enterprise customers. Alibaba is offering VMware’s Software Defi ned Data Center (SDDC) cloud software stack on its cloud infrastructure. Alibaba is working with hardware partners to deliver its Apsara stack on-premises.
These initiatives increase the competitive pressure on Microsoft, which has taken an early lead in hybrid IT with its Azure Stack.
Canalys Research Analyst Daniel Liu said: “Enterprise customers will rely on highly skilled partners that understand their application and workload requirements and can help them define the right hybrid models to meet their business goals, as well as managing and securing these hybrid environments.”
Canalys expects that a growing proportion of cloud sales will be delivered through indirect partners in 2019 and beyond. The winning cloud providers will be those that invest in their programs, channel engagement and training, as well as use their alliance partners’ channel partner ecosystems.
