Three global IT giants — Microsoft, IBM and Google — continue to lag far behind Amazon (AWS) in the IaaS / PaaS market.
This is despite all of them achieving strong growth and despite IBM’s acquisition of SoftLayer, shows new Q3 data prepared by Synergy Research Group.
Even after adding the PaaS revenues of salesforce.com, in aggregate the group lags some 15 percent behind Amazon in terms of IaaS / PaaS revenues. In a worldwide market that grew 46 percent from Q3 of 2012, Amazon grew by 55 percent and increased its overall market share.
Total IaaS/PaaS revenues for the quarter passed the $2.5 billion milestone, with IaaS accounting for the lion’s share — 64 percent.
North America accounted for 53 percent of the Q2 market, with EMEA and APAC each accounting for 21 percent and Latin America 5 percent.
Amazon is the market leader in each of the four regions, though the ranking of the chasing pack does differ by region.
Associated infrastructure service markets all grew in the quarter, but much more slowly than IaaS and PaaS. Managed hosting revenues grew by 3 percent year on year, retail colocation grew by 8 percent and CDN by 14 percent.
Recently, Gartner said the use of cloud computing is growing, and by 2016 this growth will increase to become the bulk of new IT spend. 2016 will be a defining year for cloud as private cloud begins to give way to hybrid cloud, and nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017.
“In India, cloud services revenue is projected to have a five-year projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33.2 percent from 2012 through 2017 across all segments of the cloud computing market. Segments such as software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) have even higher projected CAGR growth rates of 34.4 percent and 39.8 percent,” said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner.
Cloud computing continues to grow at rates much higher than IT spending generally. Growth in cloud services is being driven by new IT computing scenarios being deployed using cloud models, as well as the migration of traditional IT services to cloud service alternatives, Gartner said.
IDC recently said the U.S. federal government is expected to spend $118.3 million on public cloud solutions in FY14 (an increase of 32.8 percent over the previous fiscal year) and over $1.7 billion on private cloud solutions (a decrease of 5.7 percent).
Shawn P. McCarthy, research director at IDC Government Insights, said FY 2014 will continue to be a flat year for cloud computing investments. Investments should reach a critical mass around 2015 and beyond. A new emphasis on cloud solutions is expected to return within the next 18 months, and private cloud investments should approach $7.7 billion by FY 2017.
