Cloud Revs Up

Cloud revenues have grown 51 percent over the past year to nearly $15 billion, according to new research by Synergy Research Group.

As reported in The Wall Street Journal, that number outpaces full-year revenue growth of 44 percent in 2017, and 50 percent in 2016.

The results are based on an analysis of quarterly earnings reported by Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, IBM, and Alibaba in recent weeks.

The analysis includes reported revenue data from Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and hosted private cloud services.

It shows AWS, Amazon’s cloud unit, extending a 12-quarter lead in the cloud-services market, with a 33% share of the global market. Amazon was among the first tech firms to rent computer power and storage, launching AWS over a decade ago.

Currently its closest rival is Microsoft, with 13% market share, followed by IBM at 8%, Google at 6% and Alibaba at 4%, according to Synergy.

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Gains among big cloud vendors have mostly come at the expense of small-to-medium sized operators, who are being outspent by the bigger providers and have seen their market shares diminish, Synergy said.