When it comes to raking in the money on cloud computing Amazon still "dwarfs all competition," writes John Dinsdale, an analyst at market researcher Synergy in a new report.
The total cloud computing market hit $2.5 billion in revenue in Q3, up 46% the same quarter of 2012, Synergy found.
Not only did Amazon grab most of that, it grew its own cloud revenues by 55% and increased its overall market share.
As for exactly how much money that is, Amazon doesn't directly report the revenue it makes on its cloud. It lumps it into the "other revenue" category. Some analysts estimate Amazon will generate at least $3 billion from its cloud this year, and that could be low. In 2013 so far, Amazon reported $2.7 billion in "other" revenue. Most of that is from its cloud. The rest comes from things like advertising and co-branded credit cards.
For the last quarter of this year, Synergy estimates that Amazon grew cloud revenues by over $700 million and that makes Amazon bigger than all the other major players combined including Microsoft, IBM, Google and Salesforce.com ... by 15%, Synergy finds.
That's a blow to IBM, which has been running an ad campaign saying that IBM is now a bigger cloud player than Amazon, thanks to its purchase of website hosting company SoftLayer last summer.
UPDATE: Ed Barbini, an IBM spokesperson, disputes Synergy's conclusions. Barbini notes that "IBM's 3Q report, just last month, showed that IBM's revenue from cloud products and services reached more than $1 billion last quarter" up 70% in its first three quarters over last year, which would put it in a similar range as Amazon. He also pointed out that IBM has "1,400 cloud patents and 37,000 cloud experts worldwide."
Here's what Amazon's dominance looks like according to the new Synergy report.
