Amazon Web Services is vastly overpowering its competition in the cloud computing market, says Synergy Research Group.
In its latest quarterly analysis, the market research firm says that AWS accounted for 45% of the revenue generated by public "infrastructure as a service" (IaaS) providers.
IaaS is the cloud market that Amazon helped to pioneer. It's where companies rent computers and storage over the internet, only paying for what they use.
In the IaaS market, AWS is bigger than the next three players combined, which are Microsoft, Google and IBM, Synergy Research says.
There are, however, different forms of clouds. Amazon is also the leader in another one called "platform as a service," (PaaS) in which companies and developers write and host apps on a cloud. Amazon is almost as big as the next three players combined, Salesforce, Microsoft and IBM, according to Synergy.
Last quarter, AWS's revenue of was over $3.2 billion. Amazon looks to be on track to do about $12 billion in revenue on AWS this year.
A game of scale
Synergy credits IBM for being the biggest "private cloud" provider. The term "private cloud" is pretty much a marketing buzzword that means buying computers and data center equipment the old fashioned way and installing them in a company's own data center. The term also refers to using software and management techniques that make a data center highly efficient, similar to the way the big internet companies (Google, Amazon and others) build and operate their data centers.
While Microsoft Azure is growing nicely and Google is also gaining traction (and being looked at by many large enterprises), some tech execs think that Amazon owns the market and always will.
"Amazon won this round. It's game over," Mark Lewis, EMC's former CTO and chief strategy recently told Business Insider. Lewis is now founder/CEO of a storage startup called Formation Data Systems and EMC is now owned by Dell.
One big reason that Amazon is so hard to catch is that cloud computing is all about scale. The bigger a cloud provider's data centers are, the more it can share costs among many customers and the more it can lower costs while still adding more services.
In fact, last quarter, one company that had been trying to beat Amazon since AWS's early days threw in the towel: VMware. Instead, VMware signed a partnership agreement to sell AWS to its customers and make it easier for them to use AWS with VMware's software.
Others believe that Amazon can be bested. Or, if not bested, at least equaled, because the market is young and still growing like crazy.
Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including public IaaS, public PaaS and managed private cloud) have now reached well over $8 billion and continue to grow at 50% per year.
The market research firm notes that late comers to the market are growing fast like "Alibaba (particularly in IaaS) and Oracle (in PaaS).”
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