Cloud computing, where companies rent computers hosted elsewhere, is the biggest change to enterprise tech since the PC.
And the company that more or less invented the concept, Amazon, is still far and away the dominant leader of a market that generated $16 billion for its biggest players, says market research firm Synergy Research Group.
Synergy reports:
- Amazon has 30% market share, compared to the next biggest player, Microsoft, with about 10%.
- Microsoft is growing the fastest, a 96% year-over-year leap, with Google close behind: 87% year-over-year growth.
- IBM is leading what's known as the "hybrid cloud market." That refers to when enterprises use the same cloud technologies in their own private data centers and also use a cloud provider.
It makes sense that IBM is leading the hybrid camp among this crop of vendors because it's the only one of the bunch that sells computer hardware. IBM says that between its cloud services and the hardware it sells to companies to build their own clouds, cloud computing became a $7 billion business for the company in 2014.
The good news for all concerned: it's still early days for cloud computing, as $16 billion is only a tiny fraction of the almost $4 trillion that companies spend on tech annually worldwide.
Here's how Synergy saw the fourth quarter of 2014 shape up:
