Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are leading the race to the cloud as they retain top positions among infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers in 2020, according to the latest Gartner report.
The global IaaS public cloud services market grew 40.7 per cent to a total of $64.3 billion with AWS outpacing other providers in the market, followed by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google Cloud and Huawei. The top five companies accounted for 80 per cent of the market, Gartner said.
According to Gartner’s Research Vice President, Sid Nag, hyperscale providers are continuing to build distributed cloud and edge solutions that extend the public cloud’s reach into private and on-premise locations, addressing the needs of organisations relating to data sovereignty, workload portability and network latency.
With $26.2 billion of revenue in 2020 from IaaS public cloud services, Amazon continued to lead the global Iaas market commanding a 41 per cent market share. According to Gartner, AWS’ IaaS cloud services revenue grew nearly 28 per cent in 2020.
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Microsoft claimed the number two spot with nearly 60 per cent growth amounting to $12.7 billion in Iaas revenue in 2020.
The global disruption in workplace environments drove increased demand from existing Microsoft Azure customers to migrate their mission-critical workloads, such as from healthcare applications with AI-assisted bots, digital twins in manufacturing and e-commerce in retail, to the cloud.
Coming in third, Alibaba saw 52.8 per cent growth with Iaas revenue surpassing $6 billion, up from $4 billion in 2019. Asia’s largest IaaS cloud services provider saw its highest growth rate in the education vertical at 105%, driven by downloads of Alibaba’s enterprise communication and collaboration platform DingTalk among employees and students working and studying from home.
Google’s IaaS revenue grew 66 per cent to reach nearly $4 billion in 2020. This growth was driven by increased focus from the retail, government and healthcare sectors to develop and deploy cloud applications in both a hybrid and multi-cloud model.
Huawei broke into the top five IaaS vendors for the first time in 2020, after its second consecutive year of over 200 per cent growth in the IaaS market. The company made $2.7 billion in revenue, and over 90 per cent of this revenue came from Greater Chin
“The era of CIOs investing in cloud IaaS and platform as a service (PaaS) discretely is long over,” said Nag. “While the cloud market will continue to grow, the real opportunity for providers comes from growth in cloud-adjacent technology markets such as edge, 5G and AI, as CIOs look to invest in technologies that address their complex and emerging use cases.”
