Synergy Research Report: Microsoft and IBM Accelerates at the Cost of Amazon Cloud

Microsoft and IBM are gaining momentum in the market for cloud infrastructure services and pressuring beating Google and Amazon, according to a new study. While Amazon, the market leader in cloud, maintained its position. But Amazon market share is not larger now than its four closest competitors combined, said a report from research firm Synergy Research Group.

It has become clear that AWS finally has some tough competition to face, the report says. Until this quarter it could claim that it was bigger than its four nearest competitors, but now at least one jewel has fallen from its crown. While it remains a formidable leader of the market, Microsoft is making some huge strides in IaaS and PaaS while IBM now has clear leadership in the private & the hybrid infrastructure services segment.

The second quarter data of these companies show that net sales of Amazon cloud infrastructure grew 49 percent compared to the same period of 2013, but IBM showed a growth of 86 percent and Microsoft scored a whooping 164 percent, while year on year growth of Google reached 47 percent. Synergy Research report said the quarterly market for infrastructure cloud services reached 3.7 billion in the second quarter. The total market grew 45 percent year over year.

Synergy said that Microsoft is making some huge strides in IaaS and PaaS while IBM has clear leadership in the private and hybrid infrastructure services. IBM and Microsoft both claim quarterly cloud revenues of around $1 billion from SaaS, cloud related hardware products, technical and professional services. But Amazon is still the leader in cloud market. The total Amazon AWS revenues are now well in excess of $1 billion per quarter, with nearly all of that coming from cloud infrastructure services.

This contrasts with what happens in Google, which has a cloud offering but that is not perceived to be a priority for the company. The cloud was not mentioned even once in the earnings call from Google. Another issue Google faces in the cloud market is that it has a long history of working with companies. That makes the IT and business executives to re-think their strategies while choosing Google cloud.

It is important to note that Synergy Research Group adopts a broad approach to cloud services, including IaaS, PaaS, private and public clouds, prompting the comparison in perspective. But it seems pretty clear that growth of Amazon AWS has stalled.

Amazon has the advantage that AWS routinely cuts their cloud pricing and it is one of the cheapest in the cloud computing market today. Microsoft, on the other hand, recently progressed enough to be a serious threat to Amazon’s dominance in the market.

Gartner in its Magic Quadrant report says that Microsoft’s brand, existing customer relationships, history of running global-class consumer Internet properties, deep investments in engineering, and aggressive road map have enabled it rapidly to attain the status of strategic cloud IaaS providers.

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