Scale Of Cloud Growth In Q3 ‘A Little Surprising,’ Says Synergy Research

The third-quarter financials are in, and the cloud market continues to surge amid a global pandemic.

Growth in spending on cloud infrastructure (Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and hosted private cloud) was up 33 percent year over year to almost $33 billion in the quarter ended Sept. 30—a rate 1 percent higher than a strong second quarter, according to a tabulation just released by Synergy Research.

The market researcher had been expecting to see continued strength in the sector, but “the scale of the growth in Q3 was a little surprising,” said John Dinsdale, Synergy’s chief analyst, in the report.

Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure maintained their overall dominance, controlling more than half of the global market between them.

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AWS has long held 33 percent share and Microsoft stayed put at 18 percent, although on a faster growth trajectory.

Recent earnings reports pegged Azure at 48 percent growth, where AWS expanded by 29 percent in the quarter.

The next three contenders—Google, Alibaba and IBM—accounted for another 19 percent of the market, with 9 percent, 5 percent and 5 percent growth, respectively. They were followed by a strong Salesforce PaaS business holding 3 percent, and Tencent and Oracle each with 2 percent share.

Alibaba and Tencent, the two Chinese internet giants, along with Google, are all gaining ground as they grow a good deal faster than the overall market, Synergy noted.

Rounding out the top 10, which together account for 80 percent of the global market, were NTT and SAP—the Japanese and German technology giants, respectively, which each took 1 percent share.

The remaining 20 percent of the cloud infrastructure market is comprised of a long tail of small providers, Synergy said.

The $32.8 billion in third-quarter cloud spend caps a 12-month period of revenue amounting to $119 billion.

The dominant component in that market is public infrastructure and platform services, which grew at an even stronger clip of 35 percent.

“The dominance of the major cloud providers is even more pronounced in public cloud, where the top five control almost 80 percent of the market,” Dinsdale said, adding that “geographically, the cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world.”