Runners Up

’The second tier of operators are either niche players, generalist IT service providers, or companies lacking the scale, focus and investment capabilities required to truly challenge the top four hyper-scale cloud providers," Dinsdale said in the Synergy report.

Those second-tier providers include Rackspace, Oracle, NTT, Fujitsu, Alibaba and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, according to Synergy.

Dinsdale told CRN that while Oracle will likely struggle to make a large impact on the IaaS market, the software giant is in a good position for PaaS, "where it has some natural skills and assets."