Cloud Leaderboard: AWS, Microsoft, IBM And Google Continue Infrastructure Dominance

The Cloud Horse Race At The Start Of 2018

The largest cloud providers only increased their overall dominance in 2017, expanding share in a market still growing at an astronomical rate, according to a report released Friday by Synergy Research Group.

Spending on cloud infrastructure services (IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud) shot up 46 percent in the final three months of 2017 -- faster than it had in any of the previous three quarters, according to the researcher's analysis of earnings results posted by all major vendors. Full-year revenue in 2017 grew 44 percent above the previous year.

The expansion was driven mostly by the usual suspects: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google. But Chinese powerhouse Alibaba also made an impact, cracking the Top 5 rankings for the first time.

Those companies "all increased their share of the worldwide market at the expense of smaller cloud providers," said Synergy Chief Analyst John Dinsdale.

Synergy now pegs the quarterly infrastructure services market north of $13 billion.

"The leading cloud providers all have things to be pleased about and they are setting a fierce pace that most chasing companies cannot match," Dinsdale said.