The latest report from Synergy Research has claimed that Amazon Web Services’ quarterly revenues continue to be greater than its biggest rivals combined in IaaS and PaaS.
Amazon grew by 55% between Q212 and Q213 to over $700m of revenue in the quarter, with Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Google combined making over just $600m.
John Dinsdale, of the Synergy Research Group, noted that the battle for second place will be of more interest to analysts.
“We’ve been analysing the IaaS/PaaS markets for quite a few quarters now and creating these leadership metrics, and the relative positioning of the leaders really hasn’t changed much,” Dinsdale said.
“While Amazon dwarfs all competition, the race is on to see if any of the big four followers can distance themselves from their peers,” he added.
With the worldwide market expanding 46%, it appears the competition isn’t making much of a dent, as the graph below illustrates:
Yet this isn’t a spellbinding revelation to anyone concerned – just another reminder of Amazon’s relentless dominance. Synergy Research themselves, not surprisingly, came to exactly the same conclusion at the end of Q2, with CloudTech opining at the time that it was difficult to see beyond Amazon for the IaaS market.
It’s a timely reminder too, with event season having come to an end. Salesforce and Amazon both finished their industry events earlier this month – in San Francisco and Las Vegas respectively – with updated CRM tool Salesforce1 and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution Amazon WorkSpaces the key product launches.
Regarding the competition, it’s something of a misnomer to drag Salesforce into any IaaS comparisons, given its key strength – as CEO Marc Benioff acknowledged – is in the SaaS space. But to the execs at Microsoft, Google, and particularly IBM, these figures will be a source of continued frustration.
From IBM’s perspective, the transition of infrastructure following the acquisition of SoftLayer is still nascent, so there’s hope of acceleration there. Yet the loss of the much publicised $600m CIA cloud contract – pending final appeal – must hurt.
Yet according to Dinsdale, there’s still a solid long term play available for both the bigger and smaller players.
“The good news for these companies, and for the long tail of operators with relatively small cloud infrastructure service operations, is that IaaS/PaaS will be growing strongly long into the future, providing plenty of opportunity for robust revenue growth,” he said.
Of course, the joy for technology analysts is that it’s often impossible to predict the denouement of business situations. But has Amazon taken the top prize in infrastructure already?
