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Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) market share in cloud infrastructure services has hit a five year high despite competition from Microsoft, according to latest figures from Synergy Research.
The research, which examines infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), private and hybrid cloud, sees AWS’ overall share at 28%, compared to Microsoft’s 10%, IBM at 7%, Google at 5%, Salesforce 4%, and Rackspace 3%. Year on year growth saw Microsoft (96%) and Google (88%) the biggest climbers, with Amazon (51%) and IBM (48%) holding steady.
Synergy estimates quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues are now approaching the $5 billion (£3.32bn) mark. Total revenues for 2014 grew by almost half from the previous year.
“The momentum that has been built up at AWS and Microsoft is particularly impressive,” commented John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy. “They have an ever-broadening portfolio of services and they are also benefitting from a slowdown in the super-aggressive price competition that was a feature of the first half of 2014.”
AWS and Microsoft’s uptime figures were recently put under scrutiny by CloudEndure. Microsoft Azure saw 28 full service interruptions in Q2 last year, compared to 16 in Q3 and none in Q4. The vast majority of the 259 service errors in the first quarter of 2014 were advisory. In comparison, AWS in 2014 saw 46 service errors in EC2, 24 in scalable DNS provider Route 53, and 20 in network monitoring service CloudWatch.
In December last year AWS dramatically cut its rates for several types of data transfers, as well as changing how it priced reserved EC2 instances.
Comparative figures from Synergy in previous quarters have shown Microsoft strive to claim second position in the cloud infrastructure market, with AWS way out in front. “Many actual or perceived barriers to cloud adoption have now been removed, and the worldwide market is on a strong growth trajectory,” Dinsdale added.
