Cloud Rivals Catching Up With AWS Fast

If there’s one thing AWS is wary of, it’s the pace at which its cloud rivals are catching up. Companies like Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Alibaba have posted impressive growth percentages lately overall.

Even Oracle has put up a very good show, as it moves into competition with the cloud leader.

All that may not be enough to worry the world’s biggest public cloud vendor, just yet. But Amazon Web Services is braced to face some tough competition further down the track if the rampant growth rates of its three closest market rivals continue uninterrupted.

AWS now holds a 44.2% share. To put this figure into perspective, all other IaaS public cloud services vendors not included in the top five, account for 41.2% of the global market share, $9.15 billion exact.

According to Gartner research director, Sid Nag:

“The market for cloud services is growing faster than virtually every other IT market today, with much of this growth coming at the expense of the traditional, non-cloud offerings. The demand for cloud-based IaaS continues on its path of aggressive growth, and the high growth of IaaS is also driving growth in related cloud markets.”

Overall, the worldwide IaaS public cloud market grew by 31% in 2016 to a total of $22.1 billion, markedly up from the $16.8 billion recorded in 2015, according to the latest figures provided by Gartner.

And while the next three closest AWS cloud rivals reported just a fraction of its total revenue, their rates of growth for the year outstripped that of the market leader — at least in terms of percentage points, in what ought to be a concern for Amazon.

Microsoft, for example, only made up 7.1% of the global market share in 2016, but it managed to grow its year-on-year revenue by 6.11% to $1.58 billion.

Coming in third place, surprisingly, was Alibaba. The Chinese retail giant, quite like Amazon, opened a datacenter in Australia last year. And while its cloud business only accounted for just 3% of the global market share in 2016, taking in $675 million, its revenue increased by a whopping 126.5% YOY.

Next up is Google, making up 2.3% of the global market, in terms of revenue, claiming $500 million according to Gartner. However, it saw a 100% boost in revenue, compared to previous year.

Outspoken cloud contender Oracle was notably absent from these Gartner standings, as was IBM.

But the fifth place was reserved for Rackspace, who was listed just a sliver behind Google, claiming an impressive $484 million for the year, equating to about 2.2% of the global IaaS public cloud services market share. But the company only saw an increase in revenues of just 5% for the year.