AWS Loses Ground, Microsoft Azure Gains It

We have some rather interesting developments for the fourth quarter. The cloud standings for Q4 2017 have revealed that Microsoft Azure was the big winner, after AWS lost market share.

Amazon Web Services has long been wary of its immediate competitor, Azure, which is continually gaining market share over the Amazon cloud.

As noted in this report, AWS lost to Microsoft in the fourth quarter of the past year. KeyBanc revealed that not only does Microsoft has more prebuilt models than other public cloud vendors, it also has more Azure datacenters throughout the world.

This makes it easier for the Redmond based technology company to reach more enterprise customers.

The report says:

“After our conversations with leaders at Microsoft, we came away believing the majority of revenue will come from the surrounding infrastructure costs, rather than the monetization of specific AI services, due to the required intensive model training and ongoing inference.”

Microsoft, it is said, made bigger investments in Azure, and added many datacenters around the world, along with key markets like the UK.

KeyBanc said that it was only a matter of time before the Azure cloud platform would be able to overtake AWS, with estimates that Microsoft is looking at another 88% growth in 2018, which would help it inch closer to Amazon Web Services over the coming months.

As for AWS, its market share was down from 68% to 62%.

Azure, meanwhile, saw its share rise from 16% to 20%.

And even though the industry offers both companies major growth potential, the fact that the Microsoft cloud computing is growing at unprecedented levels raises some interesting scenarios.

For example, while AWS reported a sales increase of 42% to $4.58 billion, Microsoft saw even better results, with Azure sales going up 93% in Q3 alone.

And with the likes of Google, IBM, and Alibaba also making significant investments in the cloud this year, let’s just say things could get real interesting, real soon. We could have a totally different scenario at our hands by the time 2018 bows out.