AWS Maintains Dominance As Public Cloud Market Grows 42% In Q1

Amazon Web Services, or AWS for short, has maintained its sizeable lead in the sector, as the public cloud market grew 42% in the first quarter of 2017, compared to last year.

Reaching $11.4 billion, according, according to the statistics provided by market research firm Canalys.

What is very much the hottest growth story in technology these days, show AWS still holding a comfortable lead over its competitors. It grew at the same pace as the overall market, even as Microsoft and Google cloud offerings grew at a much faster clip.

Amazon is estimated to have cornered 31% of the market, and grew 43% this past quarter. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform recorded growth of 93% and 74% respectively, while the fourth player in the list, IBM, saw an increase of 38%, a little lower than the industry average.

In the words of Canalys Research Analyst Daniel Liu:

“Competition for enterprise customers is intensifying among leading cloud service providers, which are investing heavily to secure key national and global accounts. Timing is crucial, as many large accounts are assessing, formulating and executing strategies to move existing workloads and infrastructure to the cloud, and develop new types of workloads as part of digital transformation initiatives.”

According to the agency, cloud players are now looking at the channel to expand their reach, particularly into the mid-market opportunities.

Microsoft, for example, demonstrated the benefit of having a huge enterprise client base and converting it to Azure. While Google has also revamped its partner program, as it tries to catch up to the two leaders, and meet the technology and feature requirements of large enterprise customers.

This, Canalys, believes is the ultimate challenge for these other vendors, who will require deep financial resources to continue to inch closer to AWS.