Andy Jassy (CEO - AWS) and Satya Nadella (CEO - Microsoft)
The economic impact of Covid-19 has so far failed to slow the cloud progress of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft with enterprise customers increasing investments during the first quarter of 2020.
According to Synergy Research findings, the three-month period reported a 37 per cent increase in cloud infrastructure services spending year-on-year, reaching US$29 billion in the process.
For John Dinsdale - chief analyst at Synergy Research - the numbers are in line with the expected market growth rate, displaying "no meaningful negative impact” as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Indeed, anecdotal evidence points to some Covid-19-related market tailwinds as additional enterprise workloads are pushed onto public clouds,” Dinsdale added.
Mirroring overall industry growth, AWS recorded a worldwide market share of 32 per cent during the quarter. This was followed by second-ranked Microsoft which “outpaced” the overall market by over twenty percentage points, increasing share by almost three percentage points in the last four quarters, to reach 18 per cent.
Credit: Synergy Research Next up is Google Cloud, ahead of Alibaba and Tencent, with the trio “substantially outpacing” overall market growth and also gaining share with each increasing revenues by 45 per cent or more year-on-year.
According to Dinsdale, four other cloud providers have "substantial" market share but are somewhat niche players housing lower growth rates, spanning IBM, Salesforce, Oracle and Rackspace. This is followed by a long tail of cloud providers, each with a small market share.
“While Covid-19 is having a devastating impact on communities and economies around the world, indications are that it is having a mildly positive impact on the cloud infrastructure services market,” Dinsdale added.
“For sure the pandemic is causing some issues for cloud providers, but in uncertain times the public cloud is providing flexibility and a safe haven for enterprises that are struggling to maintain normal operations. Cloud provider revenues continue to grow at truly impressive rates, with AWS and Azure in aggregate now having an annual revenue run rate of well over $60 billion.”
