Few were surprised to learn that Amazon Web Services is the leading cloud player when it comes to the amount of cash it’s raking in, but is it really larger than all four of its closest competitors – Google, Microsoft, IBM and Salesforce.com, Inc?

It is if you believe the latest analysis from Synergy Research Group, which decided to take a closer look at cloud growth rates in the wake of AWS’s blowout earnings report last Thursday, and found the firm is outpacing all four of its rivals by some distance.

However, Synergy did credit Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform with having the highest revenue growth rate, while it said IBM leads the way in hybrid and private cloud services.

But the real winner is AWS, whose cloud market share rose to 29 percent in Q1 of 2015. Google is said to be “quietly gaining share”, though it’s still less than half the size of Microsoft Azure. As for Salesforce.com, the platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider lies in fifth place.

“Across the full and varied spectrum of cloud activities there are now six companies that can lay a valid claim to having annual cloud revenue run rates in excess of $5 billion – AWS, IBM, Microsoft, HP, Cisco and Salesforce – and all are able to claim leadership in different parts of the cloud market,” said John Dinsdale, an analyst at Synergy Research Group. “However, on a strict like-for-like basis AWS remains streets ahead of the competition in cloud infrastructure services. Furthermore, this part of the cloud market is growing much more rapidly than SaaS or cloud infrastructure hardware and software.”

Synergy’s report comes just days after Amazon announced stunning first quarter revenues of $1.57 billion for AWS, up from $1.05 billion the year before.

“Amazon is at least a couple of years ahead of the market,” said Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman in reaction to the company’s earnings report. “They have a sustainable lead. They’re growing, adding features and innovating at such a rapid pace that it’ll be tough to catch them.”

Not that this will stop AWS’s rivals from arguing the toss. It’s extremely difficult to make like-for-like comparisons in the cloud market, not least because it’s such a nascent sector. That AWS has only just decided to start reporting its cloud revenues signals that it’ll be some time yet before vendors and service providers agree on standard definitions for what “cloud” sales really are (if they ever do).

For example, IBM last week reported its annual cloud revenues now exceed $7.7 billion, which would put it ahead of AWS if it were true. But analysts were quick to point out that a huge chunk of that $7.7 billion didn’t come from what most typically think of as the “cloud” – instead, IBM counted its private cloud business in that figure, which refers to sales of hardware installed on-premise, but used in the same way as a cloud.

A more accurate figure can be gleened from IBM’s “as a service revenues”, which jumped by 60 percent to a $3.8 billion annual run rate, the company said.

Image credit: Sponchia via Pixabay.com