UPDATED 11:33 EST / FEBRUARY 07 2017

CLOUD

Report: AWS still owns a third of the cloud infrastructure market

Amazon Web Services continues to enjoy a commanding lead over its rivals in the cloud infrastructure market, pulling in just over a third of worldwide revenues in the fourth quarter of 2016, according to the research firm Canalys.

Assuming Canalys’ latest figures are correct, it also means that AWS’s revenues are greater than those of its three biggest competitors combined. The research firm said AWS pulled in $3.84 billion in sales during the quarter, while its closest rivals Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and IBM SoftLayer could muster only $3.17 billion in sales between them over the same period.

Oracle Corp. and China’s Alibaba Cloud, which is a part of ecommerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., were the only other companies to appear in Canalys’ figures, with 1.7 percent and 2.4 percent of the market, respectively. Oracle last year announced a raft of updates to its own cloud in an effort to win business away from AWS, while Alibaba Cloud has been aggressive too, opening new data center regions in the Middle East, Europe, Australia and Japan as it bids to move away from its traditional Chinese enterprises customer base. Considering that neither company was mentioned in Canalys’ earlier reports on the cloud infrastructure market during 2016, it’s fair to say both companies are making decent progress.

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service sector as a whole grew by 49 percent compared to one year ago, with total revenues hitting $10.3 billion during the fourth quarter, Canalys reported.

“Continuing demand is driving the adoption of cloud infrastructure services, which accelerated the cloud data centre expansion among key service providers,” Canalys said in a release.

The research firm also reported on which cloud providers were expanding, and where. IBM recently opened a new data center facility in the U.K., which means it now operates 50 cloud facilities worldwide. Microsoft added to its cloud capacity in Western Europe over the last quarter with new additions in Germany and the U.K., while Google and Oracle opened up their first data centers in Japan and China, with an eye on expansion in the Asia Pacific region.


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