UPDATED 14:10 EDT / FEBRUARY 03 2017

CLOUD

Report: Amazon keeps massive cloud lead despite disappointing earnings

Investors were disappointed Thursday after Amazon.com Inc.’s fourth-quarter earnings report revealed that its cloud business grew less than what analysts had expected. But according to Synergy Research Group Inc., Amazon Web Services is still going as strong as ever from a competitive standpoint.

The firm on Thursday released a report for the fourth quarter that claims AWS maintained a market share of just over 40 percent in the infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service categories. It’s more or less the same stake that Amazon held last year based on Synergy’s 2015 data, but the revenue figures are quite different since the cloud industry has grown substantially in the last 12 months.

Amazon’s cloud business saw fourth-quarter sales rise 47 percent year-over-year to $3.53 billion. It’s an impressive increase, but still the lowest that AWS has seen in some two years and less than the $3.6 billion Wall Street was expecting. On the plus side, the division continues to be a major profit driver: Its operating income jumped a massive 60 percent in the fourth quarter, to $926 million.

Other providers are capitalizing on the growing demand for cloud services, too. Synergy found that Microsoft Corp., IBM Corp. and Google Inc. – Amazon’s three biggest competitors – collectively boosted their market share by nearly five points year-over-year, to 23 percent in the fourth quarter. The analyst firm believes that their growth came mainly at the expense of smaller rivals.

The next 10 cloud providers on Synergy’s chart saw their combined slice of the pie shrink by 1 percentage point in the last three months of 2016. This decline becomes even starker when excluding Oracle Corp. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s small but fast-growing cloud businesses from the list. According to the report, the world’s small and mid-sized cloud providers saw their collective market share go down four percentage points to below 18 percent.

When adding everything up, Synergy claims that the infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service segments generated sales of “well over $7 billion” in the fourth quarter, up 50 percent from a year ago. This figure shoots past $9 billion when factoring in managed services.

Image via Stocksnap

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