If Gartner Inc.’s latest report on the state of the cloud infrastructure-as-a-service market wasn’t surprising in putting Amazon Web Services Inc. well out in front, it does show that Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit had better check its rear-view mirror.

Although AWS continues to dominate the market by some distance, its rivals, including Microsoft Corp. with its Azure cloud, are growing faster.

Overall, the worldwide infrastructure-as-a-service market grew by a healthy 29.5 percent in 2017, to $23.5 billion, up from $18.2 billion in 2016. Gartner said this growth comes as big enterprises increasingly embrace the cloud. Indeed, in a report this week, the analyst firm said it expects 80 percent of enterprises to move their entire information technology infrastructure to the cloud by 2025, compared with just 10 percent that have done so today.

Gartner’s latest figures, released today, show AWS retains its commanding lead with a 51.8 percent share of the market, though that’s down slightly from the 53.7 percent slice of the pie it owned one year before. Microsoft is second with a 13.3 percent share, followed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Alibaba Cloud with 4.6 percent, and Google LLC with 3.3 percent.

Those companies represent the so-called “big four” in Gartner’s eyes. Combined, they own a commanding 73 percent share of the overall market.

“The top four providers have strong IaaS offerings and saw healthy growth as IaaS adoption is being fully embraced by mainstream organizations and as cloud availability expands into new regions and countries,” Sid Nag, research director at Gartner, said in a statement. “Cloud-directed IT spending now constitutes more than 20 percent of the total IT budget for organizations using cloud. Many of these organizations are now using cloud to support production environments and business-critical operations.”

Although AWS lost market share its overall revenue continues to grow. The company saw revenue of $12.2 billion in 2017, which is a 25 percent rise from the $9.7 billion it made one year before.

However, Microsoft grew much faster than its rival, with its $3.1 billion revenue, almost double what it achieved in 2016. Alibaba and Google also saw impressive revenue growth, though they may be disappointed to see Microsoft has increased its lead over them.

Perhaps more worrying for Google is that Gartner sees Alibaba as the most likely to threaten the top two, in spite of the former’s intensive efforts to boost its cloud capabilities.

“Alibaba has the financial capability to continue this trend and invest in global expansion, giving the company potential to become over time an alternative to the global hyperscale cloud providers in select regions,” the analyst firm said.

Image: geralt/Pixabay