The biggest cloud service providers such as Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are quickly taking over the business.

Hyperscale cloud service operators’ market share is rapidly growing in several key cloud service markets, according to new data published by Synergy Research Group. Not surprisingly, in turn those cloud service markets themselves are also growing at extremely rapid rates, the data shows.

Synergy defines hyperscale cloud service operators as those companies that operate hundreds of thousands of servers in their data center networks. It said 24 companies meet that definition of hyperscale, including the largest cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Inc. and Microsoft.

Synergy said those companies in 2016 accounted for 68 percent of the cloud infrastructure services market, which encompasses Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and private hosted cloud services. In addition, they owned 59 percent of the Software-as-a-Service market in 2016. Back in 2012, the same hyperscale companies held just a 47 percent share of the same markets.

Synergy said the 24 hyperscale firms now operate a combined 320 large data centers in their networks, with substantial infrastructures located in multiple countries. AWS, Microsoft and IBM Corp. each have the largest data center footprints, with more than 45 data centers across the world, including at least two in each major region – North America, Asia-Pacific, Europe/Middle East/Africa and Latin America.

The report, whose data is available free, also noted the monumental difficulty companies face in trying to become a leading player in cloud services, due to the massive infrastructure investment required. Only a few companies are able to keep pace with this, which means their share of service markets is growing significantly faster than other companies. The same companies also account for a growing proportion of spending on data center hardware and software.

“Hyperscale operators are now dominating the IT landscape in so many different ways,” John Dinsdale, Synergy’s chief analyst and research director, said in a statement. “They are reshaping the services market, radically changing IT spending patterns within enterprises, and causing major disruptions among infrastructure technology vendors. Our latest forecasts show these factors being accentuated over the next five years.”

Image: Synergy Research Group