Analyst firm Gartner Inc.’s first-ever report on the state of the infrastructure as a service cloud computing market won’t make Google LLC happy, but it surely will please Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

Released today, the report ranks Google Cloud Platform below fast-rising Chinese public cloud giant Alibaba Cloud in market share.

Gartner said the IaaS market, which covers base-level cloud computing and storage services, is growing at an extremely rapid rate. It pulled in revenues of $22.1 billion in 2016, up from $16.8 billion the year before, representing a growth rate of 31.4 percent.

Not surprisingly, Gartner said, Amazon Web Services Inc. generated the lion’s share of those revenues. The company raked in $9.77 billion in revenues in 2016, according to the analyst firm’s numbers, giving it a 44 percent share of the market. Microsoft Corp. comes in second with $1.57 billion in revenues and a 7 percent market share, while Alibaba Cloud pulled in $675 million, giving it a 3 percent share. As for Google, it only mustered a mere $500 million in IaaS revenues in 2016, putting its market share at a minuscule 2.3 percent.

However, Microsoft, Alibaba and Google are likely to erode Amazon’s market share in the coming years.

“Looking forward, Gartner’s position is that while competitive pressures increase, Amazon will witness growth erosion in share, as the non-hyperscale providers struggle to provide value through their services, while other IaaS market leaders will see an increase in growth,” the analyst firm said.

Here’s a quick rundown of Gartner’s figures:

Alibaba Cloud’s strong performance is worth noting. Gartner said that stems from its dominance in China, but added that its recent addition of new data centers in Australia, Europe, Japan and the Middle East should help it strengthen its position outside of its home market in coming years.

Also notable is that IBM Corp. is entirely absent from Gartner’s top five. That’s because the majority of Big Blue’s cloud offerings fall in the software as a service and platform as a service categories, where it ranks much higher. However, IBM’s lack of IaaS offerings means its cloud may grow at a much slower rate than that of its rivals, as Gartner said the segment will likely outpace SaaS and PaaS growth over the next half decade.

Gartner said IaaS’s expected growth will come at the expense of “traditional, non-cloud offerings,” which means the servers, storage and switches peddled by more traditional technology companies such as Dell Technologies Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Cisco Systems Inc.

Image: bsdrouin/Pixabay