AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google dominating cloud but some tier twos are fighting back

Scale is helping keep Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM far ahead of their competitors in the cloud infrastructure services markets, with new figures showing the big four continuing to gain market share.

Synergy Research Group's Q3 figures for the market show AWS holding 45% of the public IaaS market service revenue - more than twice as much as the next three public IaaS providers - Microsoft, Google and IBM - combined.

Things are closer in the public platform-as-a-service market, but Amazon still maintains a clear lead, well ahead of its nearest three competitors, being Salesforce, Microsoft and IBM. Combined the three have marginally more overall share than Amazon AWS.

The managed private cloud market, however, is a different matter, with IBM the market leader and AWS second, followed by Rackspace and NTT.

Between them Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Google continue to control 'well over half of the worldwide market' - and are continuing to grow their market share, Synergy says.

John Dinsdale, Synergy Research Group chief analyst and research director, says scale is the name of the game, especially in the public cloud markets.

"Amazon, Microsoft and Google continue to invest huge amounts in their hyperscale data center infrastructure and also announced plans to open up more geographic regions in the coming months," Dinsdale says.

"This scale is the prime reason why they are able to gain market share and pressure smaller players into consolidation or refocusing their cloud activities.

However, despite that, he says some tier two players are seeing particularly strong growth, including Alibaba - particularly in IaaS - and Oracle in PaaS.

Synergy says based on earnings data for Q3, it estimates quarterly cloud infrastructure services revenues, which includes public IaaS and PaaS and managed private cloud, have now climbed 'well over' US$8 billion and continue to grow at 50% per year.

Public IaaS is the biggest of the three segments, but public PaaS is growing 'much more strongly', Synergy says, with the database, IoT and analytics sub-segments within PaaS growing by 100% or more per annum.