AWS top of all four regional public cloud markets around the world

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is not just the biggest public cloud services provider in the world, it's also the biggest at a lower level in all the major regions.

New quarter one (Q1) research from Synergy Research Group has revealed AWS's dominance when ranked by public IaaS and PaaS service revenues. Microsoft is ranked second in three of the four regions, while Google is ranked third in three of them.

Asia Pacific is the one region where the ranking differs which Synergy has put down to the sheer prominence of the Chinese market and the dominance of local cloud providers. The result of this is Alibaba is ranked second in the APAC region and fourth worldwide, IBM, Salesforce and Tencent fill out the other top five slots in the regions, the latter thanks to its position in China.

Public IaaS and PaaS are the most prominent sectors of the cloud infrastructure services market and are responsible for the bulk of the total revenue, with the balance coming from managed or hosted cloud services.

"Despite some local data sovereignty and regulatory issues, in most meaningful ways public cloud computing is essentially a global market," says Synergy chief analyst and research director John Dinsdale.

"This is a game of scale and to be a market leader demands vast ongoing investments, a global presence and a global brand.

When narrowing it down to within public cloud, the dominance of the three major companies (AWS, Microsoft, and Google) is even more pronounced than in the larger cloud market, as AWS alone accounts more nearly 40 percent of the market while the three in aggregate account for well over 60 percent.

In marked contrast to the rest of the world, in China the top five cloud providers are all local companies. China now accounts for a third of the total APAC market and its share of the regional total is increasing each quarter.

"Of course there will often be local issues that might enable local companies to carve out niche positions for themselves, but they will remain small local players in a specific country or sub-region," Dinsdale says.

"It is also true that in such cases the global leaders can usually deploy different local strategies to enable them to succeed. With the glaring exception of China, we view this as a truly global market.