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AWS cloud cash share: Bigger than Microsoft, IBM, Google combined

Cloud democratising IT? Nah, it's shared by even fewer players

AWS sucked up over one third of all cloudy infrastructure sales globally in the closing quarter of 2016 - more than three of its next biggest rivals could muster together.

The total IaaS sector grew by a whopping 49 per cent year-on-year to $10.3bn in Q4, according to analyst house Canalys, as a raft of businesses continued to shun capital intensive refreshes of on-premise server estates.

In its tenth year of operation, the web services division of Amazon accounted for $3.48bn of sales, giving it a 33.8 per cent market share, while Microsoft, Google and IBM SoftLayer had to make do with $3.17bn between them.

“Continuing demand is driving the adoption of cloud infrastructure services, which accelerated the cloud data centre expansion among key service providers,” Canalys stated.

In the quarter, IBM rented some rack space from a local data centre provider, as did AWS and Microsoft. All of the American giants are trying to convince UK customers their data is safe in their hands but rather than building new facilities in the country, has chosen to buy extra capacity from someone else.

Enterprise IT provider Oracle lagged behind e-commerce giant Alibaba, on 1.7 per cent and 2.4 per cent respectively. The latter has been on a drive to attract enterprises and startups to its cloud with roadshow events in London.

AWS is the undisputed IaaS kingpin but revenues of $3.5bn in Q4 was below Wall Street’s expectations by about $100m and so the parent company’s share price took a few knocks.

Meanwhile, Synergy Research Group agreed that AWS is king, and said Microsoft, Google and IBM "are gaining ground but at the expense of smaller players in the market." ®

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