Cowen: Cloud Services Business Is Now A 'Two-Horse Race'

The Cowen TMT Team, led by analyst John Blackledge, recently released the results of the firm’s 2015 survey of 200 public cloud vendors. According to the survey results, the leaders in a crowded cloud space are already starting to stand out from the pack.

The Numbers

Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN’s AWS was the leader in cloud-related budget share (27 percent), while Microsoft Corporation MSFT’s Azure came in second (23 percent). In terms of overall usage, Azure (45 percent) slightly beat out AWS (44 percent) for the top spot, indicating that more respondents currently use Azure services than any other alternative.

However, it turns out that AWS customers were bigger spenders, as AWS drew the highest annual spend per customer at $124,000.

“While our prior work suggested some competitive parity,” Blackledge writes, “this year’s survey conveys it’s a two-horse race with AWS leading Azure.”

Pockets Of Strength

Although the two leaders have taken a commanding lead, the rest of the cloud pack also demonstrated specific areas of strength. Google Inc GOOGGOOGL’s GCP showed relative strength in high spend from medium-sized businesses. Rackspace Hosting, Inc. RAX’s Rackspace Public Cloud outperformed peers in enterprise spend. International Business Machines Corp IBM captured the third-highest budget share behind AWS and Azure.

Outlook

Despite concerns over cost, Cowen believes robust cloud spending growth will continue in coming years.

Amazon seems to be the biggest winner from Cowen’s survey. However, Blackledge also sees the survey results as positive for Microsoft, Rackspace, Red Hat Inc RHT and VMware, Inc. VMW.

The report singled out IBM as the biggest loser due to potential cloud-related market share losses.

Disclosure: the author holds a short position in Amazon.