Global Cloud Infrastructure Market Reached Sky High $107B In 2019

Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN and other rivals vied for a piece of the worldwide cloud infrastructure services market as spending rose 37% to top US$107 billion in 2019.

What Happened

Data released by Canalys indicates that the total expenditure on cloud services reached a record high to exceed $30 billion in Q4 in 2019. The technology market analyst firm said, “This highlights the unrelenting expansion of the IT industry driven by digital transformation initiatives across all industries.”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) emerged as the top player in the cloud service provider market in Q4 2019, according to Canalys. AWS held 32.4% of the market share and clocked annual growth of 33.2%. Microsoft Inc.’s MSFT cloud platform Microsoft Azure came in second at 17.6% market share and grew 62.3%.

Meanwhile, Alphabet Inc’s GOOGL Google Cloud and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s BABA Alibaba Cloud held 6% and 5.4% market share, respectively, the former growing by 67.6% and latter by 71.1%.

Canalys reports that on an annual basis, AWS was the leader in spending and annual growth in 2019. The company’s business was sized at $34.6 billion and grew at 36%. Its nearest rival, Microsoft Azure, raked in $18.1 billion and grew by 63.9%.

Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud brought in $6.2 billion and $5.2 billion, respectively, and grew by 87.8% and 63.8%. In terms of market share, AWS held 32.3%, Azure 16.9%, Google Cloud 5.8%, and Alibaba Cloud 4.9%.

What It Means

There is increasingly intense competition among cloud service providers, according to Canalys.

Investment in new enterprise sales and marketing resources are drivers of growth for AWS along with “general availability” of AWS Outposts and launch of AWS Local Zones, which are likely to drive growth further.

The tech market analyst noted that Azure’s growth was higher in Q4 2019 thanks to it gaining “traction” in enterprise accounts. The cloud services provider benefited from its “extensive channel reach.”

Google Cloud has been reaching out to new enterprise customers and is also developing a “network” of channel partners.

Alibaba Cloud is the leader in China, and, according to Canalys, its growth “reaccelerated.” Alibaba’s cloud offering is aiming to expand its customer base across Asia Pacific and Europe using two-tier distribution.

Companies club together cloud revenue data irrespective of infrastructure or software origins reports TechCrunch. The publication finds that the Canalys numbers are “interesting” as they are metrics based purely on infrastructure results.