By all measures, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is still far and away the top dog when it comes to the global public cloud services market.
Ahead of next week's AWS re:Invent conference, Synergy Research Group's third quarter data found that AWS is still the dominant provider in the public cloud services market due to being a leader in all four of the world's major regions.
Based on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service revenues, AWS is ranked first in the North American, EMEA, APAC and Latin America regions, while Microsoft, which is second overall, is second across three of the same regions. Google is ranked third overall and third in the North America, EMEA and Latin America regions.
It will be a tall order for the other cloud competitors to close the gap on AWS, Microsoft and Google. AWS' parent company, Amazon, is planning on spending $28 billion on capex this year, according to research by Jefferies, plus another $26 billion for research and development. Alphabet/Google has planned a capex spend of $23 billion and an R&D budget of $21 billion. Across the public cloud sector, Google and Amazon will each spend more than double the amount that Microsoft will spend, according to Jefferies.
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Thanks in part to local cloud providers, China is the exception to the global public cloud services market. Alibaba is ranked second behind AWS in the APAC region and fourth overall behind AWS, Microsoft and Google.
IBM, Salesforce and Tencent comprise the other top-five slots in the regions, according to Synergy Research Group.
Public IaaS and Paas are the biggest segments of the cloud infrastructure services market and they account for most of the revenues followed by managed or hosted private cloud services. According to research by 650 Group, IaaS had a 53% year-over-year growth rate n the first quarter of 2018.
While AWS, Microsoft and Google dominate on a global scale, the top-five cloud providers in China are local companies. According to Synergy Research Group, China accounts for over a third of the total APAC market with its share of the regional total increasing each quarter.
The public cloud service market is more fractured across Europe because those countries have strict compliance regulations around keeping data and information within each country of origin.
“Despite some local issues over data sovereignty, in most meaningful ways public cloud computing is a global market that is led by truly global cloud providers. The market leaders need to have a global presence, a global brand and an ability to fund huge ongoing investments in data center footprint and service enhancements,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group in a prepared statement. “There will remain opportunities for smaller cloud providers to serve niche markets, especially focused on single countries or local regions, but those companies cannot hope to challenge the market leaders. China will continue to be an exception to the rule, but outside of China this is a global game requiring massive scale.”
AWS also looms large across the telco space
AWS' dominance is also reflected in the telecoms sector. In August, CenturyLink announced it had been named as a Managed Service Provider Partner by AWS. After Verizon sold its own cloud business, it inked a virtual network services deal with Amazon last year and in 2016 Ericsson announced a global alliance with AWS.
In September, Orange Business Services announced that it was that it was supporting and managing its customers on Amazon Web Services' cloud platform.
Service providers, such as Verizon and AT&T, are tapping into the cloud to offer cloud-based virtual services, including as a service VNFs, IaaS, Paas and virtual customer premise equipment, to their enterprise customers.
And with 5G, mobile operators are in the process of implementing cloud technology from a cloud-native core network architecture through use in their radio access networks.
Mobile operators are also expected to use the models defined for cloud computing by adapting them as needed. In particular, network slicing, which enables mobile operators to offer customized virtual mobile networks to customers, is one example of extending traditional cloud offerings to network-as-a-service offerings.