Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

It’s often said in baseball that a prospect has a high ceiling, reflecting the tremendous potential of a young player with plenty of room to get better. The same could be said for the cloud infrastructure market, which just keeps growing, with little sign of slowing down any time soon. The market hit $42 billion in total revenue with all major vendors reporting, up $2 billion from Q1.

Synergy Research reports that the revenue grew at a speedy 39% clip, the fourth consecutive quarter that it has increased. AWS led the way per usual, but Microsoft continued growing at a rapid pace and Google also kept the momentum going.

AWS continues to defy market logic, actually increasing growth by 5% over the previous quarter at 37%, an amazing feat for a company with the market maturity of AWS. That accounted for $14.81 billion in revenue for Amazon’s cloud division, putting it close to a $60 billion run rate, good for a market leading 33% share. While that share has remained fairly steady for a number of years, the revenue continues to grow as the market pie grows ever larger.

Microsoft grew even faster at 51%, and while Microsoft cloud infrastructure data isn’t always easy to nail down, with 20% of market share according to Synergy Research, that puts it at $8.4 billion as it continues to push upward with revenue up from $7.8 billion last quarter.

Google too continued its slow and steady progress under the leadership of Thomas Kurian, leading the growth numbers with a 54% increase in cloud revenue in Q2 on revenue of $4.2 billion, good for 10% market share, the first time Google Cloud has reached double figures in Synergy’s quarterly tracking data. That’s up from $3.5 billion last quarter.

Image Credits: Synergy Research

After the Big 3, Alibaba held steady over Q1 at 6% (but will only report this week), with IBM falling a point from Q1 to 4% as Big Blue continues to struggle in pure infrastructure as it makes the transition to more of a hybrid cloud management player.

John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy, says that the Big 3 are spending big to help fuel this growth. “Amazon, Microsoft and Google in aggregate are typically investing over $25 billion in capex per quarter, much of which is going towards building and equipping their fleet of over 340 hyperscale data centers,” he said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Canalys had similar numbers, but saw the overall market slightly higher at $47 billion. Their market share broke down to Amazon with 31%, Microsoft with 22% and Google with 8% of that total number.

Canalys analyst Blake Murray says that part of the reason companies are shifting workloads to the cloud is to help achieve environmental sustainability goals as the cloud vendors are working toward using more renewable energy to run their massive data centers.

“The best practices and technology utilized by these companies will filter to the rest of the industry, while customers will increasingly use cloud services to relieve some of their environmental responsibilities and meet sustainability goals,” Murray said in a statement.

Regardless of whether companies are moving to the cloud to get out of the data center business or because they hope to piggyback on the sustainability efforts of the Big 3, companies are continuing a steady march to the cloud. With some estimates of worldwide cloud usage at around 25%, the potential for continued growth remains strong, especially with many markets still untapped outside the U.S.

That bodes well for the Big 3 and for other smaller operators who can find a way to tap into slices of market share that add up to big revenue. “There remains a wealth of opportunity for smaller, more focused cloud providers, but it can be hard to look away from the eye-popping numbers coming out of the Big 3,” Dinsdale said.

In fact, it’s hard to see the ceiling for these companies any time in the foreseeable future.

While Google Cloud Platform has shown some momentum in the last year, it remains a distant third behind Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud infrastructure market. But Google got some good news from Canalys today when the firm reported that GCP is the No. 1 cloud platform provider for retailers.

Canalys didn’t provide specific numbers, but it did set overall market positions in the retail sector, with Microsoft coming in second, Amazon third, followed by Alibaba and IBM in fourth and fifth respectively.

Image Credits: Canalys

It’s probably not a coincidence that Google went after retail. Many retailers don’t want to put their cloud presence onto AWS, as Amazon.com competes directly with these retailers. Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, says that as such, the news doesn’t really surprise him.

“Retailers have to compete with Amazon, and I’m guessing the last thing they want to do is use AWS and help Amazon fund all their new initiatives and experiments that in some cases will be used against them,” Leary told TechCrunch. Further, he said that many retailers would also prefer to keep their customer data off of Amazon’s services.

Canalys Senior Director Alex Smith says that this Amazon effect combined with the pandemic and other technological factors has been working in Google’s favor, at least in the retail sector. “Now more than ever, retailers need a digital strategy to win in an omnichannel world, especially with Amazon’s online dominance. Digital is applied everywhere from customer experience to cost optimization, and the overall technological capability of a retailer is what will define its success,” he said.

COVID-19 has forced many retailers to close stores for extended periods of time, and when you combine that with people being more reluctant to go inside stores when they do open, retailers have had to take a crash course in e-commerce if they didn’t have a significant online presence already.

Canalys points out that Google has lured customers with its advertising and search capabilities beyond just pure infrastructure offerings, taking advantage of its other strengths to grow the market segment.

Recognizing this, Google has been making a big retail push, including a big partnership with Salesforce and specific products announced at Google Cloud Next last year. As we wrote at the time of the retail offering:

The company offers eCommerce Hosting, designed specifically for online retailers, and it is offering a special premium program, so retailers get “white glove treatment with technical architecture reviews and peak season operations support…” according to the company. In other words, it wants to help these companies avoid disastrous, money-losing results when a site goes down due to demand.

What’s more, Canalys reports that Google Cloud has also been hiring aggressively and forming partnerships with big systems integrators to help grow the retail business. Retail customers include Home Depot, Kohl’s, Costco and Best Buy.

The cloud market is coming into its own during the pandemic as the novel coronavirus forced many companies to accelerate plans to move to the cloud, even while the market was beginning to mature on its own.

This week, the big three cloud infrastructure vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — all reported their earnings, and while the numbers showed that growth was beginning to slow down, revenue continued to increase at an impressive rate, surpassing $30 billion for a quarter for the first time, according to Synergy Research Group numbers.

Research firm Canalys reports that the Chinese cloud infrastructure market grew 66.9% to $3.3 billion in the last quarter of 2019, right before the COVID-19 virus hit the country. China is the second largest cloud infrastructure market in the world, with 10.8% share.

The quarter puts the Chinese market on a $13.2 billion run rate. Canalys pegged the U.S. market at $14 billion for the same time period, with a 47% worldwide market share.

Alibaba led the way in China, with more than 46% market share. Like its American e-commerce giant counterpart, Amazon, Alibaba has a cloud arm, and it dominates in its country much the same way AWS does in the U.S.

Tencent was in second, with 18%, roughly the equivalent of Microsoft Azure’s share in the U.S., and Baidu AI Cloud came in third, with 8.8%, roughly the equivalent of Google’s U.S. market share.

Slide: Canalys

Matthew Ball, an analyst at Canalys, says the fourth quarter numbers predate the medical crisis due to the COVID-19 outbreak in China. “In terms of growth drivers for Q4, we have seen the ongoing demand for on-demand compute and storage accelerate throughout 2019, as private and public organizations embark on digital transformation projects and start building platforms and applications to develop new services.”

Ball says gaming was a big cloud customer, as was healthcare, finance, transport and industry. He also pointed to growth in facial recognition technology as part of the smart city sector.

As for next year, Ball says the firm still sees big growth in the market despite the virus impact in Q12020. “In addition to the continuation of digital projects once business returns to normality, we anticipate many businesses new to using cloud services during the crisis will continue use and become paying customers,” he said. The cloud companies have been offering a number of free options to businesses during the crisis.

“The overall outcome of current events around the world will be that companies will assess their business continuity measures and make sure they can continue to operate if events are ever repeated,” he said.

We all know the cloud infrastructure market is extremely lucrative; analyst firm Canalys reports that the sector reached $30.2 billion in revenue for Q4 2019.

Cloud numbers are hard to parse because companies often lump cloud revenue into a single bucket regardless of whether it’s generated by infrastructure or software. What’s interesting about Canalys’s numbers is that it attempts to measure the pure infrastructure results themselves without other cloud incomes mixed in:

As an example, Microsoft reported $12.5 billion in total combined cloud revenue for the quarter, but Canalys estimates that just $5.3 billion comes from infrastructure (Azure). Amazon has the purest number with $9.8 billion of a reported $9.95 billion attributed to its infrastructure business. This helps you understand why in spite of the fact that Microsoft reported bigger overall cloud earnings numbers and a higher growth rate, Amazon still has just less than double Microsoft’s market share in terms of IaaS spend.

That’s not to say Microsoft didn’t still have a good quarter — it garnered 17.6% of revenue for the period. That’s up from 14.5% in the same quarter a year ago. What’s more, Amazon lost a bit of ground, according to Canalys, dropping from 33.4% in Q4 2018 to 32.4% in the most recent quarter.

Part of the reason for that is because Microsoft is growing at close to twice the rate as Amazon — 62.3% versus Amazon’s 33.2%.

Meanwhile, number-three vendor Google came in at $1.8 billion for pure infrastructure revenue, good for 6% of the market, up from 4.9% a year ago on growth rate 67.6%. Google reported $2.61 billion in overall cloud revenue, but that included software. Despite the smaller results, it was a good quarter for the Mountain View-based company.

When Microsoft reported its FY19, Q4 earnings last week, the numbers were mostly positive, but as we pointed out, Azure earnings growth has stalled. Productivity and business, which includes Office 365, has also mostly flattened out. But slowing growth is not always as bad as it may seem. In fact, it’s an inevitability that once you start to reach Microsoft’s market maturity, it gets harder to maintain large growth numbers.

That said, AWS launched the first cloud infrastructure service, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud in August, 2006. Microsoft came much later to the cloud, launching Azure in February, 2010, but so were other established companies in Microsoft’s market share rearview. What did it do differently to achieve this success that the companies chasing it — Google, IBM and Oracle — failed to do? It’s a key question.

Let’s look at some numbers

For starters, let’s look at the most numbers for Productivity & Business Processes this year. This category includes all of its commercial and consumer SaaS products including Office 365 commercial and consumer, Dynamics 365, LinkedIn and others. The percentage growth started FY19 at 19% but ended at 14%

When you look at just Office365 commercial earnings growth, it started at 36% and dropped down to 31% by Q4.

When it comes to the cloud market, there are few known knowns. For instance, we know that AWS is the market leader with around 32 percent of market share. We know Microsoft is far back in second place with around 14 percent, the only other company in double digits. We also know that IBM and Google are wallowing in third or fourth place, depending on whose numbers you look at, stuck in single digits. The market keeps expanding, but these two major companies never seem to get a much bigger piece of the pie.

Neither company is satisfied with that, of course. Google so much so that it moved on from Diane Greene at the end of last year, bringing in Oracle veteran Thomas Kurian to lead the division out of the doldrums. Meanwhile, IBM made an even bigger splash, plucking Red Hat from the market for $34 billion in October.

This week, the two companies made some more noise, letting the cloud market know that they are not ceding the market to anyone. For IBM, which is holding its big IBM Think conference this week in San Francisco, it involved opening up Watson to competitor clouds. For a company like IBM, this was a huge move, akin to when Microsoft started building apps for iOS. It was an acknowledgement that working across platforms matters, and that if you want to gain market share, you had better start thinking outside the box.

While becoming cross-platform compatible isn’t exactly a radical notion in general, it most certainly is for a company like IBM, which if it had its druthers and a bit more market share, would probably have been content to maintain the status quo. But if the majority of your customers are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy, it might be a good idea for you to jump on the bandwagon — and that’s precisely what IBM has done by opening up access to Watson across clouds in this fashion.

Clearly buying Red Hat was about a hybrid cloud play, and if IBM is serious about that approach, and for $34 billion, it had better be — it would have to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. As IBM Watson CTO and chief architect Ruchir Puri told my colleague Frederic Lardinois about the move, “It’s in these hybrid environments, they’ve got multiple cloud implementations, they have data in their private cloud as well. They have been struggling because the providers of AI have been trying to lock them into a particular implementation that is not suitable to this hybrid cloud environment.” This plays right into the Red Hat strategy, and I’m betting you’ll see more of this approach in other parts of the product line from IBM this year. (Google also acknowledged this when it announced a hybrid strategy of its own last year.)

Meanwhile, Thomas Kurian had his coming-out party at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco earlier today. Bloomberg reports that he announced a plan to increase the number of salespeople and train them to understand specific verticals, ripping a page straight from the playbook of his former employer, Oracle.

He suggested that his company would be more aggressive in pursuing traditional enterprise customers, although I’m sure his predecessor, Diane Greene, wasn’t exactly sitting around counting on inbound marketing interest to grow sales. In fact, rumor had it that she wanted to pursue government contracts much more aggressively than the company was willing to do. Now it’s up to Kurian to grow sales. Of course, given that Google doesn’t report cloud revenue it’s hard to know what growth would look like, but perhaps if it has more success it will be more forthcoming.

As Bloomberg’s Shira Ovide tweeted today, it’s one thing to turn to the tried and true enterprise playbook, but that doesn’t mean that executing on that approach is going to be simple, or that Google will be successful in the end.

These two companies obviously desperately want to alter their cloud fortunes, which have been fairly dismal to this point. The moves announced today are clearly part of a broader strategy to move the market share needle, but whether they can or the market positions have long ago hardened remains to be seen.