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.

Conventional wisdom over the last year has suggested that the pandemic has driven companies to the cloud much faster than they ever would have gone without that forcing event, with some suggesting it has compressed years of transformation into months. This quarter’s cloud infrastructure revenue numbers appear to be proving that thesis correct.

With The Big Three — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — all reporting this week, the market generated almost $40 billion in revenue, according to Synergy Research data. That’s up $2 billion from last quarter and up 37% over the same period last year. Canalys’s numbers were slightly higher at $42 billion.

As you might expect if you follow this market, AWS led the way with $13.5 billion for the quarter, up 32% year over year. That’s a run rate of $54 billion. While that is an eye-popping number, what’s really remarkable is the yearly revenue growth, especially for a company the size and maturity of Amazon. The law of large numbers would suggest this isn’t sustainable, but the pie keeps growing and Amazon continues to take a substantial chunk.

Overall AWS held steady with 32% market share. While the revenue numbers keep going up, Amazon’s market share has remained firm for years at around this number. It’s the other companies down market that are gaining share over time, most notably Microsoft, which is now at around 20% share — good for about $7.8 billion this quarter.

Google continues to show signs of promise under Thomas Kurian, hitting $3.5 billion, good for 9% as it makes a steady march toward double digits. Even IBM had a positive quarter, led by Red Hat and cloud revenue, good for 5% or about $2 billion overall.

Image Credits: Synergy Research

John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy, says that even though AWS and Microsoft have firm control of the market, that doesn’t mean there isn’t money to be made by the companies playing behind them.

“These two don’t have to spend too much time looking in their rearview mirrors and worrying about the competition. However, that is not to say that there aren’t some excellent opportunities for other players. Taking Amazon and Microsoft out of the picture, the remaining market is generating over $18 billion in quarterly revenues and growing at over 30% per year. Cloud providers that focus on specific regions, services or user groups can target several years of strong growth,” Dinsdale said in a statement.

Canalys, another firm that watches the same market as Synergy, had similar findings with slight variations, certainly close enough to confirm one another’s findings. They have AWS with 32%, Microsoft 19% and Google with 7%.

Image Credits: Canalys

Canalys analyst Blake Murray says that there is still plenty of room for growth, and we will likely continue to see big numbers in this market for several years. “Though 2020 saw large-scale cloud infrastructure spending, most enterprise workloads have not yet transitioned to the cloud. Migration and cloud spend will continue as customer confidence rises during 2021. Large projects that were postponed last year will resurface, while new use cases will expand the addressable market,” he said.

The numbers we see are hardly a surprise anymore, and as companies push more workloads into the cloud, the numbers will continue to impress. The only question now is if Microsoft can continue to close the market share gap with Amazon.

There is a prevailing notion that while the cloud infrastructure market is growing fast, the vast majority of workloads remain on premises. While that could be true, new research from Synergy Research Group found that cloud infrastructure spending surpassed on-prem spending for the first time in 2020 — and did so by a wide margin.

“New data from Synergy Research Group shows that enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services continued to ramp up aggressively in 2020, growing by 35% to reach almost $130 billion. Meanwhile enterprise spending on data center hardware and software dropped by 6% to under $90 billion,” the firm said in a statement.

While the numbers have been trending toward the cloud for a decade, the spending favored on-prem software until last year when the two numbers pulled even, according to Synergy data. John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy says that this new data shows that CIOs have shifted their spending to the cloud in 2020.

“Where the rubber meets the road is what are companies spending their money on, and that is what we are covering here. Quite clearly CIOs are choosing to spend a lot more money on cloud services and are severely crimping their spend on on-prem (or collocated) data center assets,” Dinsdale told me.

Image Credits: Synergy Research Group

The total for on-prem spending includes servers, storage, networking, security and related software required to run the hardware. “The software pieces included in this data is mainly server OS and virtualization software. Comparing SaaS with on-prem business apps software is a whole other story,” Dinsdale said.

As we see on-prem/cloud numbers diverging in this way, it’s worth asking how these numbers compare to research from Gartner and others that the cloud remains a relatively small percentage of global IT spend. As workloads move back and forth in today’s hybrid world, Dinsdale says that makes it difficult to quantify where it lives at any given moment.

“I’ve seen plenty of comments about only a small percentage of workloads running on public clouds. That may or may not be true (and I tend more toward the latter), but the problem I have with this is that the concept of ‘workloads’ is such a fungible issue, especially when you try to quantify it,” he said.

It’s worth noting that the pandemic has led to companies moving to the cloud much faster than they might have without a forcing event, but Dinsdale says that the trend has been moving this way over years, even if COVID might have accelerated it.

Whatever numbers you choose to look at, it’s clear that the cloud infrastructure market is growing much faster now than its on-premises counterpart, and this new data from Synergy shows that CIOs are beginning to place their bets on the cloud.

The cloud infrastructure market kept growing at a brisk pace last quarter, as the pandemic continued to push more companies to the cloud with offices shut down in much of the world. This week the big three — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — all reported their numbers and, as expected, the news was good, with Synergy Research reporting revenue growth of 33% year over year, up to almost $33 billion for the quarter.

Still, John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy, was a bit taken aback that the market continued to grow as much as it did. “While we were fully expecting continued strong growth in the market, the scale of the growth in Q3 was a little surprising,” he said in a statement.

He added, “Total revenues were up by $2.5 billion from the previous quarter causing the year-on-year growth rate to nudge upwards, which is unusual for such a large market. It is quite clear that COVID-19 has provided an added boost to a market that was already developing rapidly.”

Per usual Amazon led the way with $11.6 billion in revenue, up from $10.8 billion last quarter. That’s up 29% year over year. Amazon continues to exhibit slowing growth in the cloud market, but because of its market share lead of 33%, a rate that has held fairly steady for some time, the growth is less important than the eye-popping revenue it continues to generate, almost double its closest rival Microsoft .

Speaking of Microsoft, Azure revenue was up 48% year over year, also slowing some, but good enough for a strong second place with 18% market share. Using Synergy’s total quarterly number of $33 billion, Microsoft came in at $5.9 billion in revenue for the quarter, up from $5.2 billion last quarter.

Finally, Google announced cloud revenue of $3.4 billion, but that number includes all of its cloud revenue including G Suite and other software. Synergy reported that this was good for 9%, or $2.98 billion, up from $2.7 billion last quarter, good for third place.

Alibaba and IBM were tied for fourth with 5%, or around $1.65 billion each.

Image Credits: Synergy Research

It’s worth noting that Canalys had similar numbers to Synergy, with growth of 33% to $36.5 billion. They had the same market order with slightly different numbers, with Amazon at 32%, Microsoft at 19% and Google at 7%, and Alibaba in 4th place at 6%.

Canalys sees continued growth ahead, especially as hybrid cloud begins to merge with newer technologies like 5G and edge computing. “All three [providers] are collaborating with mobile operators to deploy their cloud stacks at the edge in the operators’ data centers. These are part of holistic initiatives to profit from 5G services among business customers, as well as transform the mobile operators’ IT infrastructure,” Canalys analyst Blake Murray said in a statement.

While the pure growth continues to move steadily downward over time, this is expected in a market that’s maturing like cloud infrastructure, but as companies continue to shift workloads more rapidly to the cloud during the pandemic, and find new use cases like 5G and edge computing, the market could continue to generate substantial revenue well into the future.

When you look at the Asia-Pacific (APAC) regional cloud infrastructure numbers, it would be easy to think that one of the Chinese cloud giants, particularly Alibaba, would be the leader in that geography, but new numbers from Synergy Research show Amazon leading across the region overall, which generated $9 billion in revenue in Q2.

The only exception to Amazon’s dominance was in China, where Alibaba leads the way with Tencent and Baidu coming in second and third, respectively. As Synergy’s John Dinsdale points out, China has its own unique market dynamics, and while Amazon leads in other APAC sub-regions, it remains competitive.

“China is a unique market and remains dominated by local companies, but beyond China there is strong competition between a range of global and local companies. Amazon is the leader in four of the five sub-regions, but it is not the market leader in every country,” he explained in a statement.

Image Credits: Synergy Research

The $9 billion in revenue across the region in Q2 represents less than a third of the more than $30 billion generated in the worldwide market in the quarter, but the APAC cloud market is still growing at more than 40% per year. It’s also worth pointing out as a means of comparison that Amazon alone generated more than the entire APAC region, with $10.81 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue in Q2.

While Dinsdale sees room for local vendors to grow, he says that the global nature of the cloud market in general makes it difficult for these players to compete with the largest companies, especially as they try to expand outside their markets.

“The challenge for local players is that in most ways cloud is a truly global market, requiring global presence, leading edge technology, strong brand name and credibility, extremely deep pockets and a long-term focus. For any local cloud companies looking to expand significantly beyond their home market, that is an extremely challenging proposition,” Dinsdale said in a statement.

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.

It’s fair to say that even before the impact of COVID-19, companies had begun a steady march to the cloud. Maybe it wasn’t fast enough for AWS, as Andy Jassy made clear in his 2019 Re:invent keynote, but it was happening all the same and the steady revenue increases across the cloud infrastructure market bore that out.

As we look at the most recent quarter’s earnings reports for the main players in the market, it seems the pandemic and economic fall out has done little to slow that down. In fact, it may be contributing to its growth.

According to numbers supplied by Synergy Research, the cloud infrastructure market totaled $29 billion in revenue for Q12020.

Image Credit: Synergy Research

Synergy’s John Dinsdale, who has been watching this market for a long time, says that the pandemic could be contributing to some of that growth, at least modestly. In spite of the numbers, he doesn’t necessarily see these companies getting out of this unscathed either, but as companies shift operations from offices, it could be part of the reason for the increased demand we saw in the first quarter.

“For sure, the pandemic is causing some issues for cloud providers, but in uncertain times, the public cloud is providing flexibility and a safe haven for enterprises that are struggling to maintain normal operations. Cloud provider revenues continue to grow at truly impressive rates, with AWS and Azure in aggregate now having an annual revenue run rate of well over $60 billion,” Dinsdale said in a statement.

AWS led the way with a third of the market or more than $10 billion in quarterly revenue as it continues to hold a substantial lead in market share. Microsoft was in second, growing at a brisker 59% for 18% of the market. While Microsoft doesn’t break out its numbers, using Synergy’s numbers, that would work out to around $5.2 billion for Azure revenue. Meanwhile Google came in third with $2.78 billion.

If you’re keeping track of market share at home, it comes out to 32% for AWS, 18% for Microsoft and 8% for Google. This split has remained fairly steady, although Microsoft has managed to gain a few percentage points over the last several quarters as its overall growth rate outpaces Amazon.

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.

In its most recent report, Synergy Research, a company that monitors cloud marketshare, found that enterprise SaaS revenue passed the $100 billion run rate this quarter. The market was led by Microsoft and Salesforce.

It shouldn’t be a surprise at this point that these two enterprise powerhouses come in at the top. Microsoft reported $10.1 billion in Productivity and Business Processes revenue, which includes Office 365, the Dynamics line and LinkedIn, the company it bought in 2016 for $26.2 billion. That $10.1 billion accounted for the top spot with 17 percent

Salesforce was next with around 12%. It announced $3.74 billion in revenue in its most recent earnings statement with Service Cloud alone accounting for $1.02 billion in revenue, crossing that billion-dollar mark for the first time.

Adobe came in third, good for around 10% market share, with $2.74 billion in revenue for its most recent report. Digital Media, which includes Creative Cloud and Document Cloud, accounted for the vast majority of the revenue with $1.8 billion. SAP and Oracle complete the top companies

A growing market

While that number may seem low, given we are 20 years into the development of the SaaS market, it is still a significant milestone, not to be dismissed lightly. As Synergy pointed out, while the market feels mature, if finds that SaaS revenue still accounts for just 20 percent of the overall enterprise software market. There’s still a long way to go, showing as with the infrastructure side of the market, things change much more slowly than we imagine, and the market is growing rapidly, as the impressive growth rates show.

“While SaaS growth rate isn’t as high as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service), the SaaS market is substantially bigger and it will remain so until 2023. Synergy forecasts strong growth across all SaaS segments and all geographic regions,” the company wrote in its report.

Salesforce is the only one of the top five that was actually born in the cloud. Adobe, an early desktop software company, switched to cloud in 2013. Microsoft, of course, has been a desktop stalwart for many years before embracing the cloud over the last decade. SAP and Oracle are traditional enterprise software companies, born long before the cloud was even a concept, that began transitioning when the market began shifting.

Getting to a billion

Yet in spite of being late to the game, these numbers show that the market is still dominated by the old guard enterprise software companies and how difficult it is to achieve market dominance for companies born in the cloud. Salesforce emerged 20 years ago as an early cloud adherent, but of all of the enterprise SaaS companies that were started this century only ServiceNow and WorkDay show up in the Synergy list lumped in “the next 10.”

That’s not to say there aren’t SaaS companies making some serious money, just not quite as much as the top players to this point. Jason Lemkin, CEO and founder at SaaStr, a company that invests in and supports enterprise SaaS companies, says a lot of companies are close to that $1 billion goal than you might think, and he’s optimistic that we are going to see more.

“We will have at least 100 companies top $1 billion in ARR, probably many more. It is just math. Almost everyone IPO’ing [SaaS company] has 120-140% revenue retention. That will compound $100 million or $200 million to $1 billion. The only question is when,” he told TechCrunch.

Chart courtesy of SaasStr

He adds that annualized numbers are very close behind ARR numbers and it won’t take long to catch up. Yet as we have seen with some of the companies on this list, it’s still not easy to get there.

It’s hard to develop a billion dollar SaaS company, and it takes time and patience, and perhaps some strategic acquisitions to get there, but the market trajectory continues to move upward. It will likely only grow stronger as more companies move to software in the cloud, and that bodes well for many of the players in this market, even those that didn’t show up on Synergy’s chart.

It has to be a bit depressing to be in the cloud infrastructure business if your name isn’t Amazon. Sure, there’s a huge, growing market, and the companies behind Amazon are growing even faster. Yet it seems no matter how fast they grow, Amazon remains a dot on the horizon.

It seems inconceivable that AWS can continue to hold sway over such a large market for so long, but as we’ve pointed out before, it has been able to maintain its position through true first-mover advantage. The other players didn’t even show up until several years after Amazon launched its first service in 2006, and they are paying the price for their failure to see the way computing would change the way Amazon did.

They certainly see it now, whether it’s IBM, Microsoft or Google, or Tencent and Alibaba, both of which are growing fast in the China/Asia markets. All of these companies are trying to find the formula to help differentiate themselves from AWS and give them some additional market traction.

Cloud market growth

Interestingly, even though companies have begun to move with increasing urgency to the cloud, the pace of growth slowed a bit in the first quarter to a 42 percent rate, according to data from Synergy Research, but that doesn’t mean the end of this growth cycle is anywhere close.