Cloud infrastructure spending surges 33% in Q3

Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services in the third quarter of this year increased by 33% to $33 billion, according to new research from an analyst firm.

Figures from Synergy Research Group showed that the year-on-year growth rate for Q3 was higher than the 32% growth seen in the previous quarter. This, said analysts, demonstrated the health of the market.

The research found that Amazon and Microsoft continue to account for over half of the global market, with Amazon's market share staying at around 33%, while Microsoft's share was over 18%.

Google, Alibaba and Tencent are all growing quicker than the overall market and are increasing market share, Synergy said. Together they account for 17% of the market.

The other cloud providers in the top ten rankings include IBM, Salesforce, Oracle, NTT and SAP. In aggregate, the top ten providers account for 80% of the worldwide market, with the remaining 20% coming from a range of small cloud providers or large companies with only a small position in the market.

"While we were fully expecting continued robust growth in the market, the scale of the growth in Q3 was a little surprising," said John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group. "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."

He added that companies competing for a share of the market have settled into three camps: "Amazon and Microsoft are in a league of their own, while others are either aggressively seeking to grow their position in the market or are more focused on specific services, geographies or customer groupings," he added.

With most of the major cloud providers having now released their earnings data for Q3, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services) were $32.8 billion, with trailing twelve-month revenues reaching $119 billion.

The research firm also found that Public IaaS and PaaS services account for the bulk of the market and those grew by 35% in Q3.

The dominance of the major cloud providers is even more distinct in public cloud, where the top five control almost 80% of the market. Analysts said that the cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world.