Now that all the major cloud-computing vendors have published their first-quarter results, cloud market researcher Synergy is tallying how each of them fared.
Most of them don't really report their cloud-computing earnings in a way that makes them easy to compare. For instance, Google bundles its cloud revenues under the banner of "other revenues," which includes other big units, such as its app store. That whole unit brought in $5.4 billion in revenue in the first quarter, up 25% year-over-year. While Sundar Pichai called Google Cloud "one of the fastest growing businesses in Alphabet," the company didn't give any kind of specifics.
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Microsoft doesn't report revenues for its Azure cloud either, although it said that mystery number grew by 76%. Azure is part of Microsoft's intelligent-cloud unit, which reported $9.4 billion in revenue in the first quarter but includes other popular multibillion-dollar products, such as its Windows Server software.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), however, does report cloud sales. Revenue grew 41% in the first quarter to $7.7 billion, up from $5.44 billion a year earlier.
Big takeaways
Despite the secrecy with which some players treat their cloud revenue, the market researcher John Dinsdale at Synergy Research Group has been tracking the market share of each of the major players' cloud businesses for years.
Dinsdale is about to publish his quarterly update and pointed out some things in the quarterly results in an email to Business Insider.
First, even though cloud computing has become an enormous $150 billion market, when including IT spending on things related to cloud, it is still growing incredibly fast.
In the first quarter of 2019, the cloud market grew 42% from the same period of 2018, Dinsdale found. That compares with the full-year growth of 48% across all of 2018.
While some people may see that as glass half full — that is to say, that growth has slowed – the lower percentage is "to be expected" as the market grows, Dinsdale said. Enterprises are still spending more of their money on cloud every quarter.
"This is a massive market that continues to grow at an impressive rate," Dinsdale wrote in the email.
And the report also found that Amazon continues to own 33% of the market, the same percentage it owned in the first quarter of 2018, although AWS market share was tallied at 40% in the third quarter of 2018, according to Dinsdale.
"Four of the chasing pack (Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and Tencent) all have growth rates far in excess of the overall market growth rate and are therefore gaining market share but they are making little or no impact on the market leadership of AWS," he found.
For the quarter, he found:
- Microsoft's market share stood at 16%
- Google's at 8%
- IBM's at 6%
- Alibaba's at 5%.
Tencent is also starting to become a player to watch, Dinsdale said.
"This remains a market that is growing improbably quickly for something of this scale. The performance of AWS and some of the chasing pack is impressive. They continue to shake up the world of IT and to reinvent what is possible." Dinsdale said.
