Amazon, Microsoft, and Google all gain market share.
New Q4 data from Synergy Research Group shows that spend on cloud infrastructure services jumped 46% from the final quarter of 2016, comfortably beating the growth rates achieved in the previous three quarters. In large part the expansion was driven by aggressive growth of Amazon (AWS), Microsoft, Google and Alibaba, who all increased their share of the worldwide market at the expense of smaller cloud providers. AWS maintained its dominant position with revenues that exceeded the next four closest competitors combined, despite huge strides being made by Microsoft. A notable change in Q4 was that a doubling of cloud revenues at Alibaba enabled it to join the ranks of the top five operators for the first time. Meanwhile IBM maintains its position as the third largest cloud provider in the market, thanks primarily to its strong leadership in hosted private cloud services.