A new study from IHS found the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market to be worth just over $4 billion in 2013. IaaS is a service that allows for on-demand use of servers, networks, storage, and operating systems. It is just one of the three categories of cloud computing, the others being Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (Saas). The latter of which accounts for the largest share of cloud revenues.

Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM were found to account for well over half of IaaS revenue in 2013. Google was absent from market share estimates in 2013, given that it only introduced its offering in December of that year. However, because of the company’s scale, existing data center infrastructure, and resources available for investment, IHS expects the company to be in the top five suppliers to the market for 2014. Other major suppliers that the report analyzes (both in terms of revenues and data center footprint) are AT&T, British Telecom, CenturyLink, Hewlett-Packard, Internap, Rackspace, Verizon Terremark, and VMware.

In terms of these 12 suppliers’ data center presence, IHS found that combined they have well over 100 IaaS-enabled data centers around the globe. California, Texas, Virginia, UK, Netherlands, and Singapore are particularly dense areas of data centers for these major providers. The location and number of facilities for each supplier can vary greatly depending on the company’s overall business model and whether they are primarily hosting, telecom, colocation, or internet companies.

IaaS is currently just a small sliver of the total enterprise IT cloud services market. By far, the greatest bulk of cloud revenues come from SaaS, which can essentially be any subscription- and web-based software on the market. Despite its comparatively small size, IaaS is a quickly growing market with major implications for the data center infrastructure market as a whole. As more companies move to an IaaS model, there will be a shrinking need for company-owned, enterprise data centers which means a very different customer base for the suppliers of data center equipment like UPS, cooling, racks, PDUs, etc.

Suppliers of Cloud Infrastructure as a Service & Their Data Centers Report - 2014 provides a new perspective on the Infrastructure as a Service market. The study presents an accurate assessment of the market size by estimating the revenues earned from IaaS services by the top 12 suppliers to this market. Also unique to this study, is an analysis of each of these suppliers’ data center infrastructure for IaaS, which presents the location and quantity of facilities for each company.

This article was originally posted “Report: 2013 IaaS Market Revenue Surpassed $4 Billion” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.