Cloud computing is a fast-growing industry that Gartner a leading market research company predicts will grow steadily at 18% in this year alone and will consequently be worth $383 billion by the year 2020.
Market Share in the Cloud Computing Industry
It is as a highly competitive industry attracting most of the huge tech corporations as well other small players who all wanting a piece of the pie among them tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Surveys show that Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds the lion share of the market at 40 percent followed by Microsoft, IBM, and Google who have 23 percent of the market share. The remaining share is currently held by different players all looking to grow their market presence with the hope of unseating some of the established cloud providers. Start-ups and other It infrastructure providers such Oracle have been especially keen to increase their market share and have ventured into providing cloud computing services.
The Battle for Cloud Dominance
The profits made from cloud computing have been and this explains why the tech companies are aggressively working to achieve market dominance. Amazon was one of the first companies to provide cloud solutions and they launched AWS back in 2006 proving that computing resources can be provided as a monetizable service. Their strategy has been hugely profitable, even more than their online retail business, raking in a gross of $12.2 billion.
On the other hand, Microsoft can attribute some of the 93 percent growth in revenue to their cloud solution product Azure, which they launched in 2010. You could say they were a late entry but they had the advantage of being well established in enterprise computing. Their customers simply made a switch to Azure and Microsoft has since held a sizable market share in the industry. Google is another provider but they made had a very late entry and only consolidated cloud services as a business unit in 2015. That means Google has to play catch up. The industry continues to have other new entries, which can be attributed to the profits that can potentially be realized.
More and more companies have begun adopting cloud solutions and services. This is because of the numerous benefits that cloud computing offers, among them is that it allows companies to access data and information using any device from virtually any location in the world. The services are cost effective and offer unrivaled flexibility for businesses operations. Cloud computing is here to stay and that is why tech companies are working to increase their market share and this can only mean improved services for the users.