Cloud infrastructure market was worth 32 billion dollars in 2018

The global market for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) grew by 31.3 percent to 32.4 billion dollars in 2018. In 2017, the market was still worth 24.7 billion dollars.

The market was again led by Amazon, according to figures from Gartner. Amazon’s revenue growth was 26.8 percent compared to 2017. In 2018, the company had an IaaS turnover of $15.5 billion and a market share of 47.8 percent. Gartner also stresses that Amazon continues to grow with new services and acquisitions.

Microsoft is in second place in the IaaS market, with sales of more than 5 billion U.S. dollars in 2018, compared to 3.1 billion U.S. dollars in 2017. That’s an impressive 60.9% growth in a year. Microsoft’s market share rose to 15.5 percent.

Biggest growth for Alibaba

Alibaba is the third largest player in the world and the dominant player in China. This company also saw the biggest growth, 92.6 percent. The company has built an ecosystem of managed service providers and independent software vendors.

This enabled Alibaba to realise a turnover of 2.5 billion dollars, which represented a market share of 7.7 percent.

The top five is completed by Google and IBM, which have sales of 1.3 billion and 577 million U.S. dollars respectively. Google had a market share of 4 percent last year, IBM of 1.8 percent. Google was also one of last year’s big winners, with sales growth of 60.2 percent.

Dominant players remain

Gartner expects the five dominant players in the market to maintain and only strengthen their positions. While these five companies saw a combined growth of 39 percent, the rest of the players together saw only 11 percent.

Despite strong growth across the board, the consolidation of the cloud market favors the large and dominant providers, with smaller and niche providers losing share, said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner.

The five largest players together held 77 percent of the global IaaS market in 2018, compared to just 73 percent in 2017.