According to Q3 data from Synergy Research Group, quarterly revenues from cloud infrastructure services have now passed the $6 billion milestone, with revenues for the last four quarters coming in at well over $21 billion. For the second consecutive quarter, the annualized growth rate has increased and is once again above the 50% mark, rewarding the market's four leading service providers.
The market remains dominated by Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Web Services, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), which in aggregate account for more than half of worldwide cloud infrastructure service revenues, SRG says. AWS is still in a league of its own with a market share in excess of 30%, but Microsoft and Google can at least boast revenue growth rates in excess of 100%. All four are growing more rapidly than the market as a whole.
"In early 2014, market growth was somewhat stymied by overly aggressive price competition, and more recently there have been some headwinds caused by the strengthening dollar, but we are now seeing a truer picture of the underlying growth in cloud usage," wrote John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at SRG. "It might be tempting to think of cloud technologies as now being relatively mature, but the truth is that this is a market which is still in its very early stages of development. As the leading cloud operators continue to launch an impressive array of new services, we will continue to see a huge swing away from traditional IT practices to a world that will be dominated by the cloud."