30Amazon, Microsoft and Alibaba led the race to the Cloud in 2020
According to the most recent survey by the Gartner, Inc., a world leader in research and advice for companies, the global market for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) handled US$ 64.3 billion in 2020, which represents a growth of 40.7% compared to 2019, when the sector generated revenue of US$ 45.7 billion. According to the analysis, Amazon maintained the first position in the IaaS sector, followed by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and Huawei.
“Large-scale vendors continue to build distributed cloud environments with cutting-edge solutions that extend the reach of the public cloud into private and on-premises structures, meeting organizations' needs for data sovereignty, workload portability, and latency. network,” says Sid Nag, Research Vice President at Gartner. “This fact, coupled with the reliance on Public Cloud by most organizations during the pandemic, led to another year of double digital market growth in 2020.”
In 2020, the top five IaaS providers accounted for 80% of the market and virtually all of these companies (90%) showed growth. Amazon continues to lead the global IaaS market with US$ 26.2 billion of accumulated revenue in 2020m=, which corresponds to 41% of market share. The company's 28.7% growth was slightly slower than the overall industry, with sales growth primarily reflecting increased customer usage.
Microsoft maintained the second position in the market share ranking in the IaaS segment, with almost 60% of growth, reaching US$ 12.7 billion in revenue in 2020. The global health crisis and the disruption in workplaces during the pandemic boosted increased demand from existing Microsoft Azure customers, especially for migrating critical workloads, such as healthcare applications with bots assisted by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Digital Twins in manufacturing and e-commerce in retail.
Alibaba, which is the dominant IaaS provider in China, grew 52.8% in 2020 with revenue of US$ 6 billion, up from US$ 4 billion recorded in 2019. In 2020, Alibaba saw its highest growth rate in the education vertical, with expansion of 105%, driven by downloads of the company's communication and collaboration platform, DingTalk, among employees and students who work and now study from home.
Following its second consecutive year of growth of over 200% in the IaaS market, Huawei ranked among the top five Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers for the first time in 2020, with revenue of US$ 2.7 billion. More than 90% of this revenue came from Greater China, a region that continues to see rapid cloud growth. “After 2019, Huawei made a difficult shift from selling equipment to investing heavily in its Cloud services business which is starting to pay off,” says Nag.
Google's IaaS revenue grew by 66% to reach US$4 billion in 2020. Spending from the retail, government and healthcare sectors helped drive Google's growth in Infrastructure as a Service in 2020, as did its focus on supporting development and deployment of applications in the Hybrid Cloud and the Multicloud model.
“The era of chief technology officers investing in cloud for IaaS and platform as a service (PaaS) is quietly ending,” says Nag. “While the Cloud market continues to grow, the real opportunity for vendors comes from growth in Cloud-adjacent technology segments such as Edge Computing, 5G and Artificial Intelligence, as CIOs look to invest in technologies that meet their needs. complex and emerging use cases.”
