Amazon cloud services revenues dominate, but Microsoft and others are gaining ground

Kit McDonald

Microsoft Cloud

The adoption of cloud computing has been on the rise for the last few years with major competition, as three global titans, Microsoft, IBM, and Google have all vied for power in the digital transformation of technology. But it’s been apparent since the beginning that Amazon rules over them all.

Amazon has always had an undeniable lead with Amazon Web Services (AWS) with a continued growth that left others in their dust. As predicted by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos last year, AWS has met $10 billion sales for 2016 and even blasted up to $12 billion before the end of the year. Geekwire reports that as the king of clouds sits on its throne, the cloud market is still at unrest beneath it.

Microsoft, Google, and IBM together have grown in the market by 5% at the cost of smaller cloud providers. This can be attributed to much of Microsoft Azure’s growth reported at $14 billion across the commercial cloud, including Office 365. The tech giant’s CEO Satya Nadella wants to see another big push for Azure, predicting approximately $20 billion annualized cloud revenue by June 2018.

While it is a step in the right direction for Microsoft Azure, the growth still doesn’t hinder the gigantic lead that Amazon has. Although, as a growing concern in the legal department concerning intellectual property, Microsoft has released its Azure IP Advantage program to protect customers against patent claims. This is a first for the cloud market and could essentially be a major play in the competition.

What do you think? Is this a tortoise and the hare scenario or is AWS destined to lord over the cloud market? Let us know in the comments below or tweet us @OnMSFT.