Earnings recap: Amazon, Microsoft and Google grow fast and keep hold on the market — for now

Although the market is consolidating around AWS, Microsoft Azure and GCP, the trailing vendors are unable to match AWS’ quarterly revenue gains

Consolidation is occurring across cloud segments, with the most notable convergence occurring around the five leading PaaS and IaaS players, blending the lines between PaaS and IaaS. Customers and applications vendors are flocking to the leading players Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This is evidenced by these three vendors collectively growing 58% year-to-year in 2Q18, while the total PaaS and IaaS market is expected to grow only 16% year-to-year in 2018. This consolidation is helping the largest players continually capture greater market share and, as a result, largely dictate the growth of the PaaS and IaaS markets.

With the leading vendors’ CY2Q18 earnings results now public, it is clear that AWS continues to rule the PaaS and IaaS spaces, sitting at almost three times the size of second-place Microsoft Azure and sustaining greater quarterly revenue additions. Google sits in third place in mindshare for many customers, but trails AWS and Microsoft Azure in revenue by a large margin. These three vendors face increasing competition from Alibaba, which continues to expand its global reach, and IBM, which has seen more success in private cloud and hybrid IT.

AWS maintains its public cloud lead through continuous innovation, but faces growing opposition as new and existing competition strengthens

AWS accelerated revenue growth for the third consecutive quarter in 2Q18, up 48.9% year-to-year to $6.1 billion, further extending its lead in PaaS and IaaS. AWS’ position as the far-and-away market leader causes the competition to fiercely innovate and expand to challenge the vendor. However, AWS’ mindshare has been secured, and paired with its portfolio breadth, innovation pace and global availability, inserts the vendor into the bulk of customer and partner evaluations. AWS’ determination to innovate with and ahead of customer needs continues to drive service and feature releases, aimed at winning new workloads without compromising profits. Halfway through 2018, AWS has released 800 new services and features, an accelerated pace of service innovation from 2017’s record level.

Microsoft Azure continues its fast-paced growth, but will remain behind AWS in revenue for the foreseeable future

Microsoft’s Commercial Cloud revenue, which includes public cloud and private cloud versions of Office 365 commercial, Dynamics 365 and Azure, approached $6.9 billion as Microsoft nearly doubled the number of Azure agreements worth $10 million or more over the last year. Azure revenue grew 89% year-to-year to $2.2 billion in 2Q18.

Microsoft’s combination of traditional software, public cloud and on-premises private cloud positions the company to be the backbone of customers’ hybrid environments — a label few competitors, especially AWS and Google, can claim. As such, Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help customers extract the value from their integrated data and has put itself at the forefront of innovation and commercialization of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) to capitalize on this leading position.

Google will be unable to retain its third-place position as it fights to shift market perception and fend off strengthening competition

Relative to AWS and Microsoft Azure, GCP is far behind in the PaaS and IaaS space but is trying to prove to customers that it is as enterprise-ready as its main competitors. As Google solidifies its cloud portfolio and builds out key offerings, the company has also prioritized improving its large enterprise go-to-market efforts under its One Google strategy. Google Cloud, which consists of G Suite and GCP, increased revenue by an estimated 56% year-to-year, nearly reaching $1.42 billion. TBR expects Google Cloud revenue will increase to $1.6 billion in 3Q18 as the vendor continues to execute its One Google strategy.

While Google is investing in its go-to-market activities and shows progress through growth, its overall reputation in the market has been slow to adapt from consumer-grade to enterprise-ready. To combat that market perception, Google Cloud focuses its innovation on mastering four areas of expertise: machine learning and analytics, security, application developer tools, and connected business platforms. Recent investments in hybrid enablement and improved rendering capabilities demonstrate Google’s ongoing commitment to becoming a leading cloud vendor in differentiated areas of high-growth opportunity. While Google will succeed in these discrete areas, TBR expects Alibaba to emerge as the third-place general-purpose PaaS and IaaS provider.