To understand why cloud is such an important trend right now, one just needs to look at the growth in cloud revenue globally.
As of last November, cloud revenue globally had grown by 46% year over year.
Gartner expects sales of infrastructure services to grow by 38% annually to $30.6 billion in 2017. IDC expects cloud services to double in the same period.
Measuring cloud market share is a little bit challenging at the moment because it’s a) a moving target and b) it depends on what you include as “cloud revenue”. While Amazon is clearly the market leader in IaaS cloud services, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce and Google are all fighting it out for market share. SAP is also claiming they are gaining market share as well with their cloud platforms.
Each company is also now claiming various independent studies and numbers are wrong because of various methodology problems or the numbers are simply out of date – usually when a study puts them behind the competition. Expect this to continue as the competition heats up and marketing departments in these companies use market share claims as a confidence booster for their customers.
The bottom line is that cloud growth will continue at a dramatic pace in the next 2-3 years…
