The global off-premises cloud service market is forecast to grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16 percent, reaching $410 billion in 2023.
Microsoft became the market share leader for total off-premises cloud service revenue last year with 13.8 percent share, bumping Amazon to the No. 2 spot with 13.2 percent, according to IHS Markit’s recently released report.
IBM bagged the third spot with 8.8 percent revenue share, as shown by the IHS Markit Cloud & Colocation Services Market Tracker.
The report attributes Microsoft’s success to its comprehensive portfolio, including advanced platform as a service (PaaS) and cloud as a service (CaaS) offerings.
Although Amazon relinquished its lead in total off-premises cloud service revenue, it remains the top infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider.
- Amazon was No. 1 in IaaS in 2018 with 45 percent of IaaS revenue.
- Microsoft was No.1 for CaaS with 22 percent of CaaS revenue and No.1 in PaaS with 27 percent of PaaS revenue.
- IBM was No.1 for software as a service (SaaS) with 17 percent of SaaS revenue.
Multi-clouds continue to form
The report noted that the market is very segmented with a small number of large, well-established providers competing for market share.
However, multi-clouds remain a very popular trend in the market. “…many enterprises are already using various services from different providers and this is continuing as more cloud service providers (CSPs) offer services that interoperate with services from their partners and their competitors,” said Devan Adams, principal analyst, IHS Markit.
In its recent Cloud Service Strategies & Leadership North American Enterprise Survey – 2018, IHS Markit had also displayed expectations of increased multi-cloud adoption. The respondents stated that in 2018 they were using 10 different CSPs for SaaS (which IHS Markit forecast to grow to 14 by 2020) and 10 for IT infrastructure (which is expected to grow to 13 by 2020).
Some of the recent multi-cloud related announcements –
- Microsoft entered into a partnership with Adobe and SAP to create the Open Data Initiative, designed to provide customers with a complete view of their data across different platforms. The initiative allows customers to use several applications and platforms from the three companies including Adobe Experience Cloud and Experience Platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure, and SAP C/4HANA and S/4HANA.
- IBM launched Multicloud Manager, which is designed to help companies manage, move and integrate apps across several cloud environments. Multicloud Manager is run from IBM’s Cloud Private and enables customers to extend workloads from public to private clouds.
- Cisco introduced CloudCenter Suite, a set of software modules created to help businesses design and deploy applications on different cloud provider infrastructures. It is a Kubernetes-based multi-cloud management tool that provides workflow automation, application lifecycle management, cost optimization, governance and policy management across cloud provider data centres.
IHS Markit expect cloud as a service (CaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) to be tied for the largest during the forecast period (2018-2023) growing at a CAGR of 22 percent. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) will have the second and third largest CAGRs of 14 percent and 13 percent respectively.
