Microsoft Takes Top Spot for Total Cloud Services Revenue

In 2018, Microsoft became the market share leader for total off-premises cloud service revenue with 13.8 percent share, bumping Amazon to the #2 spot with 13.2 percent. IBM was #3 with 8.8 percent revenue share. Microsoft’s success can be attributed to its comprehensive portfolio, and the growth it is experiencing from its more advanced PaaS and CaaS offerings.

Despite the fact that Amazon relinquished lead, it remains the top IaaS provider. There are well-established providers vying for market share:

• Amazon was #1 in IaaS in 2018 with 45 percent of IaaS revenue.
• Microsoft was #1 for CaaS with 22 percent of CaaS revenue and #1 in PaaS with 27 percent of PaaS revenue.
• IBM was #1 for SaaS with 17 percent of SaaS revenue.

Multi-clouds remains a very popular trend in the market. Many enterprises are already using various services from different providers. This trend is continuing as more cloud service providers (CSPs) offer services that interoperate with services from their partners and competitors.

Expectations of increased multi-cloud adoption were displayed in IHS Markit’s recent Cloud Service Strategies & Leadership North American Enterprise Survey - 2018, where respondents stated that in 2018, they were using 10 different CSPs for SaaS (growing to 14 by 2020) and 10 for IT infrastructure (growing to 13 by 2020).

There have recently been numerous multi-cloud related announcements highlighting its increased availability, including:

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, 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 centers.

Devan Adams, IHS Markit analyst, USA.