According to Gartner, Amazon continued to lead the worldwide IaaS space with $26.2 billion of revenue in 2020 and 41% of market share, followed by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and Huawei.
Amazon’s 28.7% growth was slightly slower than that of the market, with their sales growth primarily reflecting increased customer usage.
The research into the market’s revenue in 2020 also found that the top five IaaS providers accounted for 80% of the market, and nearly 90% all IaaS providers exhibited growth.
“Hyperscale providers are continuing to build distributed cloud and edge solutions that extend the public cloud’s reach into private and on-premise locations, addressing the needs of organisations relating to data sovereignty, workload portability and network latency,” said Sid Nag, research vice-president at Gartner.
“This fact, coupled with reliance on the public cloud by a majority of organisations during the pandemic, drove another year of double digital market growth in 2020.”
Microsoft maintained the No. 2 position in the market, with the global healthcare crisis and disruption in workplace environments during the pandemic era being key factors in its $12.7 billion in revenue and 60% growth.
Meanwhile, the biggest IaaS provider in China, Alibaba, grew 52.8% in 2020 with revenue surpassing $6 billion, up from $4 billion in 2019, while seeing its highest growth rate in the education vertical at 105%, driven by downloads of its DingTalk communication platform.
The IaaS revenue of 4th-placed Google grew 66% to reach nearly $4 billion in 2020, with spending from the retail, government and healthcare sectors being key, as well as its focus on supporting the development and deployment of cloud applications in both a hybrid and multi-cloud model.
Following its second consecutive year of over 200% growth in the IaaS market, Huawei broke into the top five IaaS vendors for the first time in 2020, with $2.7 billion in revenue, and over 90% of this revenue coming from Greater China.
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Nag continued: “The era of CIOs investing in cloud IaaS and platform as a service (PaaS) discretely is long over.
“While the cloud market will continue to grow, the real opportunity for providers comes from growth in cloud-adjacent technology markets such as edge, 5G and AI, as CIOs look to invest in technologies that address their complex and emerging use cases.”
