With Amazon leading, five hyperscalers dominate 80% of the IaaS market
Gartner Inc.’s latest poll of the public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market shows the segment grew 41.4% in 2021, totally $90.9 billion, up from $64.3 billion year-over-year. Amazon is still the premiere IaaS provider in the survey, followed by Microsoft and Alibaba. Google and Huawei are fourth and fifth, respectively. Together, the top five IaaS providers account for more than 80% of the entire market, Gartner reports.
IaaS enables enterprise IT to outsource cloud computing network infrastructure like physical computing resources, scaling, and security. Examples of IaaS include Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines and Google Compute Engine. IaaS spending has increased dramatically year-over-year, driven by new trends in hybrid cloud and hybrid workforce solutions. As enterprises digitalize their operations into the cloud, IaaS sales are expected to increase.
The numbers reinforce Amazon’s IaaS dominance: the company had 38.9% of the worldwide 2021 public cloud IaaS market share, or about $35.58 billion in revenue. Microsoft followed with $19.153 billion, or 21.1%, while Alibaba reported $8.679 billion revenue for about 9.5% precent of the market. Google and Huawei rounded out the top five with 6.436 7.1 and 4.6% share respectively.
Gartner said that Microsoft’s primacy in enterprise IT provides it with leverage to capture growth for its Azure platform in new vertical markets. Alibaba, meanwhile, leads the burgeoning Chinese cloud market — the report says that will help to give Alibaba footing for dominance in emerging Pacific Rim cloud markets in Indonesia, Malaysia and elsewhere.
Google Cloud, however, took the prize for highest growth rate, growing 63.7% in 2021, or $6.4 billion in revenue.
“This growth was driven by steadily increased adoption for traditional enterprise workloads as well as Google’s innovation in more cutting-edge capabilities such as artificial intelligence and Kubernetes container technologies, supported by an expansion of their partner ecosystem to reach a wider customer base,” said Gartner.
Gartner also singled out Huawei for plaudits, pointing to the Chinese manufacturer’s focus on open hardware, open-source software and strategic partnerships.
Sid Nag, VP analyst at Gartner, said the continued growth underscores the continuation of cloud-native workloads as the primary modern IT architecture.
“Cloud supports the scalability and composability that advanced technologies and applications require, while also enabling enterprises to address emerging needs such as sovereignty, data integration and enhanced customer experience,” said Nag.
Gartner continues to beat the “composability” drum as a key cloud service differentiator for businesses. In Gartner’s parlance, enterprise composability “is the mindset, technologies, and set of operating capabilities that enable organizations to innovate and adapt quickly to changing business needs. It is built on applying the key principle of modularity to business assets to achieve the scale and pace required of business ambition.”
Nag claims the next phase of public cloud IaaS growth will be focused on improving customer experience and achieving business-driven digital outcomes. Oh, and the metaverse too. That’s also important.
“Emerging technologies that can help businesses bring experiences closer to their customers, such as the metaverse, chatbots and digital twins, will require hyperscale infrastructure to meet growing demands for compute and storage power,” said Nag.
