AWS revenue growth slows as competition in the global IaaS market heats up

Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains the supplier to beat in the global infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market, but its growth has started to slow, Gartner research shows.

According to the IT analyst house’s worldwide IaaS market tracker, just more than half ($12.2bn) of the $23.5bn in revenue generated by suppliers in this sector during 2017 came from AWS, with the cloud giant achieving an annual growth rate of 25%.

In terms of what is driving the growth of Amazon’s cloud, Gartner said the firm continues to benefit from enterprises looking to exit private datacentres, as well as organisations embarking on “transformational digital business projects” using its ever-growing service portfolio.

Sid Nag, research director at Gartner, said: “The top four providers have strong IaaS offerings and saw healthy growth as IaaS adoption is being fully embraced by mainstream organisations and as cloud availability expands into new regions and countries.

“Cloud-directed IT spending now constitutes more than 20% of the total IT budget for organisations using cloud. Many of these organisations are now using cloud to support production environments and business-critical operations,” he added.

Even so, the firm’s annual revenue growth rate was the lowest of the top five IaaS suppliers tracked by Gartner, with its nearest competitor – Microsoft – achieving revenue growth rate of 98.2%, having brought in $3.1bn over the course of 2017.

In third place is Chinese cloud supplier Alibaba. Its revenue grew by 62.7% between 2016 and 2017, rising from $670m to $1.09bn during that time frame.

Google and IBM round out the top five, with the former reporting revenue in the region of $780m, up 56% on the previous year, while the latter accrued $457m in 2017, which equates to a rise of 53.9%.

Collectively, these five suppliers account for around 73% of the overall IaaS market, which serves to highlight how the competitive landscape appears to be consolidating around the big five, said Gartner.

“This reflects a fundamental change in what and how organisations are consuming technology,” Nag added. “Additionally, a groundswell of demand for cloud-skilled personnel is forcing technology providers to change how they compete to meet this exploding demand.”