Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services continues to grow, now nearing $80 billion per quarter, with the big three continuing to dominate and Oracle emerging as leader of the second tier providers.

The second quarter of 2024 was a good one if you are a cloud operator, with enterprise customers upping their cloudy spend by $14.1 billion to $79.1 billion, an increase of 22 percent compared with a year ago.

These figures come from Synergy Research, which said this is the third consecutive quarter in which the year-on-year growth rate for the global cloud market has been north of 20 percent.

However, cloud services have grown continually over the last several years, with only the rate of increase slowing when enterprises reined back spending because of economic conditions.

Total cloud infrastructure services revenue for the preceding 12 months adds up to $297 billion.

The big three cloud providers - AWS, Microsoft and Google - continue to account for about two thirds of the total worldwide market, with their share of the spoils shifting up or down slightly each quarter.

And if you consider only public cloud, the dominance of the major providers is even more pronounced, as the big three account for 73 percent of that market.

Amazon's AWS maintained a clear lead in the market, accounting for 32 percent of worldwide market share during Q2, which is actually a percentage point increase on the previous quarter.

Microsoft's Azure stayed in second place with 23 percent market share, though this is down slightly from the 25 percent that Synergy pegged it at in the previous quarter, when it appeared to be slowly gaining ground on AWS.

Google also gained a smidgeon, increasing its share to 13 percent from 11 percent in the prior quarter. However, the long-term trend is for it and Microsoft to slowly increase their share while that of AWS decreases.

According to Synergy, there is more sign of movement and competition among the second tier of cloud operators, and it picked out Oracle as emerging as a "leader of the following pack".

This is possibly because Oracle's market share appears to be on the rise, although at 3 percent it is currently lower than that of Alibaba, which sits at 4 percent.

Synergy lists Salesforce as having 3 percent market share, while IBM, Tencent and Huawei are all on 2 percent, and a bunch of others come in at about 1 percent to the nearest percentage point, including Baidu, China Telecom, China Unicom, Fujitsu, NTT, Snowflake, SAP, Rackspace and VMware.

In terms of regional spread, the US remains by far the largest cloud market, although the APAC region showed the strongest growth, according to synergy. India, Japan, Australia and South Korea all saw a bounce of 25 percent or more in cloud services during the quarter.

In Europe, the largest cloud markets remain the UK and Germany, but those markets with the highest growth rates included Ireland, Italy and Spain.

"We are now seeing more normalized growth of the cloud market, though some speed bumps do remain," said Synergy Research Group Chief Analyst John Dinsdale in a statement.

He noted that Amazon and Google's share both nudged upwards in Q2 while Microsoft's share dropped a little, but the trend lines for both Microsoft and Google continue heading upwards.

"Oracle is now starting to separate itself to become a top five player," Dinsdale claimed, though the gulf between it and top trio remains huge. "In this market Google is almost five times the size of Oracle, while Amazon is almost three times the size of Google," he said. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/05/cloud_market_grows_22_percent/