Global public cloud services spending tops another record

17.09.2020 1,481 13

Martin Deshev

The public cloud continues to grow. New data from both IDC and Gartner shows that 2019 was another record year for the segment. What’s more, there’s not only one or two companies that net the big gains, but five.

IDC says that in 2019 the public cloud revenues reached $233.4 billion globally. This is a 26% jump year-over-year. Another telling sign for the public cloud domination is the fact that this is double the revenue compared to 2016. It means that the segment is rising very quickly.

The big players

According to IDC, there are five big names which dominate the market. They are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Salesforce, Google and Oracle. All of them gained more than a third of the spending and netted a faster expansion than the market overall.

“Cloud is expanding far beyond niche e-commerce and online ad-sponsored searches. It underpins all the digital activities that individuals and enterprises depend upon as we navigate and move beyond the pandemic. Enterprises talked about cloud journeys of up to ten years. Now they are looking to complete the shift in less than half that time,” said Rick Villars, group vice president of Worldwide Research at IDC, in a statement to ITPro Today.

IDC views the public cloud market as consisting of three segments – infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). Gartner, on the other hand, focuses on IaaS. It says that this segment alone reached $44.5 billion in 2019. This is also a 37.3% rise from 2018.

The top five IaaS names are a bit different: Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and Tencent. Together they hold a whopping 80% of this segment. And Amazon is the big leader with a 45% market share overall. A distant second is Microsoft with 17.9%.

What will 2020 be like?

2020 will certainly go down in history as a major shift year. The IT world had already been set for major changes starting from 2020. Then the pandemic changed plans even further. As a result, businesses shifted to remote work and the cloud became even more important.

The expectations for the cloud in 2020 were big. Now they are actually even bigger. The spending jump would probably not be as big, because many companies have reduced budgets. But the usage will be even bigger. Gartner expect that the public cloud services market in 2020 will reach a 6.3% jump.

“There will be a continued push of cloud spending as an outcome of the coronavirus pandemic.When enterprises were compelled to move their applications to the public cloud as a result of the pandemic, they realized the true benefits of public cloud, and it is unlikely that they will change course,” says Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner.

Basically it means that cloud service providers will have a lot to gain. It’s up to them to make the most out of this massive opportunity.