Thunder rolls as cloud boom continues worldwide

Quarterly IaaS and PaaS revenue storms in with 56 per cent year-on-year growth

Worldwide earnings from IaaS and PaaS services exceeded $2bn (£1.3bn) in Q1 2013, up 56 per cent from the same quarter a year ago.

That is according to data from US-based Synergy Research, which also found that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has retained its leading 27 per cent share of these booming cloud markets.

John Dinsdale, spokesman for Synergy Research, said cloud services sales have been expanding at an impressive rate.

"While I cannot imagine Amazon losing its grip on the market, cloud services are growing at such a pace that all the lead players should be able to see strong growth over the next five years," he said. "Google and Microsoft are playing catch-up with relatively recent IaaS service launches, while a raft of telcos are also getting into the game."

Dinsdale also suggested that the success of IaaS and PaaS may effectively cannibalise managed hosting and colocation customers – perhaps causing some specialists in those segments to diversify into cloud services as well.

Meanwhile, "IT heavyweights" have so far failed to close the gap on Amazon, despite an increasing number of service launches and marketing initiatives, he said, noting that Amazon's share of the market for the whole of 2012 had remained stable at 27 per cent.

North America accounts for more than half of the global IaaS and PaaS market, with EMEA accounting for 20 per cent of revenue in Q1 – after Asia-Pacific, which comprised 21 per cent of the market. However, strong growth is continuing and Amazon leads in all regions, according to Synergy.