IBM leapfrogs Amazon and Apple in cloud rankings

Big Blue the second most influential cloud firm after Microsoft last month

A spate of cloud announcements has helped IBM race past cloud rivals Apple and Amazon in a chart ranking cloud influence.

According to the Global Cloud Influence league table, complied by cloud comparison side Compare the Cloud, IBM climbed from sixth place in January to second last month, sailing past Apple and Amazon, which came in third and fourth place respectively in February.

Microsoft topped the chart for the second month running.

Compare the Cloud said IBM's recent declarations on cloud commitment sent it shooting up its Cloud Influencer chart.

"IBM leapt to second place [from sixth place last month] in the rankings following the announcement of a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment with which IBM says it plans to increase revenue from growing areas such as cloud computing to $40bn by 2018," it said. "Its InterConnect event was brimming with cloud announcements covering new services, datacentres, customers, and partners."

Apple came in third place in February after it announced anyone can use iWork for iCloud for free, while Amazon came in fourth – a direct switch in places from January.

Compare the Cloud said HP was notable by its absence in February.

"HP, after having wasted billions on acquisitions such as Autonomy, EDS, 3Com and Palm trying to buy growth, have no real cloud revenue to speak of – even their recent deal with Deutsche Bank could hardly be seen as cloud," it said.