Alibaba and Microsoft closing gap on AWS in public cloud race - analyst

AWS still dominates the market, while Alibaba doubles in size

Microsoft and Alibaba have pulled themselves closer to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the public cloud market, according to Gartner.

AWS however still has a market share three times that of Microsoft's, at 47.8 per cent.

Gartner's latest public cloud report (full table below) shows that the market was worth $32.4bn (£26.4bn) in 2018, up 31.3 per cent on the previous year.

Microsoft's market share stood at 15.5 per cent, with its public cloud business growing 60.9 per cent to just over $5bn.

Despite seeing its market share drop 1.6 percentage points to 47.8 per cent, AWS saw the size of its business increase by one quarter.

It was Chinese giant Alibaba that saw the largest growth, with its public cloud business almost doubling to $2.5bn.

Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner, said: "Despite strong growth across the board, the cloud market's consolidation favours the large and dominant providers, with smaller and niche providers losing share.

"This is an indication that scalability matters when it comes to the public cloud IaaS business. Only those providers who invest capital expenditure in building out datacentres at scale across multiple regions will succeed and continue to capture market share.

"Offering rich feature functionality across the cloud technology stack will be the ticket to success as well."

Microsoft and AWS make up almost two thirds of the market alone, with IBM and Google joining them, along with Alibaba, to round out the market's big five.

These five account for nearly 77 per cent of the overall market.

Gartner's Nag said that Google will likely strengthen its enterprise position over the coming months.

"Google's cloud offering is something to keep an eye on with its new leadership focus on customers and shift towards becoming a more enterprise-geared offering," he said.