Latest results from AWS, Google and Microsoft: what we learned
The latest batch of earnings reports shine a light on the state of the public cloud market
The state of the public cloud market comes under more scrutiny than usual once every three months, when Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google publish their quarterly numbers.
All three vendors have released earnings figures over the last week, with adoption of their cloud capabilities being highlighted as the key driver of growth in their respective earnings calls.
All three boasted of large customer wins, growing their cloud teams, and expanding their datacentre regions.
But visualising the true state of the cloud market can be difficult because each has a different reporting structure.
Amazon breaks out all the key figures for AWS because it is separate to its other businesses, but Microsoft nestles Azure in with other cloudy products and Google groups its Google Cloud Platform (CGP) in with Android's Play app store and "Other" activities.
On the face of it, the market's two biggest players - AWS and Microsoft - saw their growth slow.
AWS reported year-on-year growth for its Q3 of 35 per cent - the lowest since it started reporting AWS numbers.
Microsoft, meanwhile, saw Azure revenue grow 63 per cent - the lowest since it started reporting the figure at the start of 2017.
But if you take AWS' figures in monetary terms, the $2.4bn (£1.9bn) sales rise was more than it saw in its Q2, when a 37 per cent increase equated to just $2.2bn.
Go back to Q3 last year and AWS reported similar growth in dollars, but the percentage figure was 45 per cent and therefore seemed more impressive.
It's not possible to make similar observations for Microsoft's public cloud trajectory, but we do know that 18 months ago, Azure's revenue growth was 98 per cent - so the drop to 63 per cent feels relatively steep in comparison with AWS, which has been in the market far longer.
Perhaps the best way to assess the landscape is to look at analyst figures.
According to Canalys, AWS saw its position weaken ever so slightly in Q3 this year, with its market share dipping 0.4 per cent to 32.6 per cent.
AWS is still the largest individual player by a long way, the analyst said, but Microsoft and Google continue to chip away.
Azure's market share was up 2.4 percentage points to 16.9 per cent, while Google was up 1.3 percentage points to 6.9 per cent.
The remaining 46.9 per cent is made up of other large and small players.
Alistair Edwards, chief analyst at Canalys, said that vendor partnerships are likely to be crucial to future growth - something that Microsoft has seemingly acknowledged over recent months.
"Success will increasingly be defined by the technology alliances forged by the cloud providers, as well as developing relationships with key channel categories," he said.
"Microsoft has built new partnerships with Oracle, VMware and most recently SAP, which give it greater credibility with enterprises as core applications are migrated to the cloud."
It is these sorts of relationships that have led to all three cloud players accepting that on-premise solutions have a place - at least for the foreseeable future.
Microsoft announced Azure Stack in 2017, AWS followed with Outposts last year and Google has Anthos.
The hardware move was perhaps most significant for AWS, which had always maintained that every workload can operate in the public cloud. It is possibly still the case that it considers Outposts as a stepping stone to full public cloud.
Either way, it has embraced hardware - to the point where Canalys boss Steve Brazier recently said that Outposts will make Amazon one of the top four on-premise server vendors in the world within three years.
Commenting on Google, Brazier said he expects the internet giant to acquire a hardware or software vendor in the next year, to give itself a large install base that can be converted to its cloud.
Of the three, Google would seem to be the one that has the most space to run into, having stepped up its enterprise play recently with the appointment of former Oracle president Thomas Kurian.
Google has also bolstered its presence in the channel over recent months, inking partnerships with the likes of Atos - honouring CEO Sundar Pichai's promise that it would be investing in its partner ecosystem.
It is Google's cloud business that is the hardest to judge, with no specific numbers broken out. However, Pichai did reveal earlier this year that it was operating at an annual revenue run rate of $8bn. No figure was given in the most recent quarter.
What was certainly clear from the latest set of results is that analysts were not impressed.
Microsoft's share price remained flat in the immediate hours after publication, while the prices of Google's Alphabet parent and Amazon both fell - although it is important to note that all three vendors obviously have bets placed elsewhere.
It is also worth noting that it is not just these three vendors that have underwhelmed markets over the last six months, with hardware manufacturers including Cisco, HPE and HP Inc claiming that external factors such as Brexit and the US-China trade war are making things difficult.
By the time that Microsoft, Amazon and Google report their results again it will be January - at least the UK's situation may finally be a bit more stable by then.