Key takeaways as Amazon and Google reveal cloud numbers
Cloud giants report slowed growth, but outlook remains positive
Microsoft went first in the latest round of financial results from the cloud leaders, revealing last week that Azure revenue growth slowed to 47 per cent in its last quarter.
Amazon and Google have now entered the fray, giving the latest update on the battle for public cloud dominance.
We've rounded up the key information from the pair's results.
AWS
Amazon is the only member of the big three to break out its cloud infrastructure results.
For the quarter ending 30 June 2020 AWS sales rose 29 per cent to $10.8bn, while operating income climbed 58 per cent to $3.4bn - over half of Amazon's total income.
This marks the seventh quarter in a row that AWS' growth has slowed, but Amazon CEO Brian Olsavksy said that backlog grew 65 per cent year on year.
"Customer usage remains strong, although growth varies across industries as a result of the COVID-19 crisis," he said.
The CFO also said that, in some cases, AWS has been working with customers in industries that have been hit by the pandemic to reduce their cloud infrastructures.
"We're actively, with our salesforce, looking for ways that we can help them save money," he added.
"This includes things like scaling down the usage where it makes sense or benchmarking their workloads against our architectural best practices.
So that's not going to help our usage growth in the short run, but it will help those customers save money. We think that's the right thing to do, not only for their success and so they can come out of this at a better shape, but also for the long-term health of our relationship with them."
The wider Amazon business saw sales rocket 40 per cent year on year to $88.8bn.
The firm's share price rose over six per cent in after-hours trading.
Google started releasing more numbers related to its cloud business a couple of quarters ago, although it still does not reveal the size of AWS competitor Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Google Cloud - which houses the likes of GCP and G Suite - saw sales rise 43 per cent year on year to just over $3bn.
Google boss Sundar Pichai said: "GCP maintained the strong level of revenue growth it delivered in the first quarter, and its revenue growth was again meaningfully above cloud overall.
"GCP growth was again led by our infrastructure offerings and our data and analytics platform.
"Overall, the lower Google Cloud revenue growth in the second quarter relative to the first quarter reflects the fact that G Suite lapped a price increase that was introduced in April last year."
The wider Alphabet business reported its first ever year-on-year quarterly revenue decline, with sales down two per cent $38.3bn.
Google's revenue from advertising fell eight per cent, but the firm said it had seen signs of recovery after being ravaged at the start of the pandemic.
Google advertising accounts for the vast majority of Alphabet's total sales, at $29.9bn.
TechMarketView analyst Kate Hanaghan said that the direction of travel is clear, despite the big public cloud three seeing softer quarters than perhaps they would have without the pandemic.
"The pandemic may have had some impact on the growth numbers in the short-term, but the broader trend also sees an easing of the top line as the Hyperscalers gain scale," she said.
"The cloud players may have seen a squeeze on their top line numbers, and a slowing of growth is a general trend outside of the pandemic, but there is no doubt about the general direction of the market."