Global IaaS market hit $64.3bn in 2020, Gartner claims
Amazon retained the number one position in the IaaS market
The global infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market grew 40.7 per cent in 2020 to $64.3bn (€54bn), according to findings from Gartner.
The analyst house claims Amazon maintained its number one spot in 2020, followed by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and Huawei.
It added the top five IaaS providers accounted for 80 per cent of the market, and nearly 90 per cent of all IaaS providers exhibited growth.
"Hyperscale providers are continuing to build distributed cloud and edge solutions that extend the public cloud's reach into private and on-premise locations, addressing the needs of organisations relating to data sovereignty, workload portability and network latency," said Gartner research VP, Sid Nag.
"This fact, coupled with reliance on the public cloud by a majority of organisations during the pandemic, drove another year of double digital market growth in 2020."
Amazon continued to lead the worldwide IaaS market with $26.2bn (€22bn) of revenue in 2020 and 41 per cent market share.
Microsoft secured second place by market share with a rise of nearly 60 per cent, reaching revenues of $12.7bn (€10.6bn).
The global healthcare crisis and disruption to workplace environments during the pandemic drove increased demand from existing Microsoft Azure customers to migrate mission-critical workloads, such as from healthcare applications with AI-assisted bots, digital twins in manufacturing and e-commerce in retail.
How the rest fared
The dominant IaaS provider in China, Alibaba, rose 52.8 per cent in 2020 with revenue surpassing $6bn (€5bn), up from $4bn in 2019, according to Gartner.
Last year, Alibaba saw its highest growth rate in the education vertical at 105 per cent, driven by downloads of Alibaba's enterprise communication and collaboration platform DingTalk among employees and students working and studying from home.
After its second consecutive year of more than 200 per cent growth in the IaaS market, Huawei broke into the top five IaaS vendors for the first time in 2020, with revenues of $2.7bn (€2.2bn).
Garnter claims over 90 per cent of this revenue comes from Greater China, a region that continues to see rapid cloud market growth.
"After 2019, Huawei made a hard pivot away from selling equipment to investing heavily in their cloud services business which is starting to yield results," Nag added.
Finally, Google's IaaS revenue grew 66 per cent to reach nearly $4bn (€3.3bn) in 2020.
Spending from the retail, government and healthcare sectors helped drive Google's growth in IaaS in 2020, as did their focus on supporting the development and deployment of cloud applications in both a hybrid and multi cloud model.