'Adverse' economy casts a shadow over Q4 cloud spend - research

While spending was up double-digits, growth was hampered by several global factors

Fourth quarter cloud spend was dampened by adverse economic impacts globally with growth reflecting a reduction in the market.

According to Synergy Research Group, Q4 2022 enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services surpassed $61bn, a rise of 21 per cent over Q4 2021.

However, the increase was substantially hampered by the historically strong US dollar and a severely restricted Chinese market.

Looking solely at the US market, which largely circumvents those two issues, the Q4 growth rate was 27 per cent, which compares with an average growth rate of 31 per cent in the previous four quarters, Synergy said.

The market tracker explained that the shrink in growth rate was partly to be expected due to the increasingly massive scale of the market, but added there is no doubt the current economic climate also had an adverse impact.

Among the largest cloud providers Microsoft saw a strong uptick in its worldwide market share which has now reached 23 per cent, compared to an average 21 per cent in the previous four quarters.

Meanwhile market leader Amazon stayed within its long-standing market share band of 32-34 per cent, while Google's share stood at 11 per cent, in line with the previous quarter but a percentage point up from a year ago.

In aggregate the three leaders accounted for 66 per cent of the worldwide market, up from 63 per cent a year ago, according to Synergy.

Global cloud market will be resilient

With most of the major cloud providers having now released their earnings data for Q4, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services) were $61.6bn, with trailing twelve-month revenues reaching $227bn.

Public IaaS and PaaS services account for the bulk of the market and grew by 22 per cent in Q4.

The dominance of the major cloud providers is even more striking in public cloud, where the top three control 73 per cent of the market.

Geographically, the cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world.

Despite the challenging environment, the full-year 2022 worldwide market grew by $47bn from the previous year, almost matching the $49bn growth achieved in 2021.

As economies improve and the foreign exchange market stabilises, Synergy forecasts that the worldwide cloud market will continue to grow strongly over the coming years.