A new report from International Data Corporation (IDC) revealed that the worldwide public cloud services market, including infrastructure as-a-service (IaaS), system infrastructure software-as-a-service (SISaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS), grew 24.1% year-over-year in 2020 with revenues totaling $312 billion.
AWS, Microsoft, Google and Others Show Explosive Public Cloud Growth
Combined revenue of the top five public cloud service providers - Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Google and Oracle - captured 38% of the worldwide total and among the top five, showed 32% year-over-year growth, according to the report. Microsoft and AWS share the top spot in the public cloud services market with 12.8% revenue share, thanks, in part to those companies' expanding portfolio of SaaS and SISaaS offerings, the report showed.
In the combined IaaS, SISaaS and PaaS market, the top 5 companies (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba (ALBCF), and IBM) captured over 51% of global revenues. But the other half the market total is made up of companies with targeted, use case-specific PaaS services or cross-cloud compute, data or network governance services, which leaves plenty of opportunities open in the space. The 'long tail' is even more pronounced in the SaaS space, where customers' growing focus on specific outcomes for their vertical markets ensures that over two-thirds of the spending is captured outside the top five, according to IDC.
Traditionally, the IaaS and PaaS segments have grown at much faster rates than the overall public cloud market, IDC said. This highlights the increasing reliance of enterprises on a cloud foundation built on cloud infrastructure, software-defined data, compute and governance solutions as-a-service and cloud-native platforms for application deployment for enterprise IT internal applications, according to the report. IDC expects spending on such foundational cloud services (especially IaaS and PaaS) to continue growing at a higher rate than the overall cloud market as organizations focus their efforts on resilience, flexibility and agility.
Public Cloud Services: Navigating Disruption
The Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker provides insight into the total market size and vendor share for more than seventy segments of the global public cloud services market, according to IDC. Measurement for this tracker is public cloud services revenue, which includes infrastructure as-a-service (IaaS), system infrastructure software-as-a-service (SISaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscription revenues, according to IDC. The Tracker follows 500 cloud services companies across a total of 49 countries globally.
"Access to shared infrastructure, data, and application resources in public clouds played a critical role in helping organizations and individuals navigate the disruptions of the past year," said Rick Villars, group vice president, worldwide research at IDC. "In the coming years, enterprises' ability to govern a growing portfolio of cloud services will be the foundation for introducing greater automation into business and IT processes while also becoming more digitally resilient."
