The year 2019 turned out to be yet another promising one for the cloud computing industry. While the tech industry as a whole remained somewhat subdued, the case of the cloud showed divergence from this trend.
Perhaps the main factor behind this trend was that in the year 2018, cloud companies had already dished out loads of dollars to exponentially enhance their data centre footprint globally.
So, the year 2019 was all about consolidating that investment and most cloud computing companies, big or small, shifted focus on optimizing their existing infrastructures rather than going for expansion.
This, in turn, dampened the demand for IT hardware, whose major chunk was originating from Cloud Service Providers (CSP) across the world.
As per Canalys, a tech research firm, the major growth within the cloud computing industry was observed in the cloud infrastructure segment commonly known as IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service.
Behind this rapid growth was a strong trend of migration from on-premise infrastructures to the cloud. Now, even the skeptics of the cloud are finally selecting it for obvious cost and efficiency-related benefits.
In terms of revenue, Amazon maintained the top slot by grossing around $34 BN, exhibiting a year on year revenue growth of around 36%. The company obviously enjoys the edge of being the pioneer.
In percentage terms, Google owner Alphabet experienced the highest growth in revenue of 88%. The revenue figure may not seem that significant at $6 BN, especially if pitched against that of AWS.
The most notable growth overall was perhaps exhibited by Microsoft whose revenue grew by 64% to cross the respectable $18 BN mark.
Lastly, a notable trend was that the bigger cloud players continued to dominate the landscape on the back of stronger financial might and highly attractive offerings.
The only cause for slight concern is that all this robust growth in both market share and revenues of big cloud players has largely come at the expense of smaller cloud service providers.
With multi-cloud infrastructures well poised to become the norm rather than the exception, we can expect the bigger cloud players will further cut into the already shrinking pie size for smaller CSPs.
