Microsoft cloud growth closes gap on AWS

Microsoft is catching up with AWS in terms of revenues, growing 90% year-on-year, compared to AWS's increase of 42%, according to Canalys research.

Google also put a strong show in over the last 12 months, with revenues increasing by 76%, despite the company's market share still trailing behind in third place. However, IBM's cloud business, which was fourth in line, didn't manage such impressive growth figures, with revenue growing less than 30% in the last 12 months.

The four companies managed to capture 57% of the entire cloud infrastructure market over the year, suggesting smaller businesses are suffering from falling revenues and will need to innovate to keep up with or outpace the competition.

"The leading cloud service providers' hyperscale investment in both technical capabilities and geographic coverage continues to help them expand rapidly," said Daniel Liu, research analyst at Canalys.

"AWS will continue to benefit from its first-mover advantage, broadest cloud services portfolio and strong awareness among developers. But Microsoft's substantial growth, driven by its huge enterprise installed base, compatibility with its Office portfolio and enhanced hybrid cloud solutions, means it will remain AWS' closest competitor."

Overall, the worldwide cloud infrastructure services market grew an impressive 43% year-on-year in 2016/2017, reaching total revenues of $14.4 billion.

Canalys doesn't think there are any signs of the cloud infrastructure market slowing, either, forecasting faster levels of growth as businesses adopt new cloud-powered applications and services.

"The growing adoption of cloud for digital workloads around artificial intelligence, IoT and edge computing will catalyse the next wave of market growth," Liu added. "This will also become the key factor in determining cloud players' future momentum."