When the Big 3 cloud infrastructure vendors – Amazon, Microsoft and Google – reported their earnings this week, it was clear that the cloud is helping keep their overall numbers up. But perhaps what was most surprising was that after years of sitting at 33% market share, AWS was up a tick to 34% in the second quarter, according to numbers from Synergy Research.
Even more surprising is that after years of steady market share growth, Microsoft was down a notch from 22% last quarter to 21% this quarter. Google came in third, holding steady around 10%.
Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale said the slight drop in Microsoft’s market share is probably due to the law of large numbers — Microsoft couldn’t sustain its recent growth.
“The days of Azure growing by 50% to 80% year on year are over. Once you get to a certain scale, it is virtually impossible to organically grow at such high rates. So its growth rates have trended down, as they had to. AWS experienced the same phenomenon a long time before Azure got there. Despite the Q2 changes in market share that you saw in our article, Azure’s rolling annualized growth rate does remain quite a bit higher than AWS,” Dinsdale told TechCrunch.
But he said that AWS’ ability to continue to grow at the rate it has is nothing short of remarkable.