Microsoft Azure Growing Nearly Twice As Fast As AWS

Time for some alarm bells? The cloud landscape could end up being very different in the near future, as Microsoft Azure has been found to be growing almost twice as fast as AWS.

With Google now far behind both companies.

Amazon still owns the cloud.

And as the company’s latest quarterly earnings results confirmed, the cloud business is still the star of the show, bringing a significant portion of gold for the retail giant every year. But it still is facing competition from its two other competitors.

In fact, in a rare confluence of events, all three companies reported quarterly earnings on the same day, providing us with an abundance of data on the state of cloud computing.

Which is very much an oligopoly now, as no other company of any meaningful size outside of the major players is getting into the cloud business — for the sole reason that they cannot afford it, as getting into required bottomless funds.

Nevertheless, Amazon Web Services remains the clear leader, with the company revealing that it witnessed strong growth in revenue, which surged 43% in the quarter to $3.66 billion. The cloud infrastructure business looks set to be the strongest suite for Amazon for the foreseeable future.

Microsoft, meanwhile, wraps its Azure business into a division that it calls Intelligent Cloud, which also includes other server and cloud services.

Clear numbers were not provided, but the Redmond based company did reveal that this business grew by 11% to $6.8 billion. And in terms of growth, Microsoft recorded a jump in sales amounting to 93% in the quarter that ended Mach.

And while the acronym AWS showed up 44 times in the earnings report Amazon put up, Alphabet did note even mention the Google Cloud Platform business in its earnings release.

Not surprising, considering the fact that Google made $21.4 billion of its $24.5 billion revenue in the first quarter from advertising. However, the rest of the company witnessed a 50% jump in sales to $3.1 billion, and a big part of this increase came from new cloud computing clients.

According to Synergy Research Group, AWS controlled 40% of the public cloud services market as of early February, while Microsoft, Google and IBM combined to reach just a 23% slice of the pie.