Google Cloud showed the strongest annual growth in the cloud infrastructure market in Q4 2018, growing revenues 82 percent to USD 2.2 billion, according to estimates from Canalys. The market researcher said Amazon Web Services remained dominant, with a stable market share of just over 32 percent, while Google Cloud increased its share to 9.5 percent from 7.6 percent a year earlier, according Telecompaper. Microsoft was in second place and also increased its market share, to 16.5 percent from 13.7 percent in Q4 2017. It had the second-highest annual growth, at 76 percent to USD 3.7 billion.
Alibaba was in fourth place, after annual growth of 74 percent. Its market share improved to 4.2 percent from 3.5 percent, while IBM showed the opposite trend, dropping to 3.6 percent from 4.2 percent.
The rest of the top ten global cloud service providers were Salesforce, Oracle, NTT Communications, Tencent Cloud and OVH. The total cloud infrastructure market was worth USD 22.7 billion in the quarter, up 45.6 percent from a year earlier.
Canalys said it saw more organisations opting for multiple providers in the past year, as businesses migrate to hybrid IT and multi-cloud environments. This is increasing the importance of channel partners to assess customer needs, a trend the market researcher expects to continue in 2019.
