Synergy Research Group reports that infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) public cloud revenue grew 29% to over $195 billion in 2022 despite economic headwinds, as part of its latest data.
The researchers found that across the main public cloud service and infrastructure markets, operator and vendor revenues for 2022 reached $544 billion, having grown by 21% from 2021. Synergy said that across the entire public cloud infrastructure, the vendors that featured most prominently were Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, and Google. (See chart below.)
Chief analyst for Synergy, John Dinsdale, told Silverlinings that — despite some chattering from the cloudy classes — the ranking of the top three has not changed in the last quarter of 2022.
“Microsoft has not passed Amazon in any meaningful way,” Dinsdale wrote in an email reply to questions from Silverlinings. “If people are talking about cloud infrastructure services (IaaS, PaaS, hosted private cloud) which is what we usually focus on, then it is nonsensical and mathematically impossible that the ranking of the top three will have changed in the fourth quarter.”
“In many ways cloud infrastructure services are the most important part of that ecosystem, but they account for less than half of all revenues (the rest being SaaS, CDN, public cloud data center HW and SW, etc.),” the analyst continued.
“Think of it as a basket of fruit, rather than comparing apples to apples,” Dinsdale said. “Considering that whole basket of fruit then Microsoft is a little way ahead of Amazon, the prime reason being that Microsoft has a very large SaaS line of business. But that has always been the way and the ranking has not changed,” he added.
Layoffs aren’t cloudified
The analyst also weighed in on ongoing tech layoffs. A topic that has merited much column space over the last few months.
“The vast majority of layoffs and cost savings in the IT sector have nothing to do with cloud services,” Dinsdale said. “Amazon, Microsoft and Google might be the big three in cloud services, but in all cases cloud services only accounts for a small percentage of their total revenues. The same thing applies to Oracle, IBM, SAP, etc.”
So, it turns out that being a cloud network architect might be one of the safer positions in the IT environment right now.
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