The worldwide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market grew 40.7 per cent in 2020 to total US$ 64.3 billion, up from US$ 45.7 billion in 2019, according to Gartner, Amazon retained the No.1 position in the IaaS market in 2020, followed by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and Huawei.
“Hyperscale providers are continuing to build distributed cloud and edge solutions that extend the public cloud’s reach into private and on-premise locations, addressing the needs of organisations relating to data sovereignty, workload portability and network latency. This fact, coupled with reliance on the public cloud by a majority of organisations during the pandemic, drove another year of double digital market growth in 2020,” said Sid Nag, Research Vice President, Gartner.
In 2020, the top five IaaS providers accounted for 80 per cent of the market and nearly 90 per cent all IaaS providers exhibited growth.
Amazon continued to lead the worldwide IaaS market with US$ 26.2 billion of revenue in 2020 and 41 per cent market share. Amazon’s 28.7 per cent growth was slightly slower than that of the market, with their sales growth primarily reflecting increased customer usage.
Microsoft maintained the No. 2 position in Gartner’s IaaS market share with nearly 60 per cent growth, reaching US$ 12.7 billion in revenue in 2020. The global healthcare crisis and disruption in workplace environments during the pandemic era drove increased demand from existing Microsoft Azure customers to migrate mission-critical workloads, such as from healthcare applications with AI-assisted bots, digital twins in manufacturing and e-commerce in retail.
The dominant IaaS provider in China, Alibaba, grew 52.8 60 per cent in 2020 with revenue surpassing US$ six billion, up from US$ four billion in 2019. In 2020, Alibaba saw its highest growth rate in the education vertical at 105 per cent, driven by downloads of Alibaba’s enterprise communication and collaboration platform DingTalk among employees and students working and studying from home.