Amazon edges past Microsoft to become world's leading IaaS cloud provider

Alibaba, Google pushed to 3rd and 4th position respectively

Amazon was the leading vendor in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) public Cloud services market in 2016 with 44.2 per cent share, leaving Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and others far behind, market research firm Gartner said on Wednesday.

According to Gartner, the worldwide IaaS public Cloud market grew 31 per cent in 2016 amounting to $22.1 billion -- up from $16.8 billion in 2015.

Amazon served the maximum customers across the broadest range of use cases, from Cloud-native startups to mid-market businesses to big enterprises.

"The market for Cloud services is growing faster than virtually every other IT market today, with much of this growth coming at the expense of the traditional, non-Cloud offerings," said Sid Nag, Research Director, Gartner, in a statement.

"While Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) are also exhibiting strong growth, IaaS is expected to show the fastest growth over the next five years," Nag added.

However, Gartner predicted that Amazon will witness growth erosion in share as the non-hyperscale providers struggle to provide value through their services, while other IaaS market leaders will see an increase in growth.

Microsoft secured the second position in the IaaS market with 7.1 percent market share -- an increase of 61.1 per cent over 2015.

At the third spot stood China-based Alibaba, with three per cent market share, marking a growth of 127 per cent, which reflected the company's position as the current volume leader in China.

Google stood at the fourth position with 2.3 per cent market share.