Cloud computing: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud growing faster, but AWS still has a big lead
Businesses spent about $20bn on cloud computing infrastructure in the second quarter of 2018, and top dog Amazon Web Services (AWS) took the lion's share, with 31 percent or $6.2bn.
It's a good time to be a cloud infrastructure provider; the top three of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud together raked in 57 percent of the $20bn spent in Q2, according to a report by analyst firm Canalys.
Total quarterly revenues were up 48 percent compared to the corresponding quarter last year.
There's particularly good news for Microsoft, which for the first time ever reported revenues of $110bn for its full fiscal 2018, $23bn of which came from Microsoft's 'commercial cloud' category, which includes Azure, Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Windows cloud revenues that are part of Microsoft 365.
See also: What is Microsoft 365? Microsoft's most important subscription bundle, explained
Microsoft doesn't reveal its exact Azure earnings but Canalys estimates Azure revenues in Q2 were 18 percent of the total cloud infrastructure spend, which would be $3.6bn or just over half of AWS' estimated revenue for the quarter. Microsoft's cloud infrastructure revenues grew 89 percent compared to the same quarter last year, while AWS grew 48 percent in the period.
Microsoft Azure has been growing faster than AWS for a while now but still isn't close to toppling AWS. Google Cloud, now under the leadership of Diane Greene, held an eight percent share amounting to $1.6bn, but nonetheless grew 108 percent, according to Canalys.
IBM isn't named in Canalys' report, however the company reported in its second quarter that its annual cloud revenues in 2017 reached $17.7bn, which had grown 22 percent from the past year.
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