The year 2015 marked a new era in Cloud Service Provider (CSP) space. Last year, the market witnessed two major players come off age, and challenged the leader in the market head-on. Although Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a head start in the market (being in the business for the longest time), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform were not left far behind. Both of the relatively new comers in the industry took the market by surprise in the technology as well as in promotional front. Further, Microsoft Azure slashed the price of its Block Blob (storage) to match up with the price of Amazon’s S3. And this year Google has rolled out a plan to launch 12 new cloud data centers in the next 18 months.
All these activities from the laggards in the market have impacted AWS’s market share in a huge way. According to Synergy, the growth rate in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) sector in Q4 2015 for Microsoft was a whopping 124%, whereas that of Google was recorded at 108%. AWS took the third position with 63% growth. AWS, once the undisputed leader of the market, with a market share of more than 50%, was reduced to 31% market share last year. Even though AWS holds a strong hold on market, experts are anticipating that it would not last for long.
Considering the long standing services which AWS has in the market, one cannot assume that this big empire can be fallen so easily. Recently, AWS has come out with a stronger strategy to counter the moves of the other CSPs. It recently launched a datacenter in Seoul, the first one from a CSP in Korea, and has plans of launching the first datacenter in India in FY 2016-17. Currently, AWS has the largest number of data centers, and the largest range of services for its customers. Going by the trend, it does not look like AWS is anywhere near giving up on its market leader position soon and is ready to take on the competition firmly.
However, in all this fight to reach the top, the winner has emerged to be the Cloud users. Unlike when the concept of public cloud was started way back in 2007 or even in the recent past, customers currently are spoilt for choices. The market is growing with the CSPs battling to provide the best price to their customers. Not only that, the availability of datacenters in close range has made it easy for the customer to have the best latency and faster processing from almost all the CSPs. Customers are also benefiting from the faster update in technology, and wide range of services offered as a result of this fight.
Another group that has taken the cake will be the Managed Service Providers. With the increase in choice, and faster rate of growth in technology, customers are bound to take the expert opinion of the MSPs. Follow this thread to know more about the Managed Service Provider market. And with respect to the battle for the king of Cloud Service Provider market, AWS is still crowned as the winner, but one thing is certain that it has a healthy competition from its counterparts. We will have to wait and see how all of them will fair in the coming future.
