The analyst company IDC has announced that Microsoft stayed in the top position during 2022 in the overall public cloud services market. Microsoft held 16.8% of the market share while Amazon Web Services was in second place with a 13.5% market share.
The findings are part of a wider analysis which found that worldwide revenue for the public cloud services market reached $545.8 billion in 2022. This represents a 22% increase compared to 2021 when revenue was at $444.2 billion.
The top five public cloud providers were found to be Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce Inc, Google, and Oracle. Together they made up 41% of the market share and grew 27.3% year-over-year. Growth among the top five players was greater than the market as a whole which only grew 22.9% year-over-year.
Commenting on the findings, Rick Villars, group vice president of Worldwide Research at IDC said:
“Given the economic challenges of the past year, it"s easy to conclude that we are in a period where a focus on constraining new expenditures and optimizing the use of existing cloud assets will dominate CIOs" priorities and shape the fortunes of IT providers for the next several years. It"s also a very wrong conclusion. The assessment and use of AI, triggered by generative AI, is starting to dominate the planning and long term investment agendas of businesses and cloud providers will play a significant role in the evaluation and adoption of AI enablement services.”
Echoing Villars’ comments, Neowin reported on other IDC research that found spending on cloud computing and storage infrastructure had increased by 14.9% in Q1 2023 year-over-year but that actual cloud infrastructure unit demand was down by 11.4%. This suggests that the increased spending could be down to inflation rather than increased demand.
When looking at public cloud services, IDC broke the sector down into four categories: Software as a Service - Applications (SaaS - Applications), Software as a Service - Systems Infrastructure Software (SaaS-SIS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas).
Out of all those categories, SaaS - Applications had the highest market share in terms of revenue at 45.1% and the sector which saw the most growth (32.1%) was PaaS. SaaS - SIS had the smallest market share at 16.7% and it came in third for growth at 22.6%.