Last year, Microsoft climbed over Amazon to become the market share leader for total off-premises cloud service revenue, according to a report.
Microsoft pulled close to a 14% market revenue share while Amazon posted a 13.2% share, according to a recent report by IHS Markit. Following Microsoft and Amazon, IBM was third with a market revenue share of 9%.
IHS attributed Microsoft's success last year to its comprehensive portfolio and a growth spurt its experiencing from its more advanced platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and cloud-as-a-service (CaaS) offerings. Microsoft was ranked first in both CaaS and PaaS sectors with revenues of 22% and 27%, respectively. IBM held down the top spot last year for software-as-a-service with 17% of the market share revenues.
Despite losing the top spot for total off-premise cloud service revenue, Amazon still held a commanding lead in the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) sector last year with 45% of IaaS revenue. And, Amazon Web Services is still the undisputed king for overall cloud revenues, according to a recent report by Synergy Research Group.
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The IHS Markit report highlighted that enterprises are becoming more firmly entrenched in multi-cloud strategies. On that note, rivals Microsoft and Oracle announced an interoperability partnership on Wednesday that allows their enterprise customers to interconnect their workloads across both clouds.
“Multi-clouds remain a very popular trend in the market; many enterprises are already using various services from different providers and this is continuing as more cloud service providers (CSPs) offer services that interoperate with services from their partners and their competitors,” said Devan Adams, principal analyst, IHS Markit, in a statement.
Further proof of the increased adoption of multi-cloud strategies by enterprises was borne out in IHS Markit's recent Cloud Service Strategies & Leadership North American Enterprise Survey – 2018. Respondents in that survey stated that in 2018 they were using 10 different communication service providers for software-as-a-service (SaaS)—growing to 14 by 2020—and 10 for IT infrastructure (increasing to 13 by 2020).
