New Q1 data from Synergy Research Group shows that there are five major cloud infrastructure service providers that are growing more rapidly than Amazon Web Services (AWS), but the market leader remains well ahead of the field with a worldwide market share that is holding steady at around 33%. While Microsoft, Google, IBM, Alibaba, and Oracle all achieved Q1 growth rates that were substantially higher than that of AWS, AWS revenues are still comfortably bigger than the other five combined. Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba all achieved annual growth rates of 80% or more. Salesforce and Rackspace are the two other companies that feature in the ranking of top cloud providers. While they have lower growth rates than the other providers, they are maintaining strong positions in particular market niches.

With most of the major operators having now released their earnings data for Q1, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services) have now reached almost $10 billion and continue to grow at well over 40% per year. While AWS, Microsoft, and Google are the lead providers in IaaS/PaaS, IBM continues to lead in hosted private cloud, where Rackspace and some traditional IT service providers feature more prominently than they do in public cloud.

“At the top end of the cloud provider market we’re now seeing a clear stratification featuring AWS, a group of higher-growth chasers, and a couple of more focused niche players,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director, Synergy Research Group. “Beyond those leading companies, the cloud market features a long tail of small-to-medium sized providers or companies that have only a minor position in the market, typically based on either a specific country or focused application area. There are decent growth opportunities for some of these smaller players, but they are unlikely to make much impact in terms of overall worldwide market share.”