As far as generating money from the cloud goes, Amazon still reigned supreme. According to a new report released by Synergy Research Group, the ecommerce platform founded by Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, IBM and Google are being dwarfed by Amazon when it comes to cloud computing.
The Synergy report said in the third quarter, the cloud computing market reached revenues of USD 2.5 billion. This was a 46% increase in the figures posted in the same quarter last year. Amazon did not only get a huge chunk of that, its own cloud revenues also rose by 55%. The company also increased its overall share of the market.
A Business Insider report about the research pointed out however, that Amazon does not itemize the revenues it makes on the cloud, so the exact figure is not known. Rather, Amazon puts the revenues generated from the cloud to a category it labels as "other revenue." However, the report said analysts have estimated that for 2013, the company will be making USD 3 billion at the least from the cloud. This is a low end of the estimate, considering that so far this year, Amazon had said that its "other revenue" already reached USD 2.7 billion. According to the report, most of the revenue came from its cloud with the others generated from co-branded credit cards and advertising.
Synergy said that Amazon cloud revenues increased by more than USD 700 million for the last quarter of 2013. This looked bigger than the other players in the cloud by 15%. According to the Business Insider report, the research puts a damper on the claim of IBM that they were a larger player in the cloud than Amazon.
However, an IBM spokesperson told the Business Insider that its third quarter report released last month showed that it had generated revenue of over USD 1 billion in the last quarter from its cloud products and services. In addition, IBM said it had 37,000 cloud experts around the world as well as 1,400 cloud patents.
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