Big changes in the cloud this week! With the wrap up for Q1 coming to a close, new market share data has updated the Liftr Index. AWS, largely considered the most successful of the cloud giants, is down in global market share from 32.2% to 31.6%. Trailing them is Azure, with a significant jump from 13.7% to 15.9%. This impressive leap was hinted at when Microsoft announced a 93% year-over-year growth for their cloud branch, and many consider this to be a new leaf for the multimedia powerhouse.
Following Azure, Google Cloud’s share fell slightly from 7.6% to 7.4% market share. New to the Index, Alibaba Cloud also made some impressive gains in Q1. More details about Alibaba Cloud will be coming in the following weeks, but they did creep forward slightly from 3.5% to 4.1% this quarter. This was enough to allow them to bypass their nearest competitor in Q4 of last year, IBM Cloud, in total market share.
Related Alibaba Cloud, the Liftr team is excited to announce that the Asia based cloud provider will now be included in the Index. The team has been tracking and compiling metrics on the rising provider for several months now, culminating in the decision to include them in the index. As a refresher, providers influence the index scores in accordance with their market share value.
The decision to add Alibaba Cloud was driven by many factors, which will be detailed in the weeks to come here at the Liftr blog. The largest driving force was the impressive growth Alibaba has displayed over the past year and particularly over the past few months, as they set their sights on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Alibaba still has a long way to go to catch up to the big players in the cloud arena, but their strong presence in Asia-Pacific sets the stage for what could be an exciting struggle for dominance in other regions of the world.
