Azure, Microsoft’s cloud service, outperformed its competitors, but Amazon Web Services still dominates the field. Why?
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February 24, 2021 2 min read
Tech giants compete on many grounds and one of them is the cloud . Today, Amazon dominates the market for cloud services, followed by Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud . However, Microsoft reports reveal that its earnings for this concept during 2020 were above those obtained jointly by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google in the same period.
Last year, the company founded by Bill Gates reported $ 59 billion in cloud revenue . Azure, Microsoft’s cloud , was the company’s fastest growing product in the last quarter of 2020, generating $ 16.7 billion. This represents a growth of 34% compared to the same period of 2019.
In contrast, Amazon Web Services made about $ 45.4 billion in revenue in 2020 , while Google Cloud made $ 13 billion . Despite these figures, AWS retains the largest market share, where is the catch?
The figure given by Microsoft does not only reflect Azure sales, since in the same statement the company explained that “the acceleration in demand for our differentiated offerings boosted revenues from the commercial cloud .” In other words, the results also cover OneDrive and other services.
Credit: Canalys.com
The COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of people to work, study, communicate, entertain themselves and shop online, triggering the development of the cloud. The British consultancy Canalys , specialized in technology, estimates that in 2020 global spending on cloud infrastructure was about 142,000 million dollars, which represents 33% more than the previous year.