Report: Amazon dominates global cloud spend

Amazon Web Services dominates the infrastructure-as-a-service cloud computing market, and is dramatically growing its share in platform-as-a-service as well, according to reasonably-believable research figures. Amazon took in around 35 percent of the $1.2bn spent globally on infrastructure-as-a-service clouds in Q4 2012, with …

[K]

Prices start at three grand for a small server per year...

Its economical, honestly! .. (as they laugh on the way out the door)

For £3k you could buy a couple of quite well spec'd servers and setup your own Xen cluster.. Or if you took it on a 3 year cost, thats £9,000 which is enough to buy you a reasonable entry level iSCSI SAN, 2 Servers and a couple of VMWare Essentials licences.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Prices start at three grand for a small server per year...

How many IT staff can you pay out of that cash? Have you included software licences? What's the data and power costs for those servers you've just bought?

The whole point about this is that you're trying to avoid the expensive infrastructure that servers require. For a small company like ours, an external provider is the only realistic way to have a server. Although we're unusual, with under 10 staff but spread over the whole of SE England.

Not that I've any idea if BT are cheap. That's more than I pay for hosted Exchange, CRM and accounts/payroll combined.

[EddieD]

Oh gee whiz

For the colouration on the graph, you get a fail. If you're comparing the companies, keep them the same colour so we can easily see their relative performances on all scales.

Dear oh dear...

[Roland6]

And the value of business transacted on the various clouds?

Whilst Amazon may have a significant market share, I suspect that many businesses are using the 'smaller' business focused providers. IE. the cloud market is a bit like the traditional computer market, relatively few businesses use z-Series mainframes, but those that do, transact a very large volume of critical business through those systems.

[Charlie Clark]

With a bucket of salt

Not including the market for Google's paid for mail and office software is a gaping hole. Actually, it's easy to pull the whole thing apart. And, as any fule no: it's not revenue but margins that matter. It wouldn't surprise me to see IBM making more than IBM from what it provides.

Amazon's services are popular and have enabled a raft of services. But it's not suited to every task and gets quite expensive if you use a lot of computing power.