According to new data from Synergy Research Group, Amazon Web Services (AWS) again beat out competitors during the first quarter as the largest public cloud provider. AWS, ranked by public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) revenues, topped Microsoft, Google, IBM, Alibaba, Salesforce, and Tencent in every region.

Microsoft held onto the No. 2 position in every region except for the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region where local Chinese cloud provider Alibaba held the second position. Google Cloud ranked third in all regions except for APAC.

While AWS reported strong growth in their cloud businesses — up 49 percent for AWS in its Q1 2018 earnings — Microsoft Azure continues to report the highest revenues. In the fiscal first quarter of 2018, Microsoft reported $6 billion in commercial cloud revenues, a 58 percent increase year over year. Google didn’t report its specific Q1 growth.

John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group, said this continued pattern of growth is unusual. “One of the most notable features of the market development is the continued strength in the market growth rate.” he said. “It is usual for growth percentages to start declining ... but in the last two quarters the year-over-year growth rate has actually increased.”

Synergy reported on this growth in another recent report.

[caption id="attachment_67784" align="aligncenter" width="460"] Source: Synergy Research Group[/caption]

The Synergy rankings are based on public IaaS and PaaS revenues as these segments of the cloud infrastructure services market are the most prominent and account for the majority of revenues. Managed or hosted cloud services balance the remainder of the revenues.

According to Synergy, “the dominance of AWS, Microsoft, and Google is even more marked than in the larger cloud market,” with AWS accounting for 40 percent of that market, and the combined AWS, Microsoft, Google accounting for more than 60 percent.

China, which accounts for one-third of the total APAC market, is a bit of an anomaly within these numbers as the top five cloud providers in the country are local companies. Dinsdale noted that while the worldwide cloud market is demonstrating strong growth, the growth rate in APAC is about 10 percentage points higher, with China the highest growth in that region.

“There is no doubt that cloud providers who do well in China will automatically improve their standing in the Asia-Pac market and also the worldwide market,” he said. “Though AWS is still a long way ahead of its nearest rival.”