Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily news and commentary show, hosted by Cloud Wars Founder, Bob Evans. The next three minutes are packed with insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the Cloud! Today’s Topic: AWS Outgrows Microsoft!
Highlights
0:03 – We are pleased to announce Redis as a major Cloud Wars Sponsor! Open source Redis and Redis Enterprise are supporting businesses to move at the speed of their customers. Along with colleague John Foley, Bob looks forward to sharing perspectives on Redis in future Cloud Wars Minute episodes, articles, and a digital roundtable.
0:24 – For the second straight quarter, Amazon Web Services has outgrown Microsoft. For years, Bob has challenged the notion that AWS is “king of the cloud industry”, pointing out that Microsoft’s cloud business is larger than AWS. So after the last two quarters, it is striking to see AWS grow faster than Microsoft Cloud.
1:02 – A look at the numbers: On June 30 when Q2 ended AWS grew 37%, Microsoft 36%. Then, AWS revenue continues to accelerate. At the close of Q3, AWS is up 39%, while Microsoft’s cloud revenue for Q3 stayed flat at 36%. If you look at the Q3 total revenue, AWS revenue grew to $16.1B while Microsoft grew to $20.7B
1:35 – Overall, we see a great acceleration in AWS growth and they’re getting closer to Microsoft. But even so, Microsoft Cloud Q3 Revenue was 28.5% larger than AWS, leaving an enormous gap in between them.
2:04 – Why is this striking? Not because of how Amazon reports its numbers, but because AWS is improving upon what they’ve always done well. Some credit could be given to Adam Selipsky, the new CEO of AWS, but it is doubtful he triggered this much acceleration in such a short time span.
2:37 – It also speaks to the enormous customer demand to cloud providers. AWS excels at these things – from the infrastructure and platform, but they also compete against a wide range of capabilities that Microsoft offers.
2:55 – This showcases the continued growth, dynamism, and intense competition in the Cloud Wars which is wonderful for customers!
