As the enterprise cloud blows away any doubt about being the greatest growth market the world has ever known, the Cloud Wars Top 10 vendors saw their combined market caps soar by almost $5 trillion since January 2017.
On my weekly Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings, Microsoft is the longtime #1, Amazon is #2, and Google is #3.
Those three powerhouse companies are, of course, more than just cloud providers, and certainly some of that massive market-cap appreciation for each company has been driven by forces other than their cloud offerings.
But: before the end of this year, it’s extremely likely that Microsoft will report that the cloud makes up more than half of its total revenue, and over the past 12-15 months, Alphabet has elevated Google Cloud to the very top of its wide-ranging corporate interests, giving it top billing on earnings calls and related materials.
At Amazon, AWS profits funded huge parts of the entire corporation for years, and while Amazon’s profitability outside of North America has been steadily improving, the company still depends on AWS to deliver the lion’s share of profits.
So before breaking out the market-cap growth (or, in the case of IBM, shrinkage) of each of the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies over the past 5 years, here are a couple of broad numbers to offer some perspective on the astonishing increase in the valuations of the world’s largest and most-influential cloud providers:
- in January 2017, the combined market cap of the Cloud Wars Top 10 was $1.94 trillion;
- in January 2022—five years later—that combined market cap is about $6.86 trillion, an increase of almost $5 trillion;
- ServiceNow had the steepest rate of increase over that time as its market cap soared 720%; and
- IBM was the only company whose valuation declined over those 5 years.
Now let’s take a look at the market-cap change for each company in the Cloud Wars Top 10 over that 5-year period.
#1 Microsoft: from about $480 billion to about $2.4 trillion, up 530%
#2 Amazon: from about $381 billion to about $1.64 trillion, up 330%
#3 Google: from about $558.5 billion to about $1.84 trillion, up 229%
#4 Salesforce: from about $75.6 billion to about $238 billion, up 215%
#5 SAP: from about $89.4 billion to about $139 billion, up 55%
#6 Oracle: from about $160 billion to about $236 billion, up 47%
#7 ServiceNow: from about $13.9 billion to about $114 billion, up 720%
#8 Workday: from about $14.9 billion to about $64 billion, up 332%
#9 Snowflake: this one can’t be calibrated on a 5-year basis because Snowflake went public about 16 months ago. But over those 16 months, its market cap has risen at least 51%—from $63 billion to $94 billion—and perhaps by closer to 100% based on the opening-day valuation, which I had difficulty pinning down.
#10 IBM: from about $163 billion to about $120 billion, a decline of about 26.6%
Final thought
While these company-by-company numbers are compelling to think about, the larger issue here is how the enterprise cloud has exploded into the consciousness of business customers as the indispensable building-block of their digital futures and of their ability to grow, to innovate, and to move at the speed of their customers.
Yes, the big hyperscalers have an outsized influence in these cumulative numbers. But look at it another way: 3 of the world’s largest, most wealthy, and most-influential companies have all decided to invest many, many billions of dollars every year into the cloud market because they see that of all the categories they could choose to pursue, the cloud is the one that will yield the biggest payoffs and has the greatest potential.
The greatest growth market the world has ever known? Oh, you betcha!
