After we recently posted our list of the 10 largest cloud vendors by revenue, some readers asked about growth rates among the Cloud Wars Top 10. Since we’re always eager to engage with such questions, here are some compelling figures on the major cloud vendors’ growth rates.
Now, for some of you hand-wringers who will tut-tut about how one simply can’t compare the growth rates of a SaaS vendor with those of an IaaS vendor, please consider:
- Business customers care a great deal—a very great deal—about the financial health of their cloud vendors. They care which ones have arrows pointing up, and which have arrows pointing way up. Most business customers—not all, but most—want to be sure they’re going with a winner that other business customers are selecting as well.
- Unlike those in the cloud-industry bubble, business customers see the universe of cloud vendors as fixers of business problems and creators of business opportunities rather than as wonkily striated IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, DBaaS, DaaS, XaaS and all the other industry-specific terminology that is meaning less and less to businesspeople.
- Very few of the companies in the Cloud Wars Top 10 play in only one of the cloud layers. Most of them are crossing over into multiple categories as quickly as they can. And those crossover efforts are oriented around appealing to the business issues that customers have rather than to the taxonomic purity that those trapped inside the bubble cling to like security blankets.
Plus, some companies give lots of details about their cloud revenue, others cloak it in some murkiness, others describe some but not all, and some—believe it or not—only talk about the cloud results that make them look good.
Quick Thoughts: Top Cloud Vendors’ Growth Rates
So what we have here—inexact though portions of it may be—is a pretty compelling look at the growth rates among major lines of business for the world’s top cloud vendors. Here are a few details that jumped out at me:
- Microsoft Azure revenue growth of 76% in spite of a very large (and undisclosed) base,
- AWS sustaining hypergrowth even as its total revenue tops $25 billion,
- SAP making a claim that it’s the fastest-growing SaaS provider at scale,
- Workday, aided by its acquisition of Adaptive Insights, hitting 37% in subscription-revenue growth, and
- Accenture checking in with $9.0 billion in cloud revenue for 2018 along with a healthy growth rate of 23%.
And as you consider the sizes of these companies and the rates at which their cloud businesses are growing, bear in mind two things: first, these growth rates are vivid reflections of the urgent rush into digital business by companies in every industry and in every part of the world; and, we are only in the early, almost-pre-school stage of cloud and digital revolutions.
Lace ’em up tight, kids—the fun is only beginning!
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RECOMMENDED READING FROM CLOUD WARS:
The World’s Top 5 Cloud-Computing Suppliers
Amazon Versus Oracle: The Battle for Cloud Database Leadership
Why Microsoft Is #1 in the Cloud: 10 Key Insights
SAP’s Stunning Transformation: Qualtrics Already “Crown Jewel of Company”
Watch Out, Microsoft and Amazon: Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian Plans To Be #1
Oracle, SAP and Workday Driving Red-Hot Cloud ERP Growth Into 2019
The Coming Hybrid Wave: Where Do Microsoft, IBM and Amazon Stand? (Part 1 of 2)
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Disclosure: at the time of this writing, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, and Oracle are clients of Evans Strategic Communications LLC.
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