As 2018 draws to a close and we wonder what will happen in the ever-changing world of technology, one thing seems to be frozen; the cloud business.
At present, it seems as though Amazon will continue its dominance over the entire market, and this certainly seems as if it will continue throughout 2019. What is more contentious, however, is the fight for second; which Azure will seemingly keep over its rival Google.
For a number of years, Google seemed to be the alternative to Amazon’s platform, but with Microsoft driving capital and targeting less tech-centric companies with their Azure platform, that perception will taper off into 2019. This is reflected in the expanding disparity in revenue:
Microsoft collected $9.5 billion in Azure cloud revenue in 2018, vs. $1.6 billion for the comparable Google business, according to investment bank KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc. Next year, KeyBanc forecasts, it’ll be $15.1 billion for Microsoft, $3.2 billion for Google.
For the Google platform, whose framework was acquired with Youtube, it is dismaying that this gap has widened so far, especially with the perception it has received from the market. What is also concerning is the fact that Google has been working on this platform with a 2-year head start over Microsoft.
It seems as though Microsoft has targeted the larger enterprises who have less of a concentration on Technology, which has worked well for them. Whereas, GCP seems to be more targeted to the type of companies who would be more interested in the more secure Amazon Service.
With Google increasingly looking like it it will be 3rd in the Cloud business, what can they do to claw back market share? Will the market run away from them with Azure catering to the larger more traditional enterprises, AWS the more tech-centric firms and Google with an identity crisis?
Who can say, but what is clear, it has a lot to do in 2019 to affect the rankings into the next decade.
