San Francisco– Amazon retained the top position in the worldwide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market which grew 37.3 per cent in 2019 as organisations increased adoption of Public Cloud services, Gartner said on Monday.

The worldwide IaaS market revenue reached $44.5 billion, up from $32.4 billion in 2018. Amazon was followed by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and Tencent in this market.

“Cloud underpins the push to digital business, which remains at the top of CIOs’ (chief information officers) agendas,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner.

It enables technologies such as the edge, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and 5G, among others.

“At the end of the day, each of these technologies require a scalable, elastic and high-capacity infrastructure platform like public Cloud IaaS, which is why the market witnessed strong growth,” Nag added.

In 2019, the top five IaaS providers accounted for 80 per cent of the market, up from 77 percent in 2018.

Amazon continued to lead the worldwide IaaS market with an estimated $20 billion of revenue in 2019 and 45 per cent of the total market.

Amazon leveraged its No. 1 spot in 2018 to build out its capabilities beyond the IaaS layer in the Cloud stack and maintain its top position in 2019.

Microsoft remained in the No. 2 position in the IaaS market with more than half of its nearly $8 billion in revenue coming from North America.

Microsoft’s IaaS offering grew 57.8 per cent in 2019, as the company leveraged its sales reach and ability to co-sell its Azure offerings with other Microsoft products and services in order to drive adoption.

The dominant IaaS provider in China, Alibaba Cloud, grew 62.4 per cent in 2019 with revenue surpassing $4 billion, up from $2.5 billion in 2018, Gartner said.

Google’s IaaS revenue grew from $1.3 billion in 2018 to $2.4 billion in 2019, experiencing 80.1 per cent growth.

Google’s cloud services focused on providing organisations with industry specific solutions on robust computing infrastructure.

China-based Tencent grew its IaaS offering by over 100 per cent in 2019, said the report.

Tencent is the second largest provider of cloud services in China, after Alibaba.

“As the cloud market matures, and its leaders experience natural market share erosion as a result, China-based providers such as Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei will start to gain more traction,” said Nag. (IANS)