VisionMobile Ltd. has published a new survey about cloud computing. It found that Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), while the preferred public cloud platform for all customer and industry segments is somewhat challenged by its competitors in some areas.
The new report “The State of the Developer Nation Q1 2017,” based on VisionMobile’s 12th Developer Economics survey, provides insights based upon polling more than 21200 developers in 162 countries around the world.
One section of the report examines “challengers seeking the cloud prize” and reaffirms AWS’s dominance in the cloud space. This is due to Amazon’s policy that reinvests profits from existing businesses to expand operations and create new companies. Although it paid off in AWS growth segments, it only resulted in modest profits until recently.
The report praised Amazon for creating the public cloud market. It said that Amazon is now able to spend the profits in a way that they can’t afford. “For many years, others have seen the value of Amazon’s prize and raced to get a piece of it.
AWS’s profitability and growth have been remarkable in the midst price wars among cloud providers. The report stated that only the Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure cloud can be considered serious competitors. However, this is only in certain areas.
[Click on the image to see a larger version.] Developer Cloud Preferences (source : VisionMobile). “Amazon Web Services is the most popular primary hosting provider at all sizes of companies,” the report stated. Amazon has a 15% share in the smallest companies (1-5 employees), but they are facing credible competition from Google (11%) and Digital Ocean (10%). If we look at larger companies, Amazon’s share rises to 26-27 per cent at all sizes, while Microsoft remains in the 11-13percent range, while Digital Ocean fades with it. Google is just 5 percent of companies with over 5,000 employees, while Digital Ocean is just 4 percent.
Similar dominance can be seen in the all-important race to develop developer mindshare.
According to the report, AWS is also the most popular primary host for developers, regardless of targeted audience. However, AWS is strongest with backend developers who target large corporations, of which 29 percent are primarily using AWS.”
It continued, “Microsoft has greater strength with developers who target large businesses than those who target small and medium businesses (14%) each).” They are less strong with developers who target consumers (11%) or professionals (9%) Google shows that developers who target consumers are more popular than those who target large corporations or employees. However, the reverse pattern is true.
The report stated that both Google and Microsoft are supported in their challenge to AWS because of their size. They generate profits that allow them to compete in the extremely costly process of setting up global datacenters and fiber-to-support operations.
The report also noted that company size is important. Public cloud providers aren’t interested in attracting individual developers. Enterprise customers are the prized plum.
“Taking into account the share of primary cloud hosts across both company sizes as well as target audiences, we predict that AWS continues to outpace both Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, growing quicker in absolute terms than either of them combined,” the cloud section concluded.
“We also expect Microsoft’s cloud business to grow faster (again, in absolute terms), than Google’s in short term. Building trust with large corporations and a reputation of serving them well will take many years, regardless of how good theii are.