Enterprise Cloud FEATURED ARTICLE

The cloud market is already sizeable and most analysts agree it has plenty of growth ahead of it in the years to come. As such, it’s always interesting to see which companies are at the forefront of the space. This time, IHS (News - Alert) Technology is releasing its figures, which place IBM at the top of the SaaS cloud service market and Amazon as leader of the global cloud infrastructure market in 2015.

This seems to line up with what most analyst firms have to say about the cloud market. In fact, IBM was recently named a market leader in three separate Ovum (News - Alert) Decision Matrix (ODM) reports, each detailing critical cloud segments including DevOps Release Management, Application Lifecycle Management and Agile Project Management.

The IHS report puts IBM at the top of the 2015 global SaaS market by revenue share with 19 percent, followed by Salesforce at eight percent, Microsoft (News - Alert) with six percent, Oracle with three percent and SAP with two percent. In terms of global infrastructure service revenue share last year, Amazon held on to 17 percent of the market, followed by Microsoft with nine percent, Google with five percent, and Equinix (News - Alert) and China Telecom, which managed four percent each.

The infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) segment of the cloud infrastructure market is maturing meanwhile, leaving the top three players—Amazon, Microsoft and Google—in a position lock out smaller players. That’s because these three companies have the scale and specialized knowledge to compete at a level smaller players can’t match without a key differentiator. In other words, there’s room for innovation in the segment and companies like NTT—which announced a self-serve OpenStack orchestrated bare metal server service—are taking advantage of this.

Machine learning and analytics capabilities integrated with enterprise and mobile applications are also expected to bring innovation to IaaS. Google has already released a machine learning service for developers, while IBM has released three new Watson APIs, providing developers with access to technology for sensing emotional and visual cues.

In total, the off-premises cloud market—including IaaS, cloud-as-a-service (CaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and SaaS (News - Alert)—reached $93 billion in 2015, up 54 percent from 2014. Of this, SaaS accounted for nearly half of all revenue, followed by IaaS with 39 percent. The market is expected to reach $278 billion globally by 2020.