Every earnings season we realize how little is known about the competitive positions of the big cloud vendors. The vendors themselves, and various third parties offer plenty of stats and data points, but how many are truly believable?
It is universally agreed that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the leader, but by how much?
Microsoft doesn’t break out its cloud revenue between Azure and Office 365, nor does Alphabet (Google’s parent company) distinguish between Google Cloud Platform and other cloud apps (now collectively called G Suite). Until this happens, most news about cloud market share is speculation or cloud-washing.
We often rely on surveys to determine competitive positioning, but when looking at cloud providers they are usually flawed because 1) the samples are skewed, 2) the definition of cloud types (Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service) are rarely clear and/or delineated, and 3) details about breadth and depth of use are limited. In the last few weeks, we spoke to sharp market forecasters like Ed Anderson at Gartner and Greg Zwakman of 451 Research. They are creating more reliable bottom-up models, but the research is privately shared with investors willing to pay dearly for it.
So, public reporting, surveys and market forecasts all have their problems. Another approach is using machine learning and web scraping techniques. For example, HG Data has amassed huge data set about installed technologies at companies around the world.
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