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The dominance of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in cloud infrastructure has long been apparent – but a new note from analyst house Synergy Research argues the space is in three distinct tiers, with AWS all on its own at the top table.

Amazon currently holds 31% of the global market share, with Microsoft, IBM and Google between them holding 22%. The next 20 vendors, including CenturyLink, Oracle, Rackspace, Salesforce and VMware, have 27% share between them. As previous research indicated, Microsoft and Google are – very slowly – gaining ground on the AWS juggernaut, with more than 100% year over year growth compared to Amazon’s 57%. The 20 vendors in the third tier are growing on average by 41% each year.

The figures come amidst Amazon’s first quarter revenues published earlier this week. The cloud arm noted a particular uplift, with revenues rising 64% year over year and reaching $2.5 billion.

Synergy argues that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues are not ‘comfortably’ above the $7bn mark.

 “This is a market that is so big and is growing so rapidly that companies can be growing by 10-30% per year and might feel good about themselves and yet they’d still be losing market share,” said John Dinsdale, Synergy Research chief analyst and research director.

“The big question for them is whether or not they are building a sustainable and profitable business,” he added. “This can be done by focusing on specific regions or specific services, but the bulk of the market demands huge scale, a broad footprint, very deep pockets and a long-term corporate focus.”

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