Amazon Web Services (AWS) has total geographic dominance in public cloud – but while Microsoft and Google secure second and third place through most of the globe, Alibaba is a clear second in APAC.

This is the key finding from the latest note by Synergy Research, which focused on Q1 data – although the majority of the figures won’t differ from what many market watchers already recognise.

AWS ranks at #1 worldwide, ahead of Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, and IBM. Across North America and EMEA, the top three remain the same but with IBM and Salesforce taking the last two places, while in Latin America the latter two swap over. In APAC, AWS leads Alibaba, ahead of Microsoft and Google, with Tencent taking fifth position – the latter because of its strong market placing in China.

Indeed, in China the top five providers are all local companies – and it is this sign which, as regular readers of this publication will recognise, has enabled Alibaba to expand further afield. As Yeming Wang, general manager of Alibaba Cloud Europe, explained last month: “To go global is definitely a corporate level of strategy.”

“Despite some local data sovereignty and regulatory issues, in most meaningful ways public cloud computing is essentially a global market,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research. “This is a game of scale and to be a market leader demands vast ongoing investments, a global presence and a global brand.

“Of course there will often be local issues that might enable local companies to carve out niche positions for themselves, but they will remain small local players in a specific country or sub-region,” added Dinsdale. “It is also true that in such cases the global leaders can usually deploy different local strategies to enable them to succeed.

“With the glaring exception of China, we view this as a truly global market.”