New research from Synergy states while the cloud market is growing at a healthy rate quarter-by-quarter, the four dominate cloud brands are continuing to pull away from the pack, controlled more market share month-by-month, reports Telecoms.com.

Data from Synergy Research claims the four companies now collectively control more than 50% of worldwide cloud market share (IaaS, PaaS and Hosted Private Cloud), with AWS maintaining its lead at the top of the leader board controlling almost a third of worldwide share. Over the course of the second quarter of 2016, the top four grew revenues by 68%, while the next 20 players, who roughly account for a quarter of the market share, grew 41%. All other vendors in this space grew by a collective 27%.

“In a variety of ways Amazon and the other big three players have distanced themselves from the competition in this market and continue to widen the gap,” said John Dinsdale, Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “What marks them out as different is their global presence, marketing muscle, ability to fund huge investments in hyper scale data centres and, in most cases, a determination to succeed in the market.

“The ranking of the next 20 largest cloud providers features some interesting companies, with Alibaba and Oracle growing particularly strongly, but they are all starting from a long way behind Google, which is itself growing by well over 100% per year and yet remains only a sixth the size of Amazon.”

Although AWS is still the dominant market player, growth is slowing. Google and Microsoft both posted growth figures of more than 100%, though it is far too soon to write AWS’ obituary, as it still controls more than three times the market share of its nearest rival, Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft has been going through a number of transformation projects in recent years, and while the market share for cloud shows it will still be some time before it catches AWS, the team are finding success in other arenas. According to additional research from Synergy, in the data centre infrastructure market, HPE and Cisco may be leading the way for public and private cloud hardware, but Microsoft now accounts for just over 40% of cloud software share, with VMWare its nearest competitor at roughly 20%. The research including share for servers, server OS, storage, networking, network security and virtualization software.

“With spend on cloud services growing by over 50% per year and spend on SaaS growing by over 30%, there is little surprise that cloud operator capex continues to drive strong growth in public cloud infrastructure,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Chief Analyst. “But on the enterprise data centre side too we continue to see a big swing towards spend on private cloud infrastructure as companies seek to benefit from more flexible and agile IT technology. The transition to cloud still has a long way to go.”