A recent report from JP Morgan has stated Microsoft is considered the most important IT vendor globally, with AWS ranked in second place.

In a survey of 207 CIOs, who account for $126 billion annual enterprise IT spend, JP Morgan uncovered Microsoft is considered the most valuable mega-vendor in the IT ecosystem. 46.9% of the CIOs surveyed highlighted Microsoft as the most critical and indispensable to the future of their IT environment, whereas AWS only accounted for 13%. While AWS is still generally considered as the market leader within the cloud segment, feedback highlighted Microsoft’s wider array of enterprise IT offerings (desktop, server, database etc.) positioned it as a much more critical component of their organizations future.

While the cloud revolution has been immensely profitable for certain organizations, the continued drive towards cloud computing has also proved a difficult time for others. Oracle and SAP are two such organizations, according to the report, which have dropped down in CIO’s priorities. Only 11.1% and 9.2% (Oracle and SAP respectively) of the CIO’s said the organizations were the most important vendors to the future of their IT strategy.

In fact, Oracle was highlighted as important to some of those CIOs simply because it was “the backbone of our data warehouse” or “mission critical applications and databases are Oracle” or “difficult to replace” or “too much already invested to move on”. It would appear Oracle is important out of necessity or a lack of choice, as opposed to Oracle’s strides forward in the IT world. The Oracle cloud offering was only mentioned twice by the respondents, compared to Azure being mentioned 16 times.

The report also brought attention to IBM whose fortunes in the new-era of cloud computing would appear to be dwindling. 26.1% of the respondents highlighted IBM would be the vendor which would lose their IT spend as the move towards cloud computing continues. The report also detailed that while only 16.2% of workloads are currently on public cloud, though in five years this figure would increase to 41.3%.

The era of cloud computing is seemingly taking chunks out of Big Blue’s traditional business units, though the team should be encouraged by its efforts in cognitive computing, which was recognized by some of the respondents. IBM’s Watson has been claiming more column inches than other cognitive computing offerings, though it remains to be seen whether this is a sign of intent to adopt from the enterprise community, or an effective PR machine.