An independent study from analyst house IDC has revealed that IBM is the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) vendor of choice for US enterprise buyers, well ahead of rivals Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services.

Of the three competitors, only Google made the top five vendors, with Cisco, HP and AT&T all ahead. IBM was one of ‘the top three vendors that [respondents] believe can provide infrastructure as a service for private and/or public, most effectively’ according to 35% of respondents. Cisco came in at just under 30%, while the remaining vendors had less than one fifth of the vote – Microsoft and Google scored approximately 16% while Amazon languished at 13%.

The overall market share, according to the more than 400 respondents at US enterprises with over 1000 employees, can be seen below:

David Tapper, VP at IDC and author of the report, said he wanted to understand …