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Yesterday was a pretty busy day if you were tracking financial results, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google all declaring their figures. And it was an impressive showing on the cloud side for the three tech giants, with Microsoft announcing Azure usage and compute usage more than doubling year on year and Amazon Web Services (AWS) showing similar quarterly and yearly growth.
AWS brought in $2.09bn for the firm in Q315, compared with $1.17bn for this time last year, with $5.47bn in the nine months from January 2015. As for Microsoft Azure, the exact figures remain undisclosed, but under Microsoft’s four buckets in which they divulge their revenue, ‘intelligent cloud’ contributed to $5.89bn for the quarter ended September 30 – up from $5.48bn this time last year.
Regarding Google, the specific figures again remained under cloak and dagger, but the company, of course now under the umbrella of parent firm Alphabet, intimated cloud had contributed strong growth. The company also promised, as early as the next quarter, financial results to be more transparent than the usual ‘advertising’ and ‘other’ brackets.
In terms of overall figures, revenue for Amazon was at $25bn for the latest quarter, compared to Microsoft at $20.4bn GAAP for Q116 and Alphabet’s $18.7bn.
Ruth Porat, CFO of Alphabet and Google, said: “Our Q3 results show the strength of Google’s business, particularly in mobile search. With six products now having more than one billion users globally, we’re excited about the opportunities ahead of Google, and across Alphabet.”
Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, said: “We are making strong progress across each of our three ambitions by delivering innovation people love. Customer excitement for new devices, Windows 10, Office 365, and Azure is increasing as we bring together the best Microsoft experiences to empower people to achieve more.”
The cloud infrastructure revenues of each company comparatively makes for interesting reading, with notes from Synergy Research revealing how, while AWS maintains a major lead, Microsoft is finding a niche in second place. Back in July, the latest figures revealed the combined market share of the ‘big four’ – AWS, Microsoft, IBM, and Google – was at 54% of the overall cloud infrastructure market, with quarterly revenues of the four behemoths having surpassed $3 billion for the first time.
John Dinsdale, Synergy chief analyst, told this reporter that the status quo, of Azure revenue growing significantly more rapidly than AWS or IBM, remains – yet AWS will maintain a substantial lead. “Considering the scale of their cloud operations, both AWS and Microsoft are growing at remarkable rates,” he said.
You can find the full Amazon figures here, the Microsoft results here, and the Google announcement here.