Amazon remains ‘in a league of its own' as a cloud provider, despite the rapid growth of key competitors Microsoft, Google and Alibaba.

Third quarter data from Synergy Research Group shows Amazon Web Services ‘is still managing to nudge its market share upwards, despite increasingly intense competition'.

“Microsoft, Google and Alibaba are all growing their revenues much more rapidly than Amazon and they continue to gain market share, but the reality is that in this market Amazon remains bigger than its next five largest competitors combined,” Synergy Research says.

John Dinsdale, Synergy Research Group chief analyst and research director, says “While we forecast 40% growth in the total market for 2017, there's still something a little shocking about seeing a business unit the size of AWS consistently growing its revenues by over 40%.

Dinsdale notes that Microsoft and Google also deserve plaudits for the growth rates they are achieving, while IBM is gaining market share in its sweet spot of hosted private cloud services.

“It is becoming increasingly difficult for cloud providers outside of the leading pack to make an impression on the market share rankings,” Dinsdale adds.

Synergy Research says IBM is maintaining its position is the third largest cloud provider, behind AWS and Microsoft, thanks largely to its strong leadership in hosted private cloud services.

Oracle, Salesforce and Rackspace round out the top eight cloud providers, with Synergy noting that Oracle continues to grow strongly – albeit from a strong base – while Salesforce and Rackspace maintain strong positions in their niche segments.

Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues, which include infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and hosted private cloud services, have now hit US$12 billion, and are continuing to grow at ‘well over' 40% per year.

The leading players continue to be similar in all regions, with the exception of China, Synergy says.