Microsoft won the battle of cloud revenues in 2020 handsomely, boasting an annual revenue of $59.5 billion and leaving Amazon Web Services far behind with $45.4 billion. Meanwhile, Google Cloud toppled Salesforce to finish third with annual revenue of $13 billion last year.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) currently dominates the cloud computing market with a healthy market share of 31%, followed by Azure at 20% and Google Cloud trailing far behind with a share of 7%. One would expect AWS to clock a revenue much higher in such a scenario than that of Azure.Â
However, when comparing revenues of the two tech giants, one must keep in mind that Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud segment includes Azure and Office 365 Commercial, the commercial portion of LinkedIn, Dynamics 365, and other commercial cloud properties. Hence, comparing the revenues of AWS and Intelligent Cloud is just like comparing apples and oranges.Â
Nevertheless, Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud segment clocked a revenue of $16.7 billion in Q4, up from $15.2 billion in Q3, $14.3 billion in Q2 and $13.3 billion in Q1 2020, representing a consistent growth in the sales of Azure, enterprise servers, and other cloud products. While Microsoft does not reveal standalone Azure revenues or profits, the company said that revenue from server products and cloud services grew by 26% YoY, and Azure grew by 50% in the same period.
According to CanalysOpens a new window , AWS earned $10.22 billion in Q1 last year and finished the year with a revenue of $12.74 billion in Q4. While there was a slight decline in its market share from 32.4% in 2019, its revenue grew by 28% year-on-year in 2020.Â
See More: Azure’s Skyrocketing Growth Drives Record Revenue for Microsoft
Meanwhile, global cloud spending has been significant, reaching $39.9 billion in Q4 last year – up to $10 billion year-on-year. In Q4, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud also accounted for 58% of the industry’s revenues and benefited from a significant rise in worldwide cloud spending, which was up 33% from $107 billion in 2019 to $142 billion in 2020.
While AWS boasted a revenue of $12.74 billion with an operating income of $3.56 billion in Q4, Google Cloud reported revenue of $3.83 billion in the same period, an increase of 47% year-over-year. However, unlike AWS, Google Cloud suffered operating losses of $1.24 billion compared to a loss of $1.19 billion in Q4 2019. For the full fiscal year 2020, Google Cloud’s revenue was $13 billion, with $5.6 billion operating losses.Â
AWS’ continued domination of the cloud market is a result of the 7-year head-start it enjoys over Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Over the years, the platform has steadily added fresh features in its kitty to meet the needs of organizations switching over to a cloud-based storage and analytics approach.Â
See More: Despite $5.5B Loss, Google Cloud Revenue Surges 46%
During last year’s AWS re:Invent 2020 event, the company announced a slew of features to strengthen its cloud offering. These included AWS CloudShell, a browser-based shell service for developers to access a Linux console; the AWS IoT EduKit which gives students, developers, and professionals hands-on experience in building end-to-end IoT applications; and AWS IoT Core, a fully managed service for IoT core customers to connect and manage LoRaWAN-compliant wireless devices with AWS cloud.
The company also launched Fleet Hub for AWS IoT device management to let customers develop web applications to visualize, interact, and monitor their device fleets connected to AWS IoT; the Amazon Location Service to let developers securely add location-based features to their web and mobile applications; and Fleet Manager which monitors remote servers instead of applications and enables system admins to monitor fleets of managed instances that run on AWS and on-premises servers from a single unified console.
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