How to Value Azure Market Share When Placing Your Bets in the Cloud Race

Azure market share appears to be growing within the cloud computing race — both at large and within our own customer base here at ParkMyCloud.

As multi-cloud enthusiasts, we keenly observe the various commentator speculations about the winners and losers in the three-horse race between AWS, Azure and GCP that is the public cloud market. When quarterly results are reported, the tech news cycle buzzes for days, and what they choose to highlight can set the tone in the news.

One of the side benefits of reviewing the utilization of our customers in the ParkMyCloud platform is to compare what we see to what the market sees. Our customer base is of course a non-random sample from the cloud IaaS market, but we definitely see a number of trend correlations which do seem to speak to changes in this highly competitive marketplace.

Azure Market Share Among ParkMyCloud Users

One trend we recently spotted was an uptick in the relative proportion of Azure accounts and resources being managed within ParkMyCloud. Over the last six months or so, the proportion of customers using Azure exclusively has increased from roughly 10% to 20% — not to mention the handful using Azure in addition to one of the other major providers. Meanwhile, the proportion of our customers using solely AWS decreased slightly, while Google Cloud and the multi-cloud combinations remained roughly flat.

Azure Market Share at Large

Is this growth reflected in the market at large? Last quarter’s earnings reports and market outlook align with what we observed in our small sample. According to a recent KeyBanc report, Amazon lost almost 6% stake, while Microsoft Azure went from 26% to 30% and Google successfully grew its share from 8% to 10% in the cloud business. As the report’s author stated:

“AWS has a formidable lead and first-mover advantage in IaaS and is maintaining AWS estimates for this year and next, but the slowdown warrants further investigation into multi-cloud competitive dynamics”.

(Source: BusinessQuant.com)

Still, Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing unit reported incredible revenue gains in their filings with its revenue increasing by 91% in FY18 and 72% in FY19. This growth has underpinned the overall performance of the entire Microsoft business and the consensus seems to be that Azure’s cloud momentum is still in its early days of playing out within the company’s massive install base. As shown in the chart above Azure’s growth has consistently been above the current 65% growth rate, and for much of the last five years has been close to doubling annually. Some have argued that the growth is slowing, which it is, but nevertheless it’s still at an impressive rate and even if it dropped to AWS levels would still be remarkable even by tech standards. After all, there is a key size after which the growth requires such a huge segment of the available market that it’s impossible to maintain early adoption rates.

Another key indicator of growth is Microsoft’s stock price, which as of this week has nearly matched its all-time high. Many cite Azure as a key driver of this growth, also noting that Azure’s customer skew toward larger enterprises protect it from some of the market volatility that AWS and Google Cloud’s large proportion of startup customers leave them vulnerable to.

What’s Driving Azure’s Growth?

While AWS has long been seen as an innovator, Azure has the advantage of being the default option with the ability for large enterprises using other Microsoft products to roll Azure into existing contracts.

However, we’re also seeing Azure as a component of more and more companies’ multi-cloud strategies, as well as more customers drawn to Azure’s now-mature feature set as market-leading on its own terms, taking advantage of offerings like Azure DevOps.

One interesting idea is whether Azure is growing its customer base at a risky rate compared to its infrastructure capacity. For example, we’ve seen anecdotal complaints regarding low availability of most sizes of low priority VMs, which may indicate a lack of excess capacity. On the other hand, we do not know of any widespread availability issues outside of this “spare capacity” offering, which indicates a razor’s edge balance of supply and demand thus far.

Join us to Talk All Things Azure at Microsoft Ignite

If you enjoy discussing Azure market share and features, then come and discuss not only how to optimize your public cloud spend in Azure but also your own views on this fascinating market. You will find us at Microsoft Ignite in a few weeks. For Microsoft Ignite, November 4–8, we’ll be joining our parent company Turbonomic at booth #1713 in the expo hall. Schedule a time to stop by — we’d love to chat.

Originally published at www.parkmycloud.com on October 17, 2019.