Canalys report on the cloud services market in the last quarter of 2021 – a record with a revenue of 53.5 billion dollars

News unit EMGblog.com: Canalys Research Institute recently published a report on the market situation. Cloud infrastructure services in the fourth quarter of 2021 published. According to this report, the quarterly revenue generation of cloud services reached more than 50 billion dollars with an unprecedented record breaking. The exact figure of revenue generated by these services in the last quarter of 2021 is reported to be 53.5 billion dollars, which has increased by 13.6 billion dollars (or in other words, 34%) compared to the same period last year. Unlike the market of smartphones or wearables – in which there are many players – the market of cloud services is somewhat monopolistic, so that 64% of the total revenue of this market goes to the pockets of only three companies.

According to Canalys experts, the diversification factor for the use of cloud infrastructure services is specific industrial functions (especially in the health and public sector). In addition to these functions, other factors such as the migration of more workloads to the cloud and the development of cloud-native functions (as a result of the digitization process of projects) should be mentioned, which have increased the demand for cloud services. Not to mention, the prolongation of the corona epidemic also drives users to use cloud services in various fields, including remote work, distance learning, e-commerce, and streaming content and games.

Perhaps the most important factor driving the cloud services market in the future is Metaverse. To operate in the metaverse, more powerful, decentralized, intelligent and scalable cloud services with lower latency are needed. Metaverse is actually a shared environment of virtual or augmented reality that, according to Canalys, will be the most important driver of revenue growth and infrastructure development of cloud services in the coming decade. The Metaverse, with its enhanced capabilities and high computing power, will resemble today’s Internet in many ways. Currently, phenomena such as gaming, social media, workplace collaboration, education, real estate, electronic and digital commerce (including non-fungible tokens) are among the pioneers of the metaverse.

According to Canalys research analyst Blake Murray, cloud services are a suitable option for developers and organizations looking to enter the metaverse. Is. According to him, in the future, the demand for computing in virtual and augmented reality environments will increase, and things like storage, machine learning, Internet of Things and data analysis will support operations such as digital twinning technology, modeling and interaction in the metaverse environment. will be necessary.

Alex Smith, vice president of Canalys, says about the opportunities ahead for cloud services: “Continued investment in Metaverse by developers will lead to a huge opportunity for cloud service providers (especially hyperscalers). had.” Pointing out that gaining the trust of customers and technological partners plays an important role in the development of Metaverse, he emphasizes that the global infrastructure, the implementation of edge computing and fifth generation communications are among the necessary things to expand the Metaverse experience with minimum The amount of delay is considered.

The most important companies providing cloud services in the recent season are Amazon (AWS service ), Microsoft (Azure service) and Google (Google Cloud Service). According to Canalys, over the past quarter, these three services combined grew by 45% and accounted for 64% of the total global market revenue. Below we have a look at the performance details of each of these services in the last quarter of 2021:

AWS

web services Amazon – abbreviated as AWS – was the leading provider of cloud services in the most recent quarter, accounting for 33% of the market’s total revenue. According to Canalys, the service experienced 40 percent year-over-year growth in the most recent quarter. The company Meta – formerly known as Facebook – has recently chosen AWS as its strategic and long-term partner in the field of cloud services and intends to deepen its relationship with the service, because Meta has gradually moved away from the social media space and is looking to become the biggest company in the Metaverse within the next 5 years. It should be noted that, while introducing new customers in the fields of retail, health and financial services, AWS announced an agreement with Nasdaq for the migration of this stock market to AWS.

Microsoft Azure

After Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure is the second largest provider of cloud services in the world during the fourth quarter of 2021 with a 22% market share, and an annual growth of 46 has a percentage in the record. Among the achievements of this service in the field of Metaverse technology, we can mention the following: Digital Twins (for modeling physical objects), Azure IoT (for connecting physical assets to the cloud) and Azure Maps (a personal mapping service). According to Canalys, the cloud service Microsoft managed to expand its cloud business in various segments in the fourth quarter of 2021. to develop The most important customers of Microsoft Azure are related to the health and financial services sector.

Google Cloud

Google Cloud service is in third place with 9% of the global market, but the interesting thing is that the annual growth of this service (equivalent to 63%) It has been far more than the cloud services of Amazon and Microsoft. One of the initiatives of Google is the launch of a program called Google for Startup Cloud Program, whereby Google Cloud has expanded its scope of support to startups and found important customers (including in the virtual reality space). Other Google Cloud plans to develop its activities include a 5-year investment in Africa (worth $1 billion) to support digital transformation in the continent.

While referring to the statistics of the fourth quarter, Canalys also described the state of the cloud services market as a whole in 2021. According to this institute, the total revenue generation of cloud infrastructure services has increased by 35%, from 142 billion dollars in 2020 to 191.7 billion dollars in 2021. The reopening of economic enterprises in the post-corona era and the growth of customer confidence throughout the year have led to an increase in multi-year contracts with cloud service providers.

At the end, it should be mentioned that Canalys means cloud infrastructure services, those services that provide infrastructure or platform as a service (either on the basis of private allocated infrastructure or shared infrastructure). As such, fees paid by customers directly for “software as a service” are not included in this category. Of course, revenues from infrastructure services that are used to host and launch “software as a service” will still be a subset of cloud infrastructure services.