Report: Hyperscale Cloud Vendors in Tight Race to Win Customers

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The top differentiator for customers between the “big three” hyperscale cloud platforms is the quality of tools and features they offer, according to new research by Clutch.

The Battle for the Cloud: New Data Comparing AWS, GCP, and Azure, finds strong security and brand familiarity were nearly tied for the second-most common reason for selecting a certain cloud provider, just ahead of fit for the customer’s industry and best service or reviews.

Clutch interviewed 247 IT decision makers from different sized organizations in the U.S. about Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsft Azure. A roughly equal number of respondents were interviewed who use each of the three platforms as their primary cloud in order to compare them.

The largest segment of primary users of Azure (37 percent) and AWS (36 percent) is made up of enterprises, while SMBs make up Google’s biggest user base (41 percent). The mix of customers among all three is similar, but Google has more SMBs and less enterprise customers than the other two, while non-profit and government organizations make up a higher percentage of Azure customers (12 percent) than for the other two (8 percent AWS and 4 percent Google, respectively).

“Infrastructure-as-a-service will reside mainly on AWS, cloud services will be on Microsoft’s side, while Google will dominate analytics,” Brian Dearman of Solutions Architect at Mindsight told Clutch. “Even though every platform offers each type of service, people will want the best.”

Clutch points out that other respondents noted the fluidity of the relative strengths of the three companies’ offerings, and said that security is a “red herring,” as all three are very secure.

The most common combination of service providers was using AWS as a primary provider, supplemented by Google (41 percent), ahead of AWS with Azure (32 percent), and Google with AWS (31 percent).

AWS holds double the public cloud market share of Google, Azure, and IBM, according to Synergy Research Group. The three providers compared by Clutch have previously acknowledged the critical importance of the features and services they offer, rather than just scale, to compete for market share.