Synergy Research: Quarterly Cloud Service Revenue Exceeds $6 Billion

There’s some good news for those of you who sell cloud services: business has never been better.

According to Q3 data from Synergy Research Group, quarterly revenues from cloud infrastructure services have exceeded the $6 billion dollar mark, proving that the is one of the most lucrative in all of enterprise IT. When combined, the last four quarters alone have accounted for more than $21 billion in revenue.

The study took into account Q3 revenue for Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, private and hybrid cloud infrastructure services.

Synergy’s latest study also showed that the annualized growth rate increased slightly for the second consecutive quarter, placing it slightly above the 50 percent mark. The annual growth rate has not exceeded 50 percent since the third quarter of 2013, according to Synergy’s research.

Unsurprisingly, the largest benefactors of the boom in cloud services are Amazon Web Services, Microsoft (MSFT), IBM and Google (GOOG) who together account for more than half of worldwide cloud infrastructure service revenues.

All four companies are growing more rapidly than the industry as a whole, with both Microsoft and Google showing revenue growth rates in excess of 100 percent.

Of these four, AWS dominates the market with more than 30 percent market share, which is in keeping with the company’s previous ownership of the cloud infrastructure services market and its widespread success in the public cloud market, according to Synergy.

The Q3 study reflects a positive change from last year’s figures, which were slowed by aggressive price competition, according to John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group. The recent strengthening of the American dollar has also proved positive for the cloud services market, and is helping analysts to gain a clearer overall image of the market and its continued growth.

“It might be tempting to think of cloud technologies as now being relatively mature, but the truth is that this is a market which is still in its very early stages of development,” said Dinsdale in a statement. “As the leading cloud operators continue to launch an impressive array of new services we will continue to see a huge swing away from traditional IT practices to a world that will be dominated by the cloud.”