How channel partners are driving hyperscale cloud growth

Hyperscale cloud service providers continue to leverage their low-cost advantage to drive growth. According to the latest worldwide market study by Canalys, Google Cloud was the fastest-growing cloud infrastructure vendor last year - up more than 90% year on year - increasing its share of the total market from 6% in 2017 to 8% in 2018. The top four hyperscale cloud service providers accounted for 61% of the total market in 2018. Amazon Web Services (AWS) remained the leader on 32%, followed by Microsoft Azure with 17%, Google Cloud in third place with 8% and Alibaba Cloud with 4%. Canalys reports that hyperscale cloud infrastructure services are in a period of sustained growth, with spending up 46% in 2018 to more than $80 billion. Expenditure is also forecast to surpass $143 billion in 2020. More businesses are deploying a hybrid multi-cloud strategy, integrating multiple providers with their existing on-premises IT infrastructure. Canalys estimates 30% of cloud infrastructure services spend, just over $24 billion, went through the IT channel of distributors, resellers, service providers and systems integrators in 2018. "AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud are all increasing channel investment to raise their profiles, as competition for enterprise customers increases and workload cloud migration diversifies," said Alastair Edwards, chief analyst at Canalys.