Channel partners growing in importance for cloud services

here’s no surprise that the global cloud infrastructure market had another booming quarter in Q4 2018. According to new data from Canalys, spending surged 46 percent to reach almost US$23 billion, while total outlay on cloud infrastructure in 2018 surpassed $80 billion - up from $55 billion in 2017. Canalys principal analyst Matthew Ball says this makes it one of the most important sectors in the IT industry, not just by the rate of growth but also its expanding size. In terms of the cloud service providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) maintained its dominance in Q4 2018 with an unchanged 32 percent share of the market. Meanwhile somewhat further back was Microsoft Azure, although the company did manage to grow its share to 16 percent from 14 percent a year earlier. Google Cloud reached 9 percent market share for the first time, while Alibaba Cloud retained its 4 percent share. The top 10 cloud service providers was rounded out by IBM, Salesforce, Oracle, NTT Communications, Tencent Cloud and OVH.