Amazon Dominates Public Cloud Market

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which has been looking into Amazon's dominant position in the e-commerce market in recent months, has reportedly broadened its investigation of possible anti-competititve behavior to include Amazon Web Services, the company's highly successful cloud division. According to people familiar with the matter, the FTC is trying to figure out whether Amazon is discriminating against software companies that work with other cloud providers by favoring those that exclusively work with AWS.

Having established itself as an early leader in the market for cloud infrastructure, AWS, the online retailer’s profitable cloud platform, is still ahead of the pack. According to estimates from Synergy Research Group, Amazon’s market share in the public cloud infrastructure market amounted to 39 percent in the second quarter of 2019, more than the combined market share of its four largest competitors.

“It has taken just eight quarters for the public IaaS and PaaS markets to double in size and our forecast shows them doubling in size again over the next eleven quarters,“ said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group. “It is particularly noteworthy that as spending on public cloud services continues to grow rapidly, the top four cloud providers are strengthening their grip on the market.