With businesses in every industry investing heavily in cloud technology, the enterprise-cloud market continues to remain immune from the global economic slowdown with the five fastest-growing vendors posting quarterly revenue gains ranging from 45% up to 29%.
It is important to look at these numbers from two perspectives:
- First, the respective growth rates of the major cloud providers offer a rolling perspective of which vendors are gaining momentum and engaging in this fiercely competitive sector; and
- Second, the large revenue numbers and growth rates posted by cloud companies reflect the tremendous confidence business leaders have shown in the cloud’s ability to help them act faster, communicate more closer to customers, innovate faster, and focus tech spending on dazzling their customers and boosting revenue.
I also want to quickly acknowledge that the companies in the Cloud Wars Top 10 come in all shapes and sizes and in most cases, the highest growth rates were posted by cloud vendors with revenues of smaller end of the spectrum.
With that in mind, though, I find it amusing — ridiculous? — to hear some people say that a growth rate of 45% (hello, Oracle) is incredible or even worthless because, after all, that multiplier is built on the base of “only ” which is about $2.5 billion.
Only in the biggest growth market the world has ever known would some people have the idea that 45% growth to $2.5 billion in revenue is small, run-of-the-mill, or just not a big deal.
Aside from that observation, however, I fully and passionately recognize that size matters, and when I list the top growth rates below, I also provide the quarterly gross revenue for the cloud vendors.
Okay, so let’s see how these high-flying world-shapers stack up when ranked by cloud-revenue growth rate.
#1 Oracle: 45% to $3.6 billion (quarter ended August 31)
#2 Google Cloud: 36% to $6.3 billion (June 30)
#3 SAP: 34% to $3.12 billion (June 30)
#4 AWS: 33% to $19.7 billion (June 30)
#5 Microsoft: 29% to $25 billion (June 30)
#6 Today’s Service: 25% to $1.66 billion (June 30)
#7 IBM: 24% to $5.9 billion (June 30)
#8 Workday: 23% to $1.37 billion (July 31)
#9 Salesforce: 22% to $7.72 billion (July 31)
#10 Snowflake: 83% to $466M (July 31) **While Snowflake is highly disruptive, it is also smaller than the other Cloud Wars Top 10 companies. I’ll include them in the regular ranks when Snowflake’s quarterly revenue tops $1 billion.**
Now, for the past few months, the world has been preoccupied with concerns over the global recession, the war in Ukraine, rampant inflation, and other major forces disrupting the global economy. At the same time, every company in every industry has to deal with difficult workforce issues from desperately trying to find the right talent to creating a hybrid work strategy that meets the requirements of both employees. and the business.
Just to keep things interesting, organizations around the world and across industries have had to develop new business models, new customer engagement models, new digital-business processes, and more yet to keep up with the demands and requirements of modern customers.
Amidst all the chaos and disruption, the enterprise cloud has become an indispensable engine of innovation, acceleration, growth, and resilience. At the same time, cloud-powered IT has also, in the minds of CXOs and boards of directors, transformed from a cost center to be relentlessly downgraded to a strategic essential that needs to be aggressively funded rather than aggressively reduced.
If you have any doubts about that, just glance again at those growth rates for the Cloud Wars Top 10 as they range from a high of 45% to a “low” of 22% (with 83% of Snowflake serving as icing on top) .
No other industry in the world can come close to this level of growth, especially on an end-to-end scale — ergo, “the largest growth market the world has ever known.”
One of the reasons I’m so bullish about the future prospects of this business — besides the fact that customers realize they need modern technology like people need water — is that each of these 10 companies is constantly experimenting, pushing, innovating, and disrupting. No one is standing or hoping to undo their previous momentum.
Quite the opposite, in fact — and I think that means that as vibrant and world-shaping as this business is today, we’re just beginning to glimpse what’s possible. Because Cloud Wars is just heating up.