Worldwide Public Cloud Services Market Totaled $312 Billion in 2020 with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Vying for the Top Position Overall, According to IDC

NEEDHAM, Mass.--()--The worldwide public cloud services market, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), System Infrastructure Software as a Service (SISaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS), grew 24.1% year over year in 2020 with revenues totaling $312 billion, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker.

Spending continued to consolidate in 2020 with the combined revenue of the top 5 public cloud service providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Google, and Oracle) capturing 38% of the worldwide total and growing 32% year over year. Thanks to an expanding portfolio of SaaS and SISaaS offerings, Microsoft now shares the top position with Amazon Web Services in the whole public cloud services market with both companies holding 12.8% revenue share for the year.

"Access to shared infrastructure, data, and application resources in public clouds played a critical role in helping organizations and individuals navigate the disruptions of the past year," said Rick Villars, group vice president, Worldwide Research at IDC. "In the coming years, enterprises' ability to govern a growing portfolio of cloud services will be the foundation for introducing greater automation into business and IT processes while also becoming more digitally resilient."

While the overall public cloud services market grew 24.1% in 2020, consistent with the past four years, the IaaS and PaaS segments have consistently grown at much faster rates. This highlights the increasing reliance of enterprises on a cloud foundation built on cloud infrastructure, software defined data, compute and governance solutions as a Service, and cloud-native platforms for application deployment for enterprise IT internal applications. IDC expects spending on foundational cloud services (especially IaaS and PaaS) to continue growing at a higher rate than the overall cloud market as resilience, flexibility, and agility guide IT platform decisions.

"Cloud service providers are rapidly expanding their portfolio of infrastructure and platform services to address confidential computing, performance intensive computing, and hybrid deployment scenarios," said Dave McCarthy, vice president, Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Services. "Extending these foundational cloud services to customer premises and communications networks enables a broader set of use cases than previously possible."

"The high pace of growth in PaaS, IaaS, and SISaaS, which combined account for about half of the public cloud services market, reflects the demand for solutions that accelerate and automate the development and delivery of modern applications" said Lara Greden, research director, Platform as a Service. "As organizations adopt DevOps approaches and align according to value streams, we are seeing PaaS, IaaS, and SISaaS solutions become increasingly adopted and, at the same time, grow in the range of services and thus value they provide. Innovations in edge and IoT use cases are also contributing to the faster rates of growth in these markets."

"SaaS applications is the largest and most mature segment of public cloud with 2020 revenues of $148 billion. Organizations across industries hastened the replacement of legacy business applications with a new breed of SaaS applications that is data-driven, intuitive, composable, and ideally suited for more distributed cloud architectures. Organizations looking for industry-specific applications can choose from a growing assortment of vertical applications. The SaaS apps market is dominated by a longtail of providers that account for 65% of the total market," said Frank Della Rosa, research director, SaaS and Cloud Software.

 

Worldwide Public Cloud Services Revenue and Year-over-Year Growth, Calendar Year 2020 (revenues in US$ billions)

Segment

2020
Revenue

Market
Share

2019
Revenue

Market
Share

Year-over-
Year Growth

IaaS

$67.2

21.5%

$50.2

19.9%

33.9%

SaaSSystem Infrastructure Software

$49.2

15.7%

$40.2

16.0%

22.4%

PaaS

$47.6

15.2%

$36.1

14.4%

31.8%

SaaS – Applications

$148.4

47.5%

$125.2

49.7%

18.6%

Total

$312.4

100%

$251.7

100%

24.1%

Source: IDC Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker, 2H20

Looking at the segment results, a combined view of IaaS, SISaaS, and PaaS spending is relevant because it represents the foundational set of services that end customers and SaaS companies consume when running, modernizing, building, and governing applications on shared public clouds. In the combined IaaS, SISaaS and PaaS market, the top 5 companies (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, and IBM) captured over 51% of global revenues. But there continues to be a healthy long tail, representing nearly half the market total. These are companies with targeted use case-specific PaaS services or cross-cloud compute, data, or network governance services. The long tail is even more pronounced in SaaS, where customers growing focus on specific outcomes ensures that over two thirds of the spending is captured outside the top 5.

A graphic illustrating the 2020 revenue share of the top 5 companies in the IaaS+SISaaS+PaaS and SaaS segments of the worldwide public cloud services market is available by viewing this press release on IDC.com.

IDC's Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker provides total market size and vendor share for more than seventy segments of the global public cloud services market. Measurement for this Tracker is public cloud services revenue, which includes Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), System Infrastructure Software as a Service (SISaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription revenues. The Tracker exposes 500 cloud services companies across a total of 49 countries globally. Annual five-year market forecasts for this Tracker are updated semiannually and include five-year annual market projections. Forecasts are available at worldwide, regional, and country levels.

For more information about IDC's Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker, please contact Kathy Nagamine at 650-350-6423 or knagamine@idc.com.

Click here to learn about IDC's full suite of data products and how you can leverage them to grow your business.

About IDC
International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. With more than 1,100 analysts worldwide, IDC offers global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries. IDC's analysis and insight helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community to make fact-based technology decisions and to achieve their key business objectives. Founded in 1964, IDC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), the world's leading tech media, data and marketing services company. To learn more about IDC, please visit www.idc.com. Follow IDC on Twitter at @IDC and LinkedIn. Subscribe to the IDC Blog for industry news and insights: http://bit.ly/IDCBlog_Subscribe.

Contacts

Michael Shirer
press@idc.com
508-935-4200

Release Summary

The worldwide public cloud services market grew 24.1% year over year in 2020 with revenues totaling $312 billion, according to IDC.

Social Media Profiles

Contacts

Michael Shirer
press@idc.com
508-935-4200