Relentless AWS boosts market share as revenue growth accelerates

Analyst claims AWS has strengthened its market dominance following strong Q2

Amazon Web Services (AWS) saw its revenue jump by nearly half in Q2, which analyst Synergy claims sees the public cloud leader increase its market share over Microsoft and Google.

For the three months ending 30 June, AWS revenue increased 48 per cent year on year to $6.1bn (£4.6bn), while operating profit rose 79 per cent to $1.6bn.

The wider Amazon business saw revenues leap 39 per cent to $59.2bn. Amazon's share price rose over four per cent in after-hours trading.

On an earnings call, transcribed by Seeking Alpha, Amazon's CFO Brian Olsavsky said he expects AWS' growth to continue as a result of a strong pipeline.

"We're very happy with the results we're seeing, the backlog that we see, the new contracts and new customers, and the expansion of existing customer business that we see," he said.

"The business has accelerated in the last three quarters, and we're seeing great signs in a number of areas.

"Customers are just branching out to a lot of new products from us. There are new areas such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, serverless computing and database and analytics [that] are really big.

"We've built a very strong partner and customer ecosystem and frankly we have the most proven reliability of security and performance, and we've been at this longer than anyone else."

AWS' growth comes at the end of a seven-day period which has also seen its closest competitors Microsoft and Google boast of their own public cloud success.

Microsoft claimed that Azure's revenue grew 97 per cent year on year in its last quarter, while Google said that the unit which holds its Google Cloud Platform saw revenue increase 37 per cent to $4.4bn.

Synergy Research Group claimed that AWS' strong quarter saw it increase its market share by one percentage point to 34 per cent in Q2.

The market watcher claims that AWS' share is now greater than its four biggest competitors - Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and IBM - combined.

Synergy claims that the overall spend on cloud infrastructure services is now more than $16bn per quarter.