Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) revenues grew 15% in 2012 to a total of $ 12.5 billion, according to Synergy Research, a Reno, Nev., market researcher in telecommunications, in the report, “Amazon Cloud IaaS and PaaS Investments Pay Off,” published Monday.
The figure reflects estimated revenues from cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services, not the total cloud market. The total market also includes software sold to enterprises for managing private clouds and services sold to consumers from the cloud.
Amazon Web Services leads the infrastructure market with revenues that are about seven times as large as its closest competitor’s, IBM. Synergy didn’t disclose specific revenue estimates for each but displayed their relative positions in a bar graph. Neither company lists its IaaS-specific revenue figures in its quarterly reporting.
But Synergy said Amazon leads one of the fastest growing areas of cloud computing. IaaS revenues grew 55% in 2012 over 2011, and Amazon commands 36% of IaaS revenues.
The number-three IaaS competitor, according to Synergy, is British Telecom. British Telecom offers its Cloud Compute IaaS service, which runs VMware ESX Server and Citrix XenServer virtual machines and supports multi-linqual, multi-currency applications. It first launched Virtualized Data Center as a service in 2010 and renamed it BT Compute in 2011. Last year it became the self-service priced-by-the-hour BT Cloud Compute.