According to Forrester, the cloud megavendors AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud will control an expanding portion of commercial IT spending.
Two-thirds of the American IaaS market is held by three cloud hyperscalers: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. According to a Gartner report, the public cloud provided by AWS IaaS accounted for 40% of the market in 2016. Microsoft and Google both contribute 21% and 7%.
These megavendors may provide a wide variety of specialised cloud services on their platforms, opening up a new path to dominance.
According to a recent Forrester report, hyperscale cloud providers are in a better position to control a larger portion of enterprise IT budgets because they have transitioned from providing infrastructure services that are industry-neutral to offering a variety of industry-specific, vertically integrated services.
For business software requirements, IT decision-makers now have the option of committing to a megavendor or collaborating with a fragmented variety of independent service providers.
According to Forrester’s report, customers who previously depended on third-party suppliers for cyber, data, machine learning, and other technology solutions will be able to access many of these features via their CSPs.
The expansion of cloud spending to include services and goods that would otherwise be purchased from secondary suppliers is projected to increase CSPs’ share of IT budgets.
This transformation is being driven by various sources.
According to Forrester, hyperscalers are converting a once-bilateral relationship into a trilateral one in which the CSP acts as “kingmaker” through collaborations with systems integration firms, like Microsoft’s recent agreement with Kyndryl.
According to the survey, CSPs have switched to developing their own sector-specific cloud products in the previous three years since the general-purpose cloud market has reached saturation.
This transition is shown in the collaborations between Google Cloud and Ford, AWS and NASDAQ and Goldman Sachs, and Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, which will be added to the company’s portfolio in November 2021.
It’s a typical capitalism dynamic, according to Crawford. The larger scale companies—in this case, the CSPs—acquire those technologies to develop and grow their platform. Great teams of innovators create a notion that is useful to larger scale players in the industry. Synergy exists.
While this would place cloud users in a vulnerable position in comparison to CSPs, it might also make it more competitive on the market for hyperscalers.
According to Lee Sustar, principal analyst at Forrester, “Even hyperscalers have to rely on many partners to adapt their solutions to enterprise-class customers.” This forces the hyperscalers to turn over client revenue to [third-party vendors], but it is a lot better than having an account switch to a competitor.
