'Infrastructure as a Service' market grew by 29.5% in 2017: Gartner

The worldwide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market grew by 29.5% in 2017 to total $23.5 billion, up from $18.2 billion in 2016, according to Gartner, Inc. Amazon was the top vendor in the IaaS market in 2017, followed by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and IBM.

"The top four providers have strong IaaS offerings and saw healthy growth as IaaS adoption is being fully embraced by mainstream organizations and as cloud availability expands into new regions and countries," said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner.

"Cloud-directed IT spending now constitutes more than 20 percent of the total IT budget for organizations using cloud. Many of these organizations are now using cloud to support production environments and business-critical operations."

The top four providers — Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba and Google — are all hyperscale IaaS providers and represent approximately 73 percent of the total IaaS market and 47 percent of the combined IaaS and infrastructure utility services (IUS) market.

Amazon’s revenues are estimated at $12.2 billion in 2017, up 25 percent from 2016, driven not only by customers that are migrating from traditional data centers to cloud IaaS, but also by customers implementing transformational digital business projects, reflecting its broad range of use cases.