The Business they spent together in the last three months of 2021 53,500 million of dollars in cloud infrastructure, surpassing for the first time the barrier of 50,000 million and making the total annual expenditure in this case in 2021 reach 191,700 million dollars. This figure exceeds that of 2020 by almost 50,000 million dollars, according to data from the consulting firm Canalys.
As usual, the three main cloud infrastructure provider companies are the ones that have had the most notable income. Spending on them reached 61% of the total in the quarter. Amazon Web Services (AWS) achieved a 33% market share, followed by Microsoft Azure, with 22%, and Google Cloud, with 9%. Other clous providers took 36% of the market share.
The top three cloud providers also grew the most, although in reverse order of market share. Thus, Google Cloud revenue rose by 63% year-on-year in the quarter, followed by a 46% improvement in Microsoft Azure, and a 40% improvement in AWS. Of course, the year-on-year growth of spending on cloud infrastructure has slowed down since 2018, when it had annual growth levels of around 50%, to 34% this past quarter, which shows the maturity of the sector.
For the next decade, for Canalys they will be the so-called metaverse, and augmented and virtual reality, the technologies that drive investment in cloud services and in the deployment of infrastructure. And although what the metaverse is and will be is still being outlined, Canalys already sees use cases for this virtual world in gaming, social networks, collaboration at work, education, real estate and electronic commerce. Whatever form it takes, on the other hand, the metaverse is sure to be good news for cloud providers.
Blake Murray, Canalys Research Analyst, points out in this regard that «computing will be in high demand in virtual and augmented reality environments, and storage, machine learning, the Internet of Things and data analytics will be essential to support operations such as digital twin modeling and interactivity in the metaverse«.
