Amazon dominated IaaS public cloud market in 2017: Gartner

US-headquartered Amazon dominated the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) space in 2017 as the global market grew 29.5% last year to $23.5 billion, according to research and advisory firm Gartner.

IaaS a form of cloud computing that provides virtualised computing resources over the internet. Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and IBM rounded off the top five vendors, according to Gartner.

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

He said that cloud-directed IT spending now comprises more than 20% of the total IT budget for organisations using cloud.

According to the Gartner report, the competitive landscape of the IaaS market is consolidating around the leaders.

The top four providers constitute nearly three-fourths of the total IaaS market and 47% of the combined IaaS and infrastructure utility services (IUS) market.

Amazon’s estimated IaaS revenue via Amazon Web Services (AWS) stood at $12.2 billion in 2017, up 25% from the previous year.

The Gartner report states that Amazon’s growth last year was not only driven by customers migrating from traditional data centres to cloud IaaS, but also by customers implementing transformational digital business projects, reflecting its broad range of use cases.

Microsoft recorded a growth of more than 98% on its IaaS offering, with revenue at $3.1 billion in 2017. Microsoft delivers its IaaS capabilities through Microsoft Azure, which is a collection of infrastructure and platform services.

In 2017, Alibaba registered a growth of 63% and the report indicates that the growth reflects the company's strong investment in research and development (R&D).

"This reflects a fundamental change in what and how organizations are consuming technology. Some legacy infrastructure offerings, such as IUS, are seeing lower and slower uptake that impacts the combined IaaS and IUS market," Nag said.