Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 34 | Page 24

EDITOR’S QUESTION WHAT SHOULD ORGANISATIONS LOOK FOR IN AN IAAS PROVIDER? ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// T he worldwide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market grew 31.3% in 2018 to total US$32.4 billion, up from US$24.7 billion in 2017, according to Gartner, Inc. Amazon was the No 1 vendor in the IaaS market in 2018, followed by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and IBM. Sid Nag, Research Vice President at Gartner, said: “Despite strong growth across the board, the cloud market’s consolidation favours the large and dominant providers, with smaller and niche providers losing share. “This is an indication that scalability matters when it comes to the public cloud IaaS business. Only those providers who invest capital expenditure in building out data centres at scale across multiple regions will succeed and continue to capture market share. Offering rich feature functionality across the cloud technology stack will be the ticket to success as well.” In 2018, the top five IaaS providers accounted for nearly 77% of the global IaaS market, up from less than 73% in 2017. According to Gartner, market consolidation will continue through 2019, driven by the high rate of growth for the top providers, 24 INTELLIGENTCIO which experienced aggregate growth of 39% from 2017 to 2018 compared with the more modest growth of 11% for all other providers during the same period. “Consolidation will occur as organisations and developers look for standardised, broadly supported platforms for developing and hosting cloud applications,” said Nag. “As the cloud business continues to gather momentum and hyperscale cloud providers consolidate the market, product managers at cloud MSPs must look at other ways to differentiate, such as focusing on vertical industries and getting certified in the hyperscale cloud provider partner programmes in order to drive revenue.” Gartner analysts will provide additional analysis on cloud strategies and infrastructure and operations trends at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies Conferences taking place between November 25 to 26 in London and December 9 to 12 in Las Vegas. www.intelligentcio.com