Amazon Spheres building, Seattle, Washington
Alexander Cimbal/Dreamstime.com
Who has the biggest cloud? Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform dominate the U.S. public cloud market, with Oracle knocking on the door. But the data are obfuscated by definitions that can make comparisons among them almost impossible.
Amazon (ticker: AMZN) has the clearest story: AWS had net sales of $12.7 billion in the fourth quarter, and $45.4 billion for all of 2020. Sales were up 28% for the quarter, and 30% for the full year.
Alphabet (GOOGL) reported revenue of $3.8 billion for its Google Cloud business segment in the latest quarter, up 47%. But that includes results not only from the Google Cloud Platform, its public cloud business, but also from Google Workspace, the collection of productivity tools that used to be called G Suite. Alphabet says that GCP—the piece that competes with AWS—is growing faster than its overall cloud business, but provides no details.
Microsoft’s numbers are messier. The company (MSFT) said that “commercial cloud revenue” was $16.7 billion in the December quarter, up 34% from a year ago. But that’s not an actual reporting segment—the company doesn’t even provide the number every quarter. And it rolls up not just Azure but also Office 365 and other things. Maddeningly, Microsoft also has an overlapping formal business segment called Intelligent Cloud, which includes not only Azure, but also SQL Server, Windows Server, Visual Studio, and GitHub, among other elements. Intelligent Cloud had revenue of $14.6 billion in the latest quarter, up 23%. Azure revenue rose 50% in the quarter, but—sigh—Microsoft offers no dollar figure.
Oracle ’s approach isn’t any better. Most of its corporate revenue, including cloud subscriptions, is rolled into a bucket called “cloud services and license support,” which was $7.1 billion in the quarter ended in November, up 4% from a year earlier, and accounting for 71% of revenue. That basically includes all cloud services, plus any recurring subscription services. Oracle (ORCL) partially breaks out some cloud-related bits, but provides no dollar figures.
Write to Eric J. Savitz at [email protected]
