A new survey from financial giant Goldman Sachs shows IT executives are increasingly preferring Microsoft Azure over cloud rivals. As organizations shift to Azure, the platform could take market share from cloud leader Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Amazon’s AWS leads the cloud market with 47.8%, according to Gartner data for 2019. Microsoft Azure is next with 15.5%, while Google Cloud took just 4%.
However, Azure is the preferred choice for public cloud solutions and dominates that sector. The survey from Goldman Sachs shows Microsoft’s position will likely be enhanced over the next three years.
In a survey of over 100 IT execs from Global 2000 companies, the company found 97 are already using Azure in their organization. 58 said they were using AWS. However, Azure growth seems guaranteed over the coming years as 66 said their companies will embrace the platform during that time.
“Respondents expect today’s top vendors to continue to dominate the rankings in three years. Microsoft remains the clear leader, with 22% of the votes today and in three years respectively,” the analysts wrote.
Continued Growth
There are some things worth noting. Firstly, this is a relatively small survey, but it does include execs from major companies. Secondly, the survey specifically focused on cloud infrastructure and platform as a service (PaaS).
Microsoft has led both these sectors for a few years, with much of Amazon’s success coming from database solutions.
“AWS still gets the largest share of cloud revenue, a ‘significantly higher number of respondents’ indicated they use Microsoft Azure and plan to in the next three years,” Goldman Sachs writes. In fact, “97 respondents said they are currently using Microsoft Azure, compared to 58 using AWS and 25 using Google Cloud Platform.”
