It’s become accepted wisdom that the cloud computing market is a three-way race among Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, but a new report from IDC is calling that into question. The market research firm says that while AWS dominated with $.5.516 billion in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) revenue in 2015, second place went to IBM with $761.7 million. Microsoft Azure was a close third with $729.6 million, followed by Rackspace, AliCloud (Alibaba’s cloud computing arm) and Google, in that order.
IDC analyst Melanie Posey said, “AWS isn’t the only game in town when it comes to cloud.” She added, “IBM’s approach has been informed by its customer base, who have all types of workloads that need different deployment models.”
