Recently, Frost & Sullivan (Frost & Sullivan, hereinafter referred to as “Sullivan”), a world-renowned consulting company, released the latest “White Paper on China's Public Cloud Industry”, pointing out that thanks to advances in intelligent technology, the popularity of the Internet, and national policy support, the size of China's public cloud market continues to expand.
According to the white paper, the size of China's public cloud market in 2017 was RMB 33.29 billion. In the next five years, as macroeconomic growth slows down, more enterprises will actively seek public cloud services to achieve open source savings. Sullivan predicts that China's public cloud market will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 51.2%, and the market size is expected to reach 298.04 billion yuan in 2022.
Against this backdrop, Sullivan researched and scanned the major cloud service providers in the Chinese public cloud market. According to the white paper, the competitive pattern of China's public cloud market is relatively fragmented, but the leading company, Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud, which has the top two public cloud market shares in China, has a stable position, and its advantages are still concentrated.
In the first half of 2017, Alibaba Cloud ranked first, accounting for 29.2%. With its strength in the public cloud market in the past two years, Tencent Cloud has shown development potential, ranking second, accounting for 15.3%. AWS is third, with 6.9% of the market share.
In the second half of 2017, the top three service providers in China's public cloud market share remained unchanged. Among them, Alibaba Cloud's market share was 29.7%; Tencent Cloud's market share increased by 1.2% to 16.5%; and AWS accounted for 7.5%.
In 2018, Alibaba Cloud's share of Tencent Cloud continued to expand. In the first half of the year, Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud accounted for 32.2% and 16.8% respectively. Companies such as AWS, Tianyi Cloud, Microsoft, HUAWEI CLOUD, Ucloud, Jinshan Cloud, Oracle, and Kingdee Cloud rank at the top of the public cloud market. Sullivan predicts that the top five manufacturers in the market will continue to maintain their respective positions in the second half of 2018, with little change in market share.
Overall, the proportion of heads is constantly increasing. Among them, Tencent Cloud grew from 15.3% to 17%, and its market share is already a little more than half of Alibaba Cloud's; AWS has also increased from 6.9% to 7.8%; and the share of other cloud service providers is declining. For example, Tianyi Cloud dropped from 6.5% to 6%; Microsoft dropped from 5.7% to 5.1%.
It is worth noting that Sullivan's main statistics here are infrastructure-as-a-service, or IaaS layers, of various cloud service providers. As the world's largest corporate growth consulting firm, Sullivan has provided management consulting services to the world's top 1000 companies, emerging companies, and investment institutions since its establishment for more than 50 years.
Sullivan also pointed out in the white paper that in the future, full-stack cloud will become a development trend for traditional enterprises to deploy cloud services. After enterprises have transformed from data centers to cloud data centers, the needs of enterprise users have shifted from cloud platforms to cloud applications. Enterprises prefer to improve management efficiency through comprehensive cloud transformation, so that the business can continue to innovate and develop. Therefore, Sullivan suggests that companies choose at least 2 full-stack public cloud service providers.
Given that leading full-stack public cloud vendors have capital, talent, and technical advantages, strong cloud service technology reliability, and deep service experience, they can meet the needs of customers in various industries to a large extent, Sullivan said that enterprises can give priority to choosing leading full-stack public cloud vendors.