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Microsoft's Cloud Market Share Rising at Amazon's Expense

• By David Ramel
• January 29, 2018

Microsoft's Azure public cloud platform is making some inroads against market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to new research.

Analysts at investment bank KeyBanc found that Azure stole some market share from AWS in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2017. According to a CNBC report citing KeyBanc analysts, AWS finished the fourth quarter of 2017 with 62 percent market share, down from the 68 percent share reported a year earlier.

"Microsoft Azure jumped from 16 percent to 20 percent, and Google's share increased from 10 percent to 12 percent," according to the report.

Amazon.com is expected to release its Q4 2017 numbers on Feb. 1. For the third quarter, it reported that AWS revenue was up 42 percent year over year.

"The KeyBanc report compared the big three cloud providers' artificial intelligence tools and found that Microsoft 'has more pre-built models than other public cloud vendors' and makes them available from more data centers around the world," CNBC said.

Microsoft is frequently characterized as the top competitor to AWS, the overall cloud computing provider by far according to various reports, challenging and even surpassing AWS in some segments such as AI. Google's cloud platform is often said to be the next primary challenger to AWS supremacy.