Have we arrived at a public cloud duopoly?

The two IaaS/PaaS leaders are pulling away from the rest

There are plenty of examples of industries dominated by two key players: Visa and MasterCard, Boeing and Airbus, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and in technology there's Intel and AMD and iOS and Android. Other mobile operating systems are also available including the free and open source LineageOS but they enjoy only a tiny share of the market. Meanwhile other attempts at creating new viable mobile OS such as FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Touch failed.

Are we seeing the same thing with public cloud IaaS and PaaS? One CIO we spoke to during our recent research programme certainly thinks a duopoly is possible.

"When you look at AWS it's massive, it's very sophisticated and it's got loads and loads of different products. They pride themselves on how many new products they bring to market every year. It's like going into a toy shop where there's always a new toy," the CIO said.

"Microsoft, on the other hand, have a much simpler product offering. They're not bringing so many products to market but they're packaging things more tightly so that you're not having to do so much understanding. It's more standardised."

With these two different approaches, with Microsoft's installed base, and with both moving rapidly to fill the gaps where the other is strong, it's easy to see how enterprise incumbents such as IBM and Oracle and relative newcomer to the enterprise Google may struggle to achieve anything but a distant third in the public cloud space.

"You could see a world where AWS and Azure will take the lion's share of the activity," the CIO said.

Indeed, these two players dominated our the results of our survey of IT professionals in terms of both usage and perception of leadership and innovation. Interestingly it was Microsoft's cloud that led the way in both areas, despite AWS being the larger by most measures.

We asked the third party vendor, machine analytics firm Sumo Logic which works across most of the main cloud vendors for their opinion.

"AWS is clearly the 800-pound gorilla in the market - it was first and has a huge range of services and options today that help a wide variety of technologists from developers to security analysts tackle trends such as serverless, microservices and DevSecOps," said Mukesh Sharma, vice president EMEA.

"Azure is doing well in companies that are looking at taking a multi-cloud approach. So many companies are Microsoft shops, so Azure is a good platform for them to use as part of their enterprise agreements," he went on, adding support for the duopoly theory. "Azure is being used alongside AWS as a way for CIOs to keep control over their cloud strategies."

Sharma said he does not see much of the IBMs and Oracles among his client base, instead placing Google Cloud Platform in third place for public cloud IaaS/PaaS, in part because of the growth of Kubernetes, which was originally a Google project.

"Kubernetes is getting a lot more attention now, and I think part of this is because there are a lot of IT leaders leaning on containers as a way to avoid lock-in. Kubernetes can help in that," he said.

However, GCP was not found to be making much headway among our research respondents for IaaS/PaaS, except for in the education sector. "Too late to the party", was one comment.

One to watch in the future may be Alibaba Cloud which has the potential to beat AWS on price and possibly functionality too in some key areas, but few of our respondents had chosen to back that particular horse as yet.

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