Q3 enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services passed the $45 billion mark, up 37% from the third quarter of 2020, new data from Synergy Research Group shows.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google continue to attract well over half of worldwide cloud spending, with Q3 market shares of 33%, 20% and 10% respectively.

With growth rates that are higher than the overall market, their share of worldwide revenues continues to inch upwards.

However, other cloud providers are continuing to achieve strong growth in cloud revenues, despite the prominence of the big three US companies.

The next ten largest cloud providers achieved 28% year-on-year revenue growth, while the long tail of medium-to-small cloud providers grew by 25%.

Alibaba accounted for 6%, IBM 4%, Salesforce 3%, Tencent 2% and Oracle 2%. Other companies who have a market share of 1% (to the nearest percentage point) include Baidu, China Telecom, China Unicom, Huawei, Fujitsu, NTT, Rackspace and SAP.

With most of the major cloud providers having now released their earnings data for Q3, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services) were $45.4 billion, with trailing twelve-month revenues reaching $164 billion.

Public IaaS and PaaS services account for the bulk of the market and those grew by 39% in Q3.

The dominance of the major cloud providers is even more pronounced in public cloud, where the top three control 70% of the market.

Geographically, the cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world.

John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group, said: “Given their scale, ever-expanding worldwide presence and impressive revenue growth rates, it is understandable that Amazon, Microsoft and Google grab the most attention for their cloud activities.

“However, that makes it easy to overlook the fact that other cloud providers generated $17 billion in the quarter, a figure which grew by 27% from last year.

“By any standards a $17 billion market growing at such a rate is an attractive proposition for many service providers and their suppliers. Clearly there are challenges with the big three companies lurking in the background, so the name of the game is not competing with them head-on.

“Providing companies are smart about targeting the right applications and customer groups, cloud can provide a broad and exciting range of growth opportunities for them.”