Combined, the news from Google and Microsoft mark two major new entrants into the IaaS space that has thus far been dominated by AWS, with a variety of other players vying for market share as well, most notably Rackspace, which has been pushing its OpenStack cloud building project as an open source alternative to AWS. Now, it seems consumers have a much wider range of choices as an alternative to AWS. The question is, can any of them topple AWS's leading role?
Staten says Azure could have a shot given its massive partner ecosystem and its adoption and use in the enterprise already. Microsoft has an opportunity to convert its enterprise customers and partners into the Azure ecosystem, which is a space AWS has not fully cracked yet. "Microsoft hasn't really turned that community on to its cloud services," Staten says. "If it can, and hold them loyal, Azure could certainly threaten AWS."
Brooks, the Tier1 researcher, says Google is still a long way off from that. "That will be an interesting question in about two to three years," he says. "Even the multiple partial outages at AWS over the last few weeks won't hurt their standing or their adoption rates. They're more or less untouchable."
The caveat, though, is that cloud is still very much in its early days, which means there could be enough market share for everyone to go around.
Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.
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