Wasabi Listed as an IaaS Vendor “That Has Shaped the Year” in the IDC Worldwide Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Market Shares Report, 2020
Worldwide Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Market Shares, 2020: Data Growth, Edge Use Cases, and Hybrid Deployment Take Center Stage
Wasabi is an increasingly important player in the public cloud IaaS market and one of the few vendors that has successfully broken into the IaaS market within the past three to four years.”
…we believe it is important to highlight Wasabi this year given the vendor’s continued expansion of IaaS services and physical infrastructure, combined with the consistent growth of Wasabi’s customers, partners, and financing.”
The vendor’s approach has proved a recipe for success, particularly with storage software and services providers that can quickly and cost effectively integrate Wasabi as their cloud-based object storage back end.”
Worldwide Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service 2020 Share Snapshot
Note: 2020 Share (%), Revenue ($M), and Growth (%)
Source: IDC, 2021
Executive Summary
The public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market grew 34% in 2020 to $65.5 billion. Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains the market share leader in the worldwide public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service market, at $30.4 billion, representing 46.3% of global market in 2020. Microsoft, Alibaba, and Google are the next largest providers, at 14.3%, 7.6%, and 4.6% market shares, respectively. Overall, the top 4–5 vendors in the public cloud IaaS market continue to extend their share leads, as the public cloud IaaS becomes increasingly difficult for new market entrants to penetrate. In 2020, the top 5 public cloud IaaS providers accounted for 77% of the total market spend.
A key regional story line during 2020 was how leading Asia/Pacific including Japan (APJ) vendors delivered exceptional growth during 2020, illustrating accelerated adoption of public cloud IaaS in countries outside North America and Europe, as well as APJ’s resilient growth despite the challenges of COVID-19. Market growth was most pronounced in China, where regional providers like Tencent, Huawei, Alibaba, and China Telecom all experienced double-digit growth rates above the total market average.
It is also important to note that the rise of cold storage services directly correlates to the rise of public cloud IaaS in general. The rapid pace of public cloud storage adoption drives expansion of use cases and the need for more specialized tiers of services like cold storage. Public cloud services providers are uniquely positioned to serve these cold storage use cases. These providers have built a significant infrastructure footprint and developed the economies of scale necessary to deliver storage at extremely low rates (typically price per gigabyte). Furthermore, almost all major public cloud storage providers now offer a “cold storage” service that is separately priced from the rest of their storage portfolio and designed specifically for long-term data retention use cases. The growing prevalence of these services warrants a distinct IDC MarketScape evaluation, which is designed from the perspective of enterprise IT customers, evaluating public cloud cold storage providers using the IDC MarketScape methodology.
Throughout 2020, IaaS leaders such as AWS, Microsoft, and Google all drove significant investments in core compute and storage services, expanding their portfolios to meet growing customer demand and anticipate the needs of an increasingly mature cloud user base. During 2020, we also saw leading providers invest heavily to expand their dedicated and local cloud-as-a-services solutions, which have quickly become integral, complementary assets to their core public cloud offerings. Adoption of these services has been driven by customer propensity to adopt “hybrid cloud” strategies including both public, multitenant services and dedicated, on-premises services. Adoption is also driven by the need for increasingly localized and performant cloud storage and compute resources for “edge” use cases. These trends are discussed at length in this analysis.
IDC defines public cloud IaaS as the aggregate of the compute, the raw ephemeral and persistent storage capacity, and the associated network capability, delivered through a public cloud deployment model — as described in IDC’s Worldwide IT Cloud Services Taxonomy, 2019 (IDC #US45714519, December 2019). The compute and storage components of this market are tracked in IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker.
Highlights from the 2020 market share analysis include: