The ongoing cloud wars between AWS, Azure and GCP are heating up as Google’s growth rate surges from 46% to 54%. While the run rate of AWS is still massively out in front with more than $25B, Azure and GCP growth rates are twice the size of AWS. As the battle continues and Google gains ground as shown in the latest Cloud Wars article, the real winner will always be the businesses that use their services.

This is because the only way to battle for dominance is for all three providers to expand their services and support while constantly competing on price. This results in changes in business opportunities that have meaning in terms of business outcomes.

While AWS is still firmly in the lead in terms of market share, aspects like the growth of Amazon as a major contributor to AWS growth may point to future changes. This becomes more precarious with major retailers like Walmart asking vendors to seek cloud provider support from other providers while Target moves to GCP.

A key point that is having an impact on the cloud wars are the changes in how businesses are using the cloud. Scale of the provider is less of a tipping point as multi-cloud strategies enable businesses to match applications and workloads to the best cloud environment and services.

This not only helps businesses avoid vendor lock-in, but it also increases application reliability, reduce costs, and/or leverage the best services that each cloud provider offers. Solutions like Google Anthos make managing these multi-cloud approaches through a single platform a much less daunting prospect for businesses.

How Application Needs Fuel the War

Applications and AppDev are at the heart of business needs for outcomes as they look for ways to:

• Get to market faster
• Provide more and better Services to clients and customers
• Deal with legacy debt in the move to the cloud

Databases and mainframes are of particular concern for businesses looking to the cloud for advantages like cloud-native applications, containers and microservices. The database approaches offered by GCP are a major reason for their hypergrowth as businesses transition away from traditional database management systems to a new class of cloud-native platforms. 

It still remains to be seen how the 2018 purchase of GitHub by Microsoft will benefit Azure’s growth, the open-source market plays to the needs of businesses over cloud providers. But things like version control and source code management are playing a bigger role for businesses in need of app development tied to AI and IoT projects.

Every company is focused on process automation as the route to successful migration. As cloud providers compete, they continue to provide more services and support for faster and easier cloud migrations and attaining a cloud native stance. Techolution is one digital transformation partner to businesses that has seen major growth in support services as a Google Partner.

This enables our business partners to easily embark on everything from mainframe migrations to robust application development pipelines that support containers and microservices. GCPs focus on security, governance, and high availability support ways to make it easier for application development pipelines. This plays to the business outcome needs of businesses focused on digital transformation with specific business outcomes.

Business Outcomes Have Always Been the Point

The key is, and has always been, that businesses are looking for tangible business outcomes with the cloud, whether that is:

• Cost savings
• Increased security
• Faster innovation and time to market for client and consumer services
• Agility with real-world applications of IoT, AI, and analytics
• All the above

Every business is aiming to get results in terms of:

• Making better business decisions
• Increasing market share and competitive positioning
• Innovating in ways that make them more agile, cost effective, and sustainably growth oriented

GCP’s revenue hypergrowth, which averaged 46.4% over the past 5 quarters, is a major sign that the cloud wars are heating up and things are changing. Businesses will always determine cloud provider changes by the services they use and demand. Those businesses that partner with digital and cloud transformation experts like Techolution to make the best business decisions will be the real winners in terms of cloud strategies that further their specific business outcomes.