Big tech cloud vendors have seen a week of positive results, with companies such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google reporting cloud revenue increases of over 30%. As the virus accelerates cloud adoption, it is big tech that will reap the benefits at the expense of smaller providers, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

Oliver Lockett, Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “COVID-19 has hastened cloud adoption as cloud vendors are providing the infrastructure and platforms on which almost all cloud-based application and collaboration software providers rely. All of this growth is at the expense of second-tier and tertiary cloud providers who are without big installed customer bases, and many providers have suffered significant constrictions due to capacity limitations.

“We shouldn’t expect this to change. Big Tech will use its dominant position to squeeze out smaller players. Alibaba’s $28bn data centre investment and expansions of data centre capacity by cloud rivals AWS, Microsoft and Google highlights big tech’s commitment to get bigger and tighten its grip on the cloud market.”

Big tech have been the winners in GlobalData’s Cloud Services thematic scorecard, with Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba and VMware populating the highest rankings. Having ranked four or above, these companies are market leaders in this area, and their cloud services activity will improve their future performance. Pre-pandemic, big tech companies such as Microsoft and Amazon became the market leaders and innovation drivers of the now booming cloud services and infrastructure. Investment in diversifying cloud services and expanding their cloud computing capacity is now proving to be highly lucrative.”