IBM Joining Amazon, Microsoft, Google In Cloud’s Top 4, Says UBS
Make room for IBM ( IBM ) as well as the usual suspects — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft ( MSFT ) and Alphabet’s Google — in the cloud computing market hierarchy, UBS says in a research report. While AWS, part of Amazon.com ( AMZN ), and Google ( GOOGL ) are strongest in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), Microsoft’s Azure service and IBM are formidable in platform-as-a-service (PaaS), according to the UBS survey of corporate information technology executives. In the IaaS market, customers rent computers and data storage via the Internet. In PaaS, companies sell applications and software, including business management and database services, that run on cloud infrastructure. “Cloud is not a winner-take-all market,” said UBS. “We believe the ‘big will get bigger,’ … AWS, Microsoft, and Google are going to be winners, with IBM holding its own. “The likely losers, based on UBS estimates of revenue exposure, include Rackspace ( RAX ), Nimble ( NMBL ), Pure Storage ( PSTG ), Brocade ( BRCD ), Hewlett Packard Enterprise ( HPE ), and NetApp ( NTAP ).” Rackspace, which is set to report Q1 earnings after the close Monday, is transitioning to a services model, providing support for AWS and Azure. IBM acquired IaaS provider Softlayer in 2013. To be stronger in PaaS, IBM has layered software on Softlayer’s infrastructure and made other cloud acquisitions, says UBS. One surprise in the UBS survey is that IT executives expect pricing for cloud computing to moderate. Some analysts predict Google will be more aggressive in cutting prices.