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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Last week Chinese eCommerce giant Alibaba announced its Q3 earnings. Cloud revenue was $553 million, an impressive 104 percent year-over-year increase. That comes out to a run rate in the range of $2.2 billion, well behind Google which announced it is pulling in a billion dollars a quarter and still buried behind the market leaders all of whom reported around $4 billion+ a quarter.

While the growth was impressive, keep in mind when you have a small market share, it’s much easier to grow a big number than when you have a larger market share. In other words, it gets harder to grow, the larger you get.

It is worth noting, however that the growth spurt allowed Alibaba to show up in the top five of Synergy Research’s most recent Cloud Infrastructure Market Share report for the first time. While the market share was only around 3 or 4 percent. it’s still significant because no longer being  lumped together with “next 10” or “rest of market.”

Synergy reports that the cloud market grew 46 percent in the fourth quarter, and each of the biggest cloud companies benefited over the smaller ones. “In large part the expansion was driven by aggressive growth of Amazon (AWS), Microsoft, Google and Alibaba, who all increased their share of the worldwide market at the expense of smaller cloud providers,” Synergy wrote in their report.

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