Underscoring the enormous breadth of the enterprise cloud, Oracle and SAP have become the world’s fastest-growing major cloud providers with Oracle topping the list at 45%, SAP showing another very strong quarter at 38%, and Google Cloud finishing close behind at 37.5%.
While the growth rates for some of the Cloud Wars Top 10 have tapered off over the past few months, Oracle, SAP, and Google Cloud all posted higher sequential growth rates in their most recent quarters.
So while there is no question that parts of the greatest growth market the world has ever known have slowed down a bit, it’s also equally true that some companies continue to find ways to persuade increasingly cautious customers to keep investing massively in the cloud.
A bit farther down in this article, I’ve compiled a full list of the most-recent growth rates for all of the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies, but, before getting to that, I want to offer a few thoughts about the companies in the top half.
Oracle. Clearly, the completion of the Cerner acquisition in June was a huge factor in pushing Oracle’s total cloud revenue into hypergrowth territory, but that’s not the only reason Oracle’s topping the cloud growth chart. CEO Safra Catz has said that even without the inclusion of Cerner, Oracle’s cloud business would be growing at 30% or higher for the rest of this year, and for its fiscal quarter ended Aug. 31, Oracle posted very strong for every part of its cloud business.
SAP. Three months ago, SAP blew some people’s hair back when it posted a cloud-revenue growth rate of 34%, and Christian Klein’s company followed that up with 38% for the quarter ended Sept. 30. SAP appears to be converting many of its longtime on-premises customers to the cloud while also winning lots of mid-size and small businesses, which was a market segment previously untouched by SAP. On the company’s earnings call late last month, Klein was very bullish about SAP’s ability to continue growing rapidly as more businesses look to transform themselves via the cloud.
Google Cloud. First of all, it added as much new cloud revenue in Q3 as Microsoft did ($600 million each), which is an extraordinary achievement. Then, we analyzed Google Cloud’s Q3 Trifecta: revenue up almost 38%, loss way down, and powerful endorsements from Alphabet’s top execs for continued investment. And yesterday we laid out how Google Cloud was alone among the 3 biggest hyperscalers in its ability to boost its growth rate sequentially from Q2 to Q3: Google Cloud’s growth rate increased by a point and a half while Microsoft’s fell 4 points and AWS’s fell 6 points.
Here are the most-recent quarterly cloud-growth figures for the entire Cloud Wars Top 10, and please bear in mind that while 6 of the companies operate on calendar quarters, 3 posted their most-recent numbers back in August for the quarter ended July 31 (Salesforce, Workday, and Snowflake), and Oracle’s latest report was for the quarter ended Aug. 31.
1. Microsoft 24%
2. AWS 27%
3. Google Cloud 37.5%
4. Salesforce 22%
5. Oracle 45%
6. SAP 38%
7. ServiceNow 22%
8. Workday 23%
9. Snowflake 83% (I don’t include it in fastest-growing because, while 83% is a terrific number, Snowflake is so much smaller than the other 9 cloud providers that I don’t think it’s a fair comparison. Yet.)
10. IBM 19%
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