Can Google or Amazon Displace Microsoft as World’s #1 Cloud Vendor in 2021?

Having ruled the enterprise cloud business for more than two years, Microsoft will face intensified pressure to hold the #1 spot in 2021 from not only #4 Google Cloud and #2 Amazon but also a few of the world’s other top cloud vendors.

(On my weekly Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings, Microsoft is #1, Amazon is #2, and Google Cloud is #4.)

To offer a look into this wildly competitive market in the coming year, we’re launching, starting tomorrow, the most wide-ranging and in-depth analyses that we’ve ever done. Called “Cloud Wars Top 10 Special Report: Which Cloud Vendors Will Thrive in 2021?,” this wide-ranging overview of the world’s largest and most-influential cloud vendors will deliver extensive analyses of each company in the Top 10: #1 Microsoft, #2 Amazon, #3 Salesforce, #4 Google Cloud, #5 SAP, #6 Oracle, #7 IBM, #8 Workday, #9 ServiceNow and #10 Adobe.

Starting tomorrow, Dec. 1, we’ll post our strategic overview of top-rated Microsoft, and then on each successive business day we’ll post the overview of companies #2 (Amazon) through #10 (Adobe). 

Each of the company overviews will analyze that company through 5 lenses:

• Opportunities
• Challenges
• Differentiation
• Leadership
• Big Questions

We’ll also offer extensive archives of the major articles we’ve published about each company throughout 2020, along with some intriguing lists exploring how the Top 10 stack up against several financial metrics.

In addition, we’ve given each company in the Top 10 the opportunity to place within its own section some of its own sponsored material about its capabilities, customers, and strategy. This insightful sponsored material will all be clearly designated as such and we’re excited to give the participating companies a chance to share their unique assets as part of this high-impact Special Report.

Now about that question in the headline: like every company in the world, Microsoft is vulnerable to competitors with fresher ideas, more-relevant innovation, superior engagement with customers, and more-appealing roadmaps to the future. 

When we bring that closer to home by noting that both Amazon and Google are among the only corporations on Earth with financial muscle equal to that of Microsoft, it’s clear that the competitive landscape in the Cloud Wars in 2021 will be even more intense than it’s been during this crazy year.

Then again, look at it this way: for the quarter ended Sept. 30, Amazon’s AWS cloud unit reported revenue of $11.6 billion, up by a very impressive 29%,  and Google Cloud reported revenue of $3.44 billion, up a dazzling 44.8%. Put those together and you get $14.944 billion. Extremely impressive, right?

Well, for the same period, Microsoft’s enterprise-cloud revenue was $15.2 billion—larger than the cloud revenues of Amazon and Google combined.

So while Microsoft can definitely be toppled from the #1 spot, it would require an absolutely extraordinary achievement. 

And I would contend that extraordinary achievements have been almost the norm for the Cloud Wars Top 10 throughout 2020 as their lightning-quick innovations have allowed hundreds of thousands of businesses to continue operating and, in many cases, radically transform themselves for the digital future.

In that context, the Cloud Wars Top 10 Special Report that I’m introducing here and that we’ll begin rolling out tomorrow will give you some deep and hard-hitting insights on how well prepared each Top 10 company is to lead its customers rapidly, smoothly and successfully into the rapidly approaching digital future.

Disclosure: at the time of this writing, Microsoft and Google Cloud were among the many clients of Cloud Wars Media LLC and/or Evans Strategic Communications LLC.

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