Amazon Maintains Lead in Cloud Infrastructure Market

Amazon said Monday that

Swisscom AG

, the Swiss communications and information-technology services company, selected AWS as its preferred public cloud provider for its enterprise IT.

“This will enable operators to focus on what really matters: building innovative services for their end customers. These are the benefits of the cloud,” incoming AWS CEO

Adam Selipsky

said in a virtual presentation Monday during the Mobile World Congress conference. Mr. Selipsky is expected next month to succeed

Andy Jassy,

the current CEO of AWS. Mr. Jassy is scheduled to become CEO of Amazon.com Inc.

Even though Amazon still dominates the cloud infrastructure market, its share shrank a bit as the overall market expanded and other players gained share, according to Gartner.

Amazon’s cloud infrastructure revenue increased to $26.2 billion, but its share of the global market dropped to 40.8% in 2020 from 44.6% in 2019, according to Gartner. The total market grew 40.7% to $64.3 billion in 2020, from $45.7 billion in 2019, Gartner said.

Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure revenue was $12.7 billion last year, giving it 19.7% of the market, the research firm said.

The Covid-19 pandemic drove growth in cloud computing, said Sid Nag, research vice president for cloud services at Gartner. Businesses needed to bulk up their cloud offerings to support at-home workers and other users with videoconferencing and digital tools, he said.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

, the tech giant based in China, ranked third in the cloud infrastructure market last year with $6.1 billion in revenue.

Alphabet Inc.’s

Google ranked fourth with $3.9 billion in revenue. Microsoft, Alibaba and Google all gained market share, Gartner said. All of the top four players maintained their rank between 2019 and 2020.

Amazon and Google declined to comment on the Gartner report. Microsoft and Alibaba didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Write to John McCormick at [email protected]