If we look at market growth rates and the concentration of power within a handful of providers, using the terminology coined by Geoffrey Moore, it could easily be argued that the public IaaS cloud market is in the tornado and approaching Main Street. Despite a lack of publicly available market share data, for many in the industry, it seems like a two or three-player race, with one clear “gorilla”: Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In this article I will attempt to briefly characterize the competitive positioning of the key players in the public IaaS market, and highlight some of the alternative strategies used by other providers to carve their own niches. The question that needs to be kept in mind is, can anyone else survive in the face of the steep competition presented by the two or three American mega-clouds?
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