Am I the only one that thinks IBM's acquisition of Softlayer did more to help Amazon than it did to help IBM? (or, more specifically, their mishandling of the acquisition) Cloud isn't the big market, traditional hosting is. But cloud continues to grow. I thought the idea behind the Softlayer acquisition was going to be to try to funnel the much larger group of people who aren't ALL IN on cloud into some hybrid/cloud…
"cloud isn't the big market" sorry lost me there
When I think of this I first think of Digital Realty Trust (DLR), Global Switch, China Telecom, AT&T, Equinix, NTT, Tata Communication, China Unicom, Telefonica, ....
True, a lot of their customers must be cloud vendors. At one point, I'm pretty sure AWS was a customer of Equinix in some parts of the world (and they might still be). But still, who's bigger? AWS or the folks who consider AWS another (although no doubt important) client?
No one is giving out detailed data, but DLR has 200+ data centers and 30+ million sqft of space. And while it is probably the biggest, they're just one of many. And I think they and their customers are mostly into more traditional hosting.
Then you have more direct to consumer companies that run their own data centers. OVH, Hetzner, Softlayer, PhoenixNap, HE, Rackspace, ... Worldwide? Hundreds of these. Maybe thousands.
Gartner once wrote that AWS was 10x larger than the next 14 cloud providers combined (2015). I don't know how true that was (or still is). But if "the cloud" is essentially "AWS", then it's probably safe to assume that most of DLR or OVH's or XYZ should be counted as "traditional" and not "cloud".
If it's mostly just AWS + 14 other _much_ smaller companies vs thousands of companies worlwide, some of which are bigger than AWS, many of which are in the same ballpark, is the cloud even 1% of hosting market?
(I worked at a large bank, we had our own datacenters (not buildings, not cages, but floors). I don't know if we actually owned everything though. If we did, this would probably add up to be quite a lot. If we didn't, then this capacity is already included in the above providers).
Now, if you're talking about where the money is at, I have no preconceptions. You might be right. There's no doubt cloud margins are higher.