Monday Morning Impact – July 19

Gartner: Worldwide IaaS Public Cloud Services Grew 40.7% in 2020

The worldwide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market grew 40.7% in 2020 to total $64.3 billion, up from $45.7 billion in 2019, according to Gartner, Inc.

“Hyperscale providers are continuing to build distributed cloud and edge solutions that extend the public cloud’s reach into private and on-premise locations, addressing the needs of organizations relating to data sovereignty, workload portability and network latency,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “This fact, coupled with reliance on the public cloud by a majority of organizations during the pandemic, drove another year of double digital market growth in 2020.”

In 2020, the top five IaaS providers accounted for 80% of the market, and nearly 90% all IaaS providers exhibited growth.

Amazon continued to lead the worldwide IaaS market with $26.2 billion of revenue in 2020 and 41% market share (see Table 1). Amazon’s 28.7% growth was slightly slower than that of the market, with their sales growth primarily reflecting increased customer usage.

Microsoft maintained the No. 2 position in Gartner’s IaaS market share with nearly 60% growth, reaching $12.7 billion in revenue in 2020. The global healthcare crisis and disruption in workplace environments during the pandemic era drove increased demand from existing Microsoft Azure customers to migrate mission-critical workloads, such as from healthcare applications with AI-assisted bots, digital twins in manufacturing and e-commerce in retail.

The dominant IaaS provider in China, Alibaba, grew 52.8% in 2020 with revenue surpassing $6 billion, up from $4 billion in 2019. In 2020, Alibaba saw its highest growth rate in the education vertical at 105%, driven by downloads of Alibaba’s enterprise communication and collaboration platform DingTalk among employees and students working and studying from home.

After its second consecutive year of over 200% growth in the IaaS market, Huawei broke into the top five IaaS vendors for the first time in 2020, with $2.7 billion in revenue. Over 90% of this revenue comes from Greater China, a region that continues to see rapid cloud market growth. “After 2019, Huawei made a hard pivot away from selling equipment to investing heavily in their cloud services business which is starting to yield results,” said Nag.

Google’s IaaS revenue grew 66% to reach nearly $4 billion in 2020. Spending from the retail, government and healthcare sectors helped drive Google’s growth in IaaS in 2020, as did their focus on supporting the development and deployment of cloud applications in both a hybrid and multicloud model.

Gartner clients can learn more in the report “Market Share: IT Services, Worldwide 2020.”

Channel Impact^®
The data underscores the rate at which cloud-based services are gaining traction, especially in the wake of the global pandemic.

CompTIA: Tech Sector Employment Expansion Continues

Hiring within the technology sector continues to grow with tech firms adding 10,500 workers in June and 80,600 through the first half of 2021, according to an analysis by CompTIA, a nonprofit industry association based in suburban Chicago.

New staffing in the data processing, hosting and related services employment category led the June job gains, with 13,200 positions added, according to the “Employment Situation” report released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

An estimated 1,000 jobs were added in other information services, including search engines, while the IT services and custom software development was essentially flat last month. Job losses were reported in telecommunications (- 2,200) and computer and electronic products manufacturing (- 1,400).

Employer job postings for open tech positions remain on solid footing, with an estimated 307,000 postings advertised in June. Software and application developers, IT support specialists, systems engineers and architects, systems analysts and IT project managers are in the highest demand. Jobs in emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, or those requiring emerging tech skills accounted for 28% of all open positions.

The demand for workers extends beyond technology-related companies into industry sectors such as finance and insurance (32,100 postings), manufacturing (24,970), retail trade (10,081), healthcare and social assistance (7,659), public administration (6,549) and educational services (5,820).

Major metropolitan areas, including New York, Washington, Dallas, Los Angeles and San Jose accounted for the largest number of postings in June. But markets in Alabama (Huntsville, Birmingham and Montgomery) and Colorado (Colorado Springs, Boulder and Fort Collins) were in the top 10 metro areas with the largest month over month increases in tech job postings.

The tech sector has experienced job growth in 10 of the past 12 months.

Channel Impact^®
Expectations for GDP growth contribute to a bullish attitude with respect to hiring and expansion.

Granite Announces Wholesale Voice Agreement with Cox Business

Granite Telecommunications, a Quincy, Massachusetts-based provider of communications solutions, has announced a wholesale agreement with Cox Business to deliver competitive local telephone service over Cox’s network.

“We are excited to expand our relationship with Cox Business, which understands the important role local phone services play for business customers looking to grow and maintain price stability,” said Granite COO Rand Currier. COO of Granite. “In markets served by Cox, Granite has strengthened its ability to deliver affordable communications products, tailored to fit our customers’ diverse needs.”

Jay Clark, Vice President of Carrier Sales and Operations at Cox Business added, “This new service platform enables Granite to continue assisting customers in their growth by offering reliable and cost-effective voice services. This expands our collaboration with Granite to meet and exceed our mutual customers’ expectations.”

Cox Business, a part of Cox Communications, serves more than 6.5 million customers in 18 states with a variety of voice, video and data connectivity solutions.

Channel Impact^®
The agreement will likely be of particular benefit to SMB customers who seek new options for local telephone services to support mission-critical operations, including sales, service, payments, specialty, fire and emergency lines.