New Delhi, May 16 (IANS): Microsoft shared the top position with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the worldwide public cloud services market grew 24.1 per cent (year-over-year) in 2020 with revenues reaching $312 billion, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).

Spending continued to consolidate in 2020 with the combined revenue of the top 5 public cloud service providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Google, and Oracle) capturing 38 per cent of the worldwide total and growing 32 per cent year over year.

Thanks to an expanding portfolio of SaaS and SISaaS offerings, Microsoft now shares the top position with AWS in the whole public cloud services market, with both companies holding 12.8 per cent revenue share for the year.

The public cloud services market includes Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), System Infrastructure Software as a Service (SISaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS),

"Access to shared infrastructure, data, and application resources in public clouds played a critical role in helping organisations and individuals navigate the disruptions of the past year," said Rick Villars, group vice president, Worldwide Research at IDC.

While the overall public cloud services market grew 24.1 per cent in 2020, consistent with the past four years, the IaaS and PaaS segments have consistently grown at much faster rates.

"Cloud service providers are rapidly expanding their portfolio of infrastructure and platform services to address confidential computing, performance-intensive computing, and hybrid deployment scenarios," said Dave McCarthy, vice president, Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Services.

SaaS applications are the largest and most mature segment of public cloud with 2020 revenues of $148 billion.

"The SaaS apps market is dominated by a long-tail of providers that account for 65 per cent of the total market," said Frank Della Rosa, research director, SaaS and Cloud Software.

In the combined IaaS, SISaaS and PaaS market, the top five companies (AWS, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, and IBM) captured over 51 per cent of global revenues, the report mentioned.