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Comment by googlebigdream | Hacker News Reader

Point to remember- they are number 4. And beating a fast rising azure is going to be close to impossible.

It really depends on how you split the numbers. It's kind of like saying SQL and Excel are the most popular programming languages... yeah, but they've captured a far different market than most people would consider to be the "programming" field.

A service that only exists in China to serve the Chinese audience may be bigger than worldwide services that serve worldwide audiences, but it's kind of irrelevant if you're not a Chinese company doing business exclusively in China.

Who's number 3? Who am I missing?

Gartner ranked Aliyun as the third largest provider in 1Q19.

As a fulltime web dev, I had a guess of who's cloud that was, but had to look the name up.

They may have numbers due to Chinese usage, but no Western company is going to use Chinese hosting, ever.

Gartner isn't a source that I'd use as a basis for it (or honestly, anything). I would take a look at annual revenue for all of these businesses.

Gartner ranks companies by how much they pay Gartner for "advisors"

Different articles and sources give different numbers, so don't take this as gospel, but:

IBM's *-as-a-service ARR is larger than Google Cloud's.

Oracle claims theirs is too, but my understanding is that they roll a lot of their licensing costs into the same reporting, so it's hard to tell for sure.

From what I have seen Alibaba cloud is #3. Don't forget that China is a huge market, and it is very hard for Western companies to be successful there. Alibaba has China government backing and that relationship is allowing them a lot of access in China

For example, AWS China and Azure Operated by 21Vianet (official name of Azure China) are operated independently by Chinese companies, and have incomplete integrations with the rest of their services, because of how hard Chinese govt compliance is. And GCP only has a location in Hong Kong, which means Chinese users can mostly access it but it's unreliable https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/migration/issues/649

This gives Alibaba a huge advantage domestically.

Ali,

Funny that China has a new law allowing them access to any data stored there, so it may stick to operating only in China...

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