Morgan Stanley survey shows Azure will be leading Infrastructure as a Service vendor by 2019

Mark Coppock

Azure momentum

Today, Amazon’s cloud services platform, AWS, leads Microsoft Azure in the growing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market. Specifically, AWS leads Azure 21% to 12%. According to Morgan Stanley’s 2016 survey of 100 enterprise CIOs, that is changing, and quickly.

As Geekwire reports:

According to Morgan Stanley’s 2016 CIO Survey, Microsoft’s Azure will edge out Amazon Web Services by 2019 for both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) use among 100 executives surveyed. Roughly 31 percent of the CIOs will be using Azure for IaaS, versus roughly 30 percent using AWS. Today, about 21 percent are using AWS and 12 percent are using Azure. While nearly 55 percent of the surveyed CIOs said they’re using no public-cloud IaaS today, that number will drop to less than 10 percent by the end of 2019.

IaaS represents the backbone of servers, storage, and networks that comprise cloud computing solutions. This is compared to Platform as a Service (Paas), the services that run on IaaS and enable cloud computing applications. Azure already leads AWS 18% to 16%.

2016-Morgan-Stanley-CIO-survey-IaaS-ranking
Source: Morgan Stanley.

Over time, the growth of IaaS and PaaS will have an impact on the sales of hardware vendors as cloud solutions replace on-premise implementations. That means that on-premise apps will also decline, according to the survey from 71% today to 58% in 2019.

The growing important of cloud computing solutions underlines why Microsoft is investing so heavily in Azure and its other cloud products. “Cloud-first, mobile-first” is looking like an increasingly brilliant strategy.