Is IBM’s $4.4 Billion Cloud Bigger Than Amazon’s? Not Quite.
February 1, 2014
Grazed from Recode.net. Author: Editorial Staff.
Is it possible that IBM’s new cloud computing services business unit — the one that got suddenly bigger last year after the acquisition of SoftLayer — is bigger than cloud computing’s dominant player, Amazon Web Services? It turns out that it is, but it’s not a very good comparison. It all depends on what you consider to be “the cloud.”
Let’s start with the basic numbers, which have emerged in recent days as both IBM and Amazon have reported their fourth-quarter and annual results. If you look at IBM’s cloud business strictly by revenue, the company’s CFO Martin Schroeter disclosed on a conference call with analysts on Jan. 21 that it finished the year with $4.4 billion in cloud revenue, a 69 percent increase over the prior year…
Compare that with the revenue Amazon reported yesterday in its “other” segment (which includes its AWS cloud unit): $3.7 billion for the 2013 fiscal year. Amazon has never specifically broken out exactly how big AWS is by revenue and so the “other” segment includes AWS as well as revenue from advertising, branded credit cards and other “non-retail activities.”…
Read more from the source @ http://recode.net/2014/01/31/is-ibms-4-4-billion-cloud-bigger-than-amazons-not-quite/
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