How much revenue do IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP really generate in the cloud business? The question can hardly be answered seriously, because the heavyweights of the industry are very creative in their cloud revenue. Cloud business is just 20% of all business of IBM. IBM has reported cloud revenue of 15 billion revenue in twelve months. Analysts investigate this earning in a recent Gartner report. Their information on the cloud sales achieved differ in many ways. Those who try to shed light on the subject usually compare apples to pears. According to them, some vendors have been peddling misleading cloud sales figures for some time now. They use cloud-based growth rates as a marketing tool to sharpen their profile in the highly competitive cloud growth markets. The corporations often wanted to influence their stock market valuations.
Just recently, management spoke of higher earning in annual revenue from so-called “as-a-service” products. According to IBM, the latter category includes infrastructure, software, platform, business process, data and analytics as a service revenues. In addition, the Group also highlights other services, including the implementation of public, private and hybrid environments at the customer. General Manager of the Internet of Things (IoT) at IBM, announced new Watson IoT headquarters at several locations back in 2015. The company wanted to reinvent business emails. The mail client expands email management options, integrates social media and other communication channels, and provides useful information. This allows the user to see which participants are currently communicating via mail or which position they are taking in the company. At this moment, our favourite SendGrid already aquired by Twillo and available as third party service from IBM.
With the advent of cloud infrastructure, containers, serverless frameworks, microservices, kubernetes, DevOps, monitoring/logging, IBM like companies are arranging Developer Day foucusing on these topics.
---
Microsoft’s cloud numbers are viewed critically by analysts. The company primarily uses Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM as its commercial cloud business. Gartner points out that their Office 365 revenue may also include revenue from classic desktop suites or suites for other devices that would have nothing to do with cloud usage. Microsoft does not break down the numbers publicly. They also have focussed on IoT division.
A relatively clear picture of its cloud revenue delivers, according to the analysts currently available from Amazon with its AWS division. They have a decent growth with focus on IoT division.
Conclusion
Cloud computing gradually including the IoT services from cloud. In our traditional view, we consider IoT as separate entity, despite having the part of “cloud message sending”. IoT is an interesting new roadway for the growth of the companies.
