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It's an exciting time in the cloud computing space as more and more businesses come to rely on this innovative and empowering technology. With each quarter that passes, cloud computing technology and systems continue to evolve and improve, driving growth and expansion in the market.

Until about a year or two ago, cloud computing was a tale of mostly one player: Amazon (AMZN) Web Services (AWS). They were by far the largest and the strongest in the sector, but they had competitors such as Oracle (ORCL), Microsoft Azure (MSFT), and Google (GOOGL). Now, however, the times are changing.

AWS is still the largest market player by market share. As of the fourth quarter of 2021, AWS held 33 percent of the market share of cloud service providers. Azure, with 21 percent of market share, and Google Cloud, with 10 percent, rounded out the top three at the end of 2021.

In terms of revenue share per year, Azure now holds the top spot because of the popularity of its Intelligent Cloud, which adds services such as Microsoft 365 to its infrastructure. Additionally, Azure has taken a tremendous amount of market share in the last 12 months, which we see propelling Azure to be the market leader in the future.

The four major outages that AWS experienced last year likely are playing a role in the ground that Azure is now taking. In the aftermath of the outages, AWS had some explanations that did not please the community. To protect against future outages, we see businesses using multi cloud architectures, or hybrid cloud architectures where they use at least two clouds in case a cloud fails. As this shift takes place, we see Azure as the primary beneficiary.

Because of Azure’s extremely deep roots in business, and extremely good business solutions group and business relevancy, we see Azure going from number two to the number one player at some point in the future. We still see lots of business for AWS, but an incredible amount of business per Azure.

We also see Google Cloud taking up a lot of the market share as organizations diversify from being on a single cloud. The Google Cloud is a massive cloud. It's a fantastic cloud run by extremely competent and talented people that understand the technology. Additionally, Google may be the best cloud for machine learning because of what it has learned from being the number one algorithm maker in the world with regards to Google search, as well as the number two algorithm maker with regards to YouTube. So, we see a lot of business going towards Google Cloud as organizations diversify from one cloud, which is primarily just AWS, to at least two clouds.

Nutanix (NTNX) is another provider that could see an increase in business because of the resurgence of hybrid clouds. Nutanix is known for its open/private cloud hybrid software, which could also provide a solution for businesses looking to safeguard against outages.

There is also a trend in the industry of businesses moving towards industrial clouds, or clouds that meet a specific business or a business use case. Oracle, which held 2 percent of cloud market share at the end of 2021, just bought Cerner, which is a massive health information technology company that makes electronic health records, and includes the US Department of Veterans Affairs among its clients. If the Oracle acquisition of Cerner completes, we see Oracle as a major health care provider/cloud provider organization, which would mean a lot of incredible things coming for Oracle.

Finally, we also see plenty of work in the future for IBM/Red Hat (IBM) in the OpenStack private cloud market.