Google Cloud Again #1 Hottest Large Cloud Provider; SAP #2, ServiceNow #3

On By Littum

Google Cloud’s third-quarter growth rate of 35% once again makes it the world’s fastest-growing major cloud vendor, followed by SAP at 25% and ServiceNow at 23%.

In the latest iteration of my Cloud Wars growth chart below, you can see how the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies fare when stacked by growth rate. And next month at this time, I’ll follow up with the next iteration after the latest quarterly numbers come in from Oracle, Workday, Salesforce, and Snowflake over the next few weeks.

While Google Cloud has held the #1 spot on the Cloud Wars Growth Chart for the past few quarters, I believe its recent performance stands out for a few reasons:

  • Primarily competition is ferocious – it’s “A-gile, MO-car and HOS-tile”, as a football commentator long ago liked to say about top-level players.
  • Second, in Q3, Google Cloud delivered one of the largest quarter-to-quarter growth rate accelerations – from Q2’s 28.8% to Q3’s 35.0% – I remember that from my six years of analyzing Cloud Wars Top 10 results.
  • Thirdly, the enormous growth spurt from Thomas Kurian and the company comes in the middle of a time massive disruptions and upheavals in the technology space triggered by AI bursting onto the scene and the correspondingly huge changes among customers that have taken place and will continue to take place in the coming years as they seek to become AI-first organizations . Judging by the size of Google Cloud’s growth spurt, it appears that the company is doing a masterful job of not only creating great new AI technologies and services, but also putting them to the service of delivering significant and tangible business results for customers .

In second place on this latest version of the Cloud Wars Growth Chart is SAP, which continues to outperform all other application providers by a wide margin. And making SAP’s performance even more impressive is that (a) it has maintained that pace for the past few quarters and expects to remain at that level through 2025, and (b) SAP is much larger than all the other cloud app- vendors except Salesforce. Despite its size, SAP is still growing anywhere from 50% to 2X or even 3X faster than its top competitors.

In third place on our latest growth chart is ServiceNow, whose subscription revenue grew 23% in Q3 as Bill McDermott has done a great job of positioning ServiceNow as “the AI ​​platform for business transformation.”

In tandem with these three, here’s the full Cloud Wars growth chart—and please note that until Snowflake’s quarterly revenue hits $1 billion, I’m isolating it in the #10 spot:

Company Latest growth rate Quarterly cloud revenue Quarter ended
1. Google Cloud 35% 11.4 billion dollars 30 September
2. SAP 25% 5.6 billion dollars 30 September
3. ServiceNow 23% 2.7 billion dollars 30 September
4. Microsoft 22% 38.9 billion dollars 30 September
5. Oracle 21% 5.6 billion dollars 31 August
6. AWS 19% 27.5 billion dollars 30 September
7. Working day 17% 1.9 billion dollars 31 July
8. IBM (Red Hat) 14% 1.63 billion dollars 30 September
9. Salesforce 8% $9.33 billion 31 July
**10. Snowflakes 30% 829 million dollars 31 July
Cloud Wars Growth Chart for November 12, 2024

Last thought

If this is the first time you’ve seen one of my Cloud Wars growth charts, rest assured that I’m fully aware that it’s harder for companies with high revenue bases to grow as fast as companies with smaller revenue bases . That’s one of the reasons I recently started tracking and comparing incremental revenue from quarter to quarter—and again, Google Cloud stood out by getting more new business than its relative size to Microsoft and AWS would have led us to believe.

Finally, all this competition is great for customers who are always – always — the biggest winners in the Cloud Wars.