This one chart gives you an idea of how crazy Amazon's cloud growth really is
Amazon Web Services turned out to be a profitable, fast-growing cloud computing juggernaut when it first revealed its financials earlier this year.
But this chart by market research firm MKM Partners should give you a better idea of exactly how impressive AWS's growth has been compared to some of its enterprise IT peers:
AWS is seeing 78% year-on-year revenue growth, an astonishing growth rate compared to other large cap enterprise vendors on this list that had an average growth rate of a mere 6%. That's more than double the growth rate of Salesforce - arguably the fastest growing cloud software maker - and doesn't even come close to some of the old guards like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.
Of course, AWS is a relatively new service, having launched in 2006, so it's hard to compare it apples to apples with other companies mentioned on this list, who tend to have a longer operating history. But it's simply unprecedented to see a business of its size, projected to exceed $8 billion in revenue this year, to keep up its growth rate at that level.
On top of that, AWS is seeing a solid 23% operating margin, which is in-line with the industry average and far better than Salesforce, HP, or NetApp.
Based on this growth rate, MKM Partners projects AWS to book over $38 billion in revenue by 2020, with a healthy 35% operating margin. That's pretty crazy considering Oracle had just about $38 billion in revenue last year, and AWS is still just a smaller part of Amazon's overall business that generated $88 billion in total revenue last year.
"We consider the rise of AWS as the most consequential development in the IT sector in many decades," MKM Partners wrote in a note. "AWS is by far the fastest growing large-scale supplier of technology to enterprises today."