If it’s not already doing so, Amazon better watch its back. Why? Because Microsoft is stealing Amazon’s cloud market share and looks set to win the lion’s share of the market in the not too distant future.

At least, that’s according to one analyst.

There are only two contenders in the cloud computing market, reports MSPoweruser, but while many experts believe Amazon’s dominance will last the distance, not everyone agrees.

According to Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, Microsoft is rapidly taking market share away from Amazon.

Ives commented: “In the September quarter we are seeing a clear acceleration of larger and more strategic enterprise cloud deals (both domestically as well as in Europe) as we believe Redmond [Microsoft’s corporate HQ] is poised to win the lion’s share of the next phase of cloud deployments vs. Amazon.”

He continued: “While AWS remains the leader in cloud, we believe MSFT is starting to clearly ‘close the gap’ as Redmond is seeing an acceleration of spending among enterprises around public/hybrid cloud deployments.”

Looking at the figures, it’s hard to imagine that Microsoft will be catching up with AWS any time soon. Microsoft currently claims around 20-22% of the cloud market, AWS about 45%, and Google Cloud trails behind at around 10%.

However, Ives’ assertion is backed up by Microsoft’s data. It claims high double-digit growth in their cloud computing division: its latest financial reports reported Azure had grown 73% year-on-year. By comparison, during the same quarter, Amazon only reported a 37% year-on-year growth.

The data shows that Azure business is drawing ahead of Microsoft’s older legacy businesses, but the picture will become clearer when the company reports their next financials on 23 October this year.

Hunter Charles is a leading specialist technology recruiter for Microsoft Dynamics and a trusted supplier to Microsoft worldwide. If you would like to find out how we can match talent to your business or you are looking to take the next step in your career, get in touch with one of our dedicated Microsoft technologies recruitment experts today.