Amazon’s Cloud Is Now World’s Fifth Largest Software Company

News has emerged that Amazon Web Services (AWS) would be one of the largest software businesses, even if it was completely independent of parent company, Amazon.

Newly released figures show Amazon’s cloud business has expanded so fast in the last 10 years, that it’s now the fifth-largest business software provider in the world.

While Amazon revenue as a whole has been growing at a blistering pace in the last few years, AWS is the current undisputed champion in the cloud market. The revelation also means that AWS could leapfrog perennial software behemouth SAP by as early as this time next year, that is assuming that AWS were a separate entity from Amazon overall.

Contrary to popular belief, ‘the Cloud’ is not white and fluffy, but instead looks like this

Micro… who?

The only publicly-traded business software companies ahead of AWS according to FactSet, are Microsoft , IBM , Oracle and, as we already noted, SAP. In the emergent tsunami like cloud market sector, however, both Microsoft, IBM, and even Google trail AWS by quite a bit; which isn’t bad for a company that started by selling books online from a garage in Seattle.

Overall, Amazon’s growth in the last 12 month has seemed to surprise it’s CEO and founder, Jeff Bezos. Amazon’s market value, rose above $700 billion last week (before the recent markets flash-crash!), once again threatening to become bigger than Microsoft.

That news is made even more stark, when you consider that since 2014, Microsoft’s own share price is itself up some 150% since CEO Satya Nadella took over in 2014.

World’s most valuable brand

It’s been a great few years for Amazon on other fronts as well. The company has also just been crowned the world’s most valubale brand, finishing ahead of both Google and Apple, according to the new Brand Finance Global 500 report. The report highlights the fact that for the first time since in the Brand Finance Global 500 study, technology brands claim the top five spots, with Apple, Google, Samsung, and Facebook placing below Amazon.