Wasabi Is Tripling As AWS, Azure Lead Cloud Services Market

Most startups enjoy discussing their growth rates — but not their revenues. That’s because they’re tapping the law of small numbers — a company with small revenues can more easily post eye-popping growth rates than much larger incumbents.

Nevertheless, it is worth investigating whether the fast growth is happening for a good reason — and therefore whether it signals that they might be offering customers a much better value for the money than do incumbents.

This comes to mind in considering the cloud storage service provider — a $50 billion industry expected to grow at a 22.3% compound annual rate to $137 billion by 2025, according to Research And Markets.

Wasabi, a Boston-based cloud storage provider, recently borrowed $27.5 million to boost its growth. In a January 28 interview, CEO David Friend told me that the company has “more than tripled in the last year.”

Wasabi’s fast growth springs from doing five things right:

• Friend has an effective Follow the Leader mindset
• The company aims to become “large and socially important”
• It has a clear strategic focus — providing cloud-based data storage and access for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) through channel partnerships
• It grows faster than the industry by offering a better service at a much lower price
• As it scales, its costs drop and it invests to capture new growth opportunities

Amazon
and Microsoft
have nothing to worry about — unless Friend can grow Wasabi into a much larger company.

AWS More Than Twice As Large As Azure

Amazon’s AWS — which dominates the cloud industry — is targeting a much larger market than cloud storage. In December, AWS CEO Andy Jassy said that AWS’s revenues reached $40 billion in 2020 — up 33% from the year before, according to GeekWire.

AWS says it controls 45% of the $371 billion (2020 revenues) cloud infrastructure market — more than double the share of its closest competitor, Microsoft Azure. And it sees enormous growth potential since 96% of the estimated $3.6 trillion in global IT spending has not yet shifted to the cloud, Jassy claimed.

Microsoft’s Soaring Cloud Business

Microsoft’s Azure is growing faster than AWS. On January 26, CEO Satya Nadella pointed out that its commercial cloud run rate was a forecast-topping $66.8 billion, according to ZDNet — 34% more than the prior year.

In Microsoft’s second…