Analyst firm Synergy Research Group’s latest numbers on public cloud infrastructure spending shows that enterprises just can’t satisfy their voracious appetite for hosted services.

Spending on cloud infrastructure jumped by 42% in the first quarter of 2019 from a year ago. Synergy, which calculates cloud infrastructure spending using earnings data from the main cloud providers, said the market generated more than $21 billion in revenue during the last quarter.

Revenue for the last four quarters meanwhile topped $75 billion. The bulk of that spending went to infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service offerings, which saw their combined revenue jump by 48% in the most recent quarter.

It’s always interesting to see who are the most dominant and fastest growing cloud providers, and Synergy never disappoints in that regard. Once again, it puts Amazon Web Services Inc. in the lead by some distance, growing faster than the overall cloud infrastructure market as it has done for the previous eight quarters.

Trailing Amazon is a group of four cloud providers that are also seeing growth that outpaces the overall market. Microsoft Corp. with its Azure cloud platform is the runner-up, but Google LLC, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings all saw revenue gains of 70% or more in the last quarter.

The “big 5” are followed by another group of what Synergy calls “niche players” that include IBM Corp., Oracle Corp., Salesforce.com Inc. and Rackspace Inc., though they all have lower growth rates.

Specifically, Amazon was at 33% in the first quarter, Microsoft 16%, Google 8%, IBM 6%, Alibaba 5% and Salesforce 4%, John Dinsdale, Synergy’s chief analyst, told SiliconANGLE. “The other three cloud providers each have a 2% market share,” he noted.

Image: Synergy Research Group