The telecoms market may be afflicted by anemic (or no) growth in many of its most important segments, but it’s a different story over at the cloud infrastructure services market where expenditure grew year-on-year by a whopping 52 per cent.

The two things are somewhat related. web scale cloud (the really growing bit) is the home of the online services which are driving growth and prosperity in the overall communications market at the moment (Facebook, Amazon, Google etc) and, some would say, draining growth and prosperity from telcos and many of their suppliers. Also, the cloud, in one form or another, is where much of the telcos’ next generation network investment is going to be fed.

It’s hardly surprising that we have big numbers to report. Within that 52 per cent growth spurt, fed by “expanding use of consumer-centric services, such as social media, gaming and video streaming,” says the report author, Canalys, is web scale cloud pioneer, Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Services) which accounts for 30 per cent of the total spend.

But early movers' leads are usually temporary in this market. Canalys says AWS is under pressure from Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and IBM SoftLayer who together over the past year took 60.5 per cent of the total worldwide cloud infrastructure services spend.

Canalys estimates that the total value of the cloud infrastructure services market was US$9.5 billion in Q2 2016, with North America the largest market, representing 55.3% of the worldwide total, followed by EMEA at 24.7%, Asia Pacific at 15.9% and Latin America at 4.0%.