Industrial Cloud Platforms Revenue Will Exceed US$300 Billion by 2033 as Manufacturers Look to Effectively Utilize Data as a Resource

“Historically, manufacturers have built out their infrastructure to include expensive data housing in the form of on-premises servers. The large initial upfront cost of purchasing, setting up, and maintaining these servers is a selling point for cloud manufacturing providers who beat them out in costs. With low data storage prices, manufacturers who switch to a cloud-based system can see up to 60% reduction in overhead costs relating to data storage,” explains James Iversen, Industrial & Manufacturing Technologies Industry Analyst at ABI Research. For manufacturers who have outsourced their data storage to an external data warehouse provider, other problems arise. According to Iversen, “External Data Warehouses are prone to data fragmentation and duplication, creating data siloes where critical datasets sit independently, not collaborating to produce new KPIs. Cloud manufacturing providers are eliminating these concerns by interconnecting applications bi-directionally, leading to sharing and communication between applications and their data.”

In this report, ABI Research examined revenue, market share, application offerings, and recent updates of the hyperscalers AWS, Microsoft, and Google, along with other key industry players, Alibaba, IBM, SAP, Tencent, and Oracle, to complete a full analysis of the cloud manufacturing market. Looking at the position of the hyperscalers, AWS and Microsoft provide comparable offerings and represent 2/3 of market revenue in 2022. “Both have comparable payment options, data pricing (Microsoft narrowly beats out AWS), and application offerings where AWS holds the advantage. AWS has slowly nudged away from Microsoft due to having an existing reputation as a dominant cloud service provider while offering the most comprehensive suite of applications tailored to data ingestion, contextualization, and analysis. Google has been playing catch up to the other hyperscalers from a technological standpoint with their new updates (Data Engine and Connect Edge) already having counterparts at AWS and Microsoft, hindering their market share in comparison,” Iversen says.

New 2023 updates from AWS and Microsoft support this trend as comparable architectural structures, “fabric,” were released on their platforms for enhanced data connection, operability, and communication between applications. “Two key domains which are seeing significant investments are data packaging in the edge before uploading to the cloud and low/no code pipelines with reduced latency. Look to see Google, Alibaba, IBM, SAP, Tencent, and Oracle follow in step with these developments, advancing their solution offerings in these areas,” Iversen concludes. 

These findings are from ABI Research’s The Industrial Cloud: Data, Applications, and the Horsepower for the Modern Industrial Factory application analysis report. This report is part of the company’s Industrial and Manufacturing Technologies research service, which includes research, data, and ABI Insights. Based on extensive primary interviews, Application Analysis reports present an in-depth analysis on key market trends and factors for a specific application, which could focus on an individual market or geography.