SAN FRANCISCO: Global spend on cloud services hit US$233.4 billion last year according to analyst firm IDC. The researcher said the big five cloud companies AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Google, and Oracle accounted for 35 percent of that revenue and grew faster than the companies trying to catch up, such as IBM and Intel.

By contrast, the entire cloud market grew by 26 percent.

In cheeky comparison IDC also pointed out global cloud spend surpassed the combined revenue of Cisco ($51.9bn), Dell ($90.6bn), HPE ($30.1bn) and Lenovo ($51.4bn), which collectively hauled in $224bn.

IDC said Software as a Service was the largest of the three cloud segments, accounting for a spend of $122bn.

While SaaS is the top category by spend, it is growing more slowly than Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service.

IDC says SaaS will get a boost from the COVID-19 pandemic and IaaS and PaaS will also see increased spending.