Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud services division, reached a $5 billion value in less than 10 years and shows no signs of slowing growth, according to the Forbes report. On the other hand, IBM’s cloud services are a $7.7 billion business. IBM’s cloud services are growing at 75 percent, outstripping Amazon Web Services’ 50 percent growth.
Though Amazon Web Services has a diverse portfolio of companies, ranging from video streaming service giant Netflix to small startups, IBM is actively competing. The Forbes article points out that IBM acquired a key cloud services competitor, Softlayer, and launched its “software as a service” platform Bluemix. IBM is looking at the cloud business from a broad perspective. As the Forbes article put it, “IBM is creating an app store for the cloud at an enterprise scale.”
Healthcare holds a relatively small slice of the cloud computing market, with an expected value of $5.4 billion by 2017, but technology adoption in the medical field is hitting feverish levels. Meaningful use and ICD-10, just two factors amongst many, are driving healthcare professionals on the provider, payer and vendor side to adopt and create new technologies every day, many of which are cloud-based.
Amazon and IBM have both made significant strides in healthcare. During its tumultuous launch, Healthcare.gov transitioned a number of its functions to Amazon’s cloud computing services. IBM recently introduced IBM Watson Health and the Watson Health Cloud, a significant move into the healthcare IT space. Which company will eventually prove to be dominate in the global market, and healthcare space, remains to be seen.
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