Amazon's cloud business is still crushing Microsoft and Google in the small business market (AMZN)

Amazon Web Services is now a massive $10 billion annual revenue business with customers in all sectors, including the highly-regulated public and financial industries.

But AWS got its start by giving smaller startups an easy option to rent cloud servers instead of building their own data centers, significantly reducing the cost of firing up a new service.

And it looks like AWS still absolutely owns the small and medium sized cloud app service market, according to a new survey published by Pacific Crest last week.

Pacific Crest surveyed about 300 companies with a 2015 median revenue of $5 million. A whopping 50% of the respondents picked AWS as their choice of cloud service. That compares to Microsoft's 4% share and Salesforce's 2% share this year. The "Other Third Party" category, which likely included Google's cloud service, accounted for 10% of the respondents.

Perhaps what's more impressive is that AWS is expected to further widen its lead to 64% of the market in three years, as the chart on the right shows. In last year's survey, AWS accounted for just 40% of the market.

Matt Weinberger

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