Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.
From the future of cloud management to cloud spend in the age of machine learning, our latest cloud investor survey has given me lots of food for thought. It once again came to mind when I read a new report on cloud marketplaces. These have consolidated as a new revenue avenue, but is it ever too early for startups to go that route? Let’s look into it. — Anna
Where the money’s at
The sky’s the limit for the cloud market. If Alphabet’s earnings missed expectations in Q3, it is certainly not because of Google Cloud, whose revenue grew 37.64% year on year last quarter, from $4.990 billion to $6.868 billion. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s “Azure and other cloud services” grew 35%.
One of the key factors that make cloud revenue resilient even in a more morose macroeconomic context is committed spend. This creates tailwinds not just for AWS and its competitors, but also for independent software vendors selling through their marketplaces.
