BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Cloud computing, wherein Amazon and Microsoft are the most important gamers adopted by Alphabet’s Google, does not pose competitors concerns yet due to Europe’s Gaia-X initiative, EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager mentioned on Monday.
Cloud computing providers have seen demand soar, pushed partially by the COVID-19 pandemic.
They have turn out to be an enormous driver of progress on the huge tech corporations, with AWS producing 13% of Amazon’s income final 12 months and 74% of its working earnings whereas Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud unit, of which Azure is an enormous chunk, introduced in 37% of its general gross sales.
The market energy of the large corporations has sparked unease at smaller rivals lately, with German software program supplier SubsequentCloud, France’s OVHcloud and two different corporations submitting complaints about Microsoft’s cloud practices to Vestager.
“No, to this point we have had no concerns,” Vestager instructed Reuters in an interview when requested if she was apprehensive about corporations probably abusing their dominance.
She mentioned Gaia-X, a undertaking to create safe and environment friendly cloud knowledge that seeks to scale back the EU bloc’s dependence on Silicon Valley giants, would enhance competitors.
“This just isn’t one thing that we’re engaged in, however I mainly see it as pro-competitive when you might have somebody to point out potential clients that there are greater than two giants the place you’ll be able to place your corporation,” she mentioned.
An business examine final 12 months cited respondents apprehensive about unfair phrases imposed by some software program corporations to entry their cloud infrastructure, unfair licence phrases and bundling of software program merchandise with cloud infrastructure providers.
Microsoft has mentioned that it makes its software program out there to clients throughout all environments, together with these of different cloud suppliers.
(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Nick Macfie)
