The Battle for Cloud Marketshare in Oregon

Oregon has always been well known for its timber industry.  Indeed at one point in the 1970s fully 12% of the States GDP was produced by timber.  While timber's former dominance is not a surprise, many people are surprised to learn that Oregon’s high tech sector is so prevalent.  By some 2015 estimates, high tech in Oregon could be calculated at up to 25% of GDP.

Given the huge footprint of tech broadly in Oregon the opportunity to optimize for the cloud is significant.  And with that in mind, we will be publishing a series of interviews with Oregon-based CIOs and other cloud decision makers to talk about their process for choosing the right cloud provider.  Needs vary, as do existing relationships and the incentives different providers are willing to offer.  We will share individual stories and well as collate a broader narrative on the usage of AWS, Azure, GCP - and other cloud providers in Oregon.

Our Cloud Story

Metal Toad is an AWS Consulting Partner with deep roots in Oregon. Our first major launch on the cloud was was in 2013 with a well-known televised award show. Globally at that time, the total cloud market share in 2013 had just broken $1B. Two years later in 2015 cloud revenue had tripled. This same year Elemental, which was born in Portland, Oregon, became a part of AWS. 

Accelerating Cloud Growth

In 2018, global cloud revenue was $36B - 4 times larger than what analysts were predicting in 2015.  And for the past three years cloud has tripled its revenue every year; in Q1 of 2016 the total market was $8B and in the Q1 of 2019 revenue was $24B.

Why the Cloud Continues to Grow

The reason for the success is simple: the cloud makes it cost effective to build software that even a few years ago would have been impossible to imagine. The benefit for large enterprises, like the ones many of you work at is even bigger as corporate discounts offer huge cost savings vs managing internal IT infrastructure and the associated code. By some estimates, business that take advantage of the cloud grow 20% faster. 

AWS Lambda, launched in 2014, ushering in the possibility of architecting serverless applications, and today AWS offers more than 170 products and services.  Our job at Metal Toad as a cloud consulting partner is to make these complex, powerful systems simple to deploy.  We also help our customers stay up on the latest in the industry - and we are looking forward to sharing stories from the Cloud in Oregon.

Oregon Tech Leadership Stories

• Cloud + Manufacturing
• Cloud + Healthcare (OHSU)

Who is Metal Toad? Learn more about this Oregon AWS Consultancy.