— CLOUD WARS — Highlighting one of the greatest growth markets the tech business has ever seen, just a handful of the world's leading cloud vendors are on pace to generate $100 billion in combined enterprise-cloud revenue this calendar year
— Extrapolating from recent financial results, growth rates, market momentum and particularly the insatiable appetite among business customers for cloud services, I'm estimating that Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle and Google will combine for at least $100 billion in enterprise-cloud revenue in calendar 2018
— But IaaS is only a slice of the enterprise cloud—and when you add in the other layers of PaaS and SaaS and arrive at total enterprise-cloud revenue rather than just a portion of it, Amazon is no longer the top player
— All-in on the enterprise cloud, the clear #1 player is Microsoft, which for the trailing 12 months ending March 31 posted revenue of $20.8 billion while Amazon's total for the same 12-month period was $19.24 billion and IBM's was $17.7 billion
— So as of today—141 days into 2018—here's how I'm projecting these 10 major cloud vendors will finish 2018 ranked by enterprise-cloud revenue: INTO THE STRATOSPHERE Estimated 2018 Enterprise-Cloud Revenue for Top Vendors Microsoft $28.3 Billion Amazon $26.1 Billion IBM $20.1 Billion Salesforce $12.2 Billion Oracle $6.4 Billion SAP $5.9 Billion Google $4.5 Billion ServiceNow $2.8 Billion Workday $2.7 Billion VMware $2.0 Billion Here are some key points for each of those top vendors as they battle it out over the next 224 days in the Cloud Wars: Microsoft: In a recent conversation about the enterprise-cloud market, corporate VP Julia White reminded me, "Remember—if you think of the enterprise-cloud market as a bell curve, we're only just beginning to approach the fat part."