Amazon, Salesforce lead cloud revenue race

Cloud services revenue checked in at $45.7 billion in 2013 and will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23 percent through 2018, according to IDC. Meanwhile, Salesforce and Amazon lead the cloud race.

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IDC reported that cloud software spending---software as a service primarily with a bit of platform as a service---accounted for 86 percent of the cloud revenue pie. Cloud infrastructure---compute, storage and the like---was 14 percent of revenue.

What was more notable is IDC's cloud pecking order. For instance, the SaaS market was led by Salesforce and doesn't surprise anyone. The No. 2 SaaS provider was ADP followed by Intuit. ADP is a massive HR/payroll SaaS player that doesn't get a ton of play. Oracle was No. 4 followed by Microsoft at No. 5.

In PaaS, Amazon was the leader with Salesforce and Microsoft tied at No. 2. GXS and Google were No. 4 and No. 5, respectively.

For infrastructure as a service (IaaS) there wasn't any surprises. Amazon has 40 percent share in that market. Rackspace, IBM, CenturyLink and Microsoft round out the field.

The U.S. dominates the cloud and accounts for 68 percent of the overall market. Through 2018, the U.S. share will continue to dominate, but drop to 59 percent.