The end of the year is debriefing time. The other day Maxim Ageev (De Novo CEO, Ukrainian cloud provider) published his vision of the results of the year, to which Vladimir Pozdnyakov (CEO of DX Agent, ex-head of IDC Ukraine) did not agree with him and expressed his doubts. I disagree with both of them. The thoughts below are rather applicable for the CIS region rather than the US and Europe, but though have to be answered.

I don`t have exact numbers and detailed analytics, but the arguments of both authors have a pair of important nuances: first, they make the study of the Ukrainian market in a sort of disconnected manner; secondly, only well-known and obvious companies are taken into account.

Out of these two nuances, a conflict arises. The first thing to mention - not all Ukrainian companies pay for consumed services locally. Also, most of the enterprises do not attract public attention at all. For example, one of my ex-customers was in AppStore Top3 applications in the United States and even Google Play (here I could be mistaken) among entertainment apps, while the developing company was from a small city 800km away from Moscow. Or, another example - Ring, a company originally from Ukraine, paid directly to Amazon without the involvement of any local partners, and nobody didn’t know about the origin country until the e-commerce giant bought it.

So to the question - who is the winner of the Ukrainian cloud market? Global players like Azure, AWS, GCP, or local like De Novo or GigaCloud? The answer depends on what to cover. Indeed, Microsoft has strong sales channels, many years of experience, pricing flexibility, etc. And Azure subscription is added into Enterprise Agreement, which has a positive impact. From this point of view, it is a battle of two leaders - Azure and De Novo. As the main business is local their customers pay, of course, in Ukraine, either they pay to cloud aggregators. These are easy to evaluate and measure since customer names are public and well-known.

Let have a look at the other, dark, side: outsourcers, gaming companies (especially casual, very interesting topic and market, by the way), startups, and darken IT companies mentioned above. Those types of enterprises with young and beardy young people. Most of them hate Azure for technical moments (API changed as often as WinAPI used to) and prefer it to AWS and GCP. They did not even hear about De Novo, GigaCloud, and other local CSPs. These young people consider that everyone who is over 30 is a dinosaur, quietly creeping towards the nearest tomb (although this may be specific only of the CIS). Most of such enterprises for consumed services not to Ukrainian companies, but directly to the provider with US cards. Its impossible to spot them - try to uncover someone who doesnt want it. They are not referenced in the public use cases either. As a result, the sum of their spending on IT is impossible to measure or analyze.

Besides the vendors themselves are in the game. For now, let’s stop at the big three. Microsoft makes a focus on enterprise customers and invests a lot in evangelization among young people — everything is unchanged. GCP is young and cocky. It is the best in some areas, and the opposite in else, though aggressively closes the gaps. When you understand why to choose GCP - there is no better solution. If someone doesn`t know and does not understand - presales and sales will quickly demonstrate the quality of communication channels even in Ukraine, internal services developed into external products and will deprive any traces of doubt. And only AWS quietly, without attracting any kind of attention, harvests the market and pays attention only to encouraging and actively paying customers.

To complete the overview cloud managed services from HPE, IBM, and SaaS from companies such as SAP or Salesforce should be mentioned which Maxim Ageev politely missed in his review. Although it is difficult for me to estimate the revenues of SaaS-giants inside the Ukrainian market primarily because of the low share in total earnings. HPE and IBM, as the central players of managed services, feel great - it is worth remembering the move of DTEK (energy services enterprise) to the HPE cloud or IBM’s multi-year contract with Ukrsotsbank (owned by UniCredit Group at the mentioned period) which didnt last as long as planned. SAP cloud services are a long-term and huge investment and should be considered unique in UA. Overall, SaaS and managed services are yet another piece of the pie worth considering within the whole picture. Because the result is the same - provider takes away a customers IT functions and offers an abstraction of some part of the IT processes or the entire process/application entirely.

One of the authors declared the wise idea that AWS, Azure, GCP, in modern conditions, are cloud 2.0, while HPE, IBM - 1.0. Very good and reasonable thought. But there is one difference: from a technical point of view, clouds differ only in the management interface and the changes required for applications architecture and infrastructure (VPC, subnets, etc). Because, eventually, the idea behind the cloud for the customer, is flexibility, and for the provider-competent management of data center resources.

With this idea in mind, VMware Cloud on AWS and its brothers-in-law running in other clouds should be memorized. On the one hand, it’s cloud 2.0 - flexible, fast to provision, etc. On the other hand, it is 1.0 - what can be more usual than VMware stack, natively developed and supported, but running, in this case, on AWS hardware. But there is a vice versa chimera - AWS Outpost…

As an outcome: the analysis of modern IT of a single market of one country has become so complex and multifaceted that the only correct way to measure it does not exist. But the fact that the number of variables and parts in various areas sharply multiplied is no longer in question. It remains only to understand how to make such kind of analysis with all abovementioned.