Tis earnings season, so cloud revenue and growth claims will fly fast and furious. The inability to compare vendors on an apples-to-apples basis can be frustrating. But by focusing on companies’ primary activities, and excluding their immaterial businesses, the sources of revenue for both the major hyperscale cloud providers and the remaining wannabes are easy to understand:
The diagram above illustrates the five distinct sources of cloud revenue: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Hot Air about Services (HaaS) and Snapchat.