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Of the future of cloud management until cloud spend in the age of machine learningour newest cloud investor research has given me much food for thought. It came to mind again when I read a new report on cloud marketplaces. These have been consolidated as a new source of income, but is it ever too early for startups to go that route? Let’s look at it. — Anna

Where’s the money?

The sky is the limit for the cloud market. If Alphabet’s third-quarter revenue has beaten expectations, it’s certainly not due to Google Cloud, whose revenue grew 37.64% year-over-year from $4.990 billion to $6.868 billion last quarter. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s “Azure and other cloud services” grew 35%.

One of the key factors making cloud revenue resilient, even in a more bleak macroeconomic context, is dedicated spending. This not only creates tailwinds for AWS and its competitors, but also independent software vendors selling through their marketplaces.