Amazon, Google and Microsoft vying for Uber's cloud business

Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM are reported to be bidding for Uber's cloud service. Uber has already started testing some cloud services, a person familiar with the matter told The Information.

According to the report, Uber's technology is "vendor-neutral". The company could have different partners in different regions, depending on the where they have data centres. In China, Uber is said to be considering regional partners such as Alibaba or Baidu. Uber is planning to move only a small chunk of its code into the cloud.

Uber's strategy is to expand its reach across the globe, observes the Business Insider. Google, Amazon and Microsoft are among the leading vendors in the cloud market and all trying to dominate the business.

Officially launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently a $7bn (£4.8bn) business and is a major player in cloud computing service. A listing by Statista, using data from Wikibon, suggests that Amazon dominates the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market, beating Microsoft, IBM, Google, Oracle and several others.

Ed Anderson, Gartner research vice president of Cloud Services, said: "It's kind of a 'Field of Dreams' scenario. They built it, and everybody came."

Microsoft and IBM are among the leaders in the cloud market and have worked with big businesses. Although Microsoft had been working with the cloud concept since the mid-2000s, it released its Azure cloud computing service officially only in 2010. Cloud computing is now one of its major revenue earners.

Google, under the leadership of its new cloud boss Diane Greene, is planning to boost its cloud business to compete with Amazon. "With Diane [Greene] coming in, we're on a journey to bring those worlds together," said Greg Demichillie, director of product management, at Google.