What counts as a cloud company?

Almost every software company now delivers its products over the internet, so the label cloud company needs a clear definition. The Cloud Kings 10 ranks the ten largest publicly traded cloud service providers and cloud software companies worldwide. To qualify, a company must operate a substantial, identifiable cloud service or cloud-delivered software business.

Cloud does not have to be the majority of revenue

Some of the largest cloud businesses sit inside much bigger groups. Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud are each a minority of their parents' revenue, and Tencent Cloud sits inside a segment alongside payments. What matters is that the cloud business is substantial and can be identified in the company's own reporting. Merely using cloud technology is not enough.

Cloud software qualifies when it is central to the business

Adobe, Shopify and Intuit are eligible because cloud-delivered software is central to what they sell: Adobe's subscription creative and business software, Shopify's commerce platform and Intuit's online financial and business software. Tencent and IBM are eligible because they operate identifiable cloud businesses, Tencent Cloud and IBM's hybrid cloud business including Red Hat, even though neither company is mainly a cloud provider.

Related companies: close to the cloud, outside the ranking

Delivering a product over the internet does not make a company a cloud company. Specialists whose primary identity lies elsewhere are tracked as related companies and are not ranked. CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks are primarily cybersecurity companies. Palantir sells its software both through its own hosted cloud and on customers' premises, and does not disclose how much comes from each. If security software sold as a service qualified automatically, the ranking would soon include almost every software company.

Excluded: chipmakers and indirect cloud businesses

Chipmakers such as Nvidia, TSMC and Broadcom sell the hardware that cloud providers run on, but do not sell cloud services; Broadcom is excluded even though it owns VMware's software, because its semiconductor business is central to its identity. Data center landlords such as Equinix, and companies such as Meta that run vast data centers only for their own services, are excluded for the same reason: their connection to cloud computing is indirect.

Rules over results

The boundary is applied consistently, whatever its effect on the ranking. Every decision, its reasoning and the evidence behind it are published in our methodology and on each company's profile.