(NOTE: This story was originally posted to CRN.com May 4.)

Who's The Leader? And What About Other Players?

Amazon, Microsoft and Google -- the three leading public cloud providers -- all released earnings figures last week that seemed to buoy investor confidence while no doubt pleasing their channel partners.

The three rivals are locked in a heated battle to control the public cloud, a market that's exploding at an almost 50 percent growth rate. Sales for Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and hosted private cloud are approaching $10 billion in quarterly revenue, according to a recent analysis by Synergy Research.

In the concurrent earnings calls for the quarter, which ended March 31, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky each extolled the capabilities of their respective cloud offerings.

But it's worth noting that the Big 3, as they've come to be known, aren't the only players left standing in the industry. While IBM's recent earnings call certainly didn't generate the same kind of enthusiasm on Wall Street, Big Blue has a strong share of the market Synergy evaluated due to its private cloud hosting business. Oracle and Alibaba are also growing fast and trying to make inroads.