Things are looking up for the IBM Cloud. As recently reported, both SugarCRM (News - Alert) and VMware are now bringing their respective CRM suite, and cloud-hosted desktops and apps, to Big Blue’s cloud.

IBM is among the cloud infrastructure market leaders, according to a February Synergy Research study, which named Amazon Web Services, Microsoft (News - Alert), Google, and Salesforce as the others. Amazon is the clear leader with 31 percent market share, and 63 percent year-over-year growth. Microsoft comes in next, at about 10 percent market share, but with impressive 124 percent year-over-year growth. IBM is next, at 7-8 percent market share and 57 percent year-over-year growth. Google (News - Alert) is just under 5 percent in terms of market share, but has 108 percent growth for this business. And Salesforce is just a bit behind that in terms of market share, and saw 40 percent year-over-year growth.

“The big four cloud operators are continuing to run away with the market,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy (News - Alert) Research Group. “The second tier of operators are either niche players, generalist IT service providers, or companies lacking the scale, focus and investment capabilities required to truly challenge the top four hyperscale cloud providers. This second tier includes Salesforce, Rackspace, Oracle, NTT, Fujitsu (News - Alert), Alibaba and HPE.”

As for SugarCRM, it offers a customer relationship management solution focused primarily on management reporting. Sugar coordinates the actions of customer-facing employees and equips them with the right information at the right time to transform the customer experience. Sports apparel company Marathon is among the users of the SugarCRM solution, which was recently named a winner of TMC and CUSTOMER magazine’s 2016 CRM Excellence Awards.

VMware is best known for its virtual machine technology. The company’s product portfolio includes a cloud-hosted virtual desktop solution called Horizon Air.