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Amazon Web Services is considered the market leader in cloud computing because of its dominance in the infrastructure space, such as computing power and storage services that enable other applications.

But it still lags behind its biggest competitors, like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle, in one major piece of cloud computing: business applications, more broadly called software as a service, or SaaS.

In a recent survey of this sector bySynergy Research Group, five companies Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle, and SAP accounted for over 50% of the market. AWS, meanwhile, failed to crack the top 20.

"For SaaS, AWS is more of a channel to market for software vendors rather than a SaaS provider in its own right," John Dinsdale, Synergy's chief analyst and research director, told Insider.

For AWS, it's a big market to miss out on. The market for business applications, including everything from Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce sales and marketing software to Zoom's videoconferencing app, is forecast to be the largest segment among all cloud services, reaching $145.4 billion in 2022,according to Gartner.

Amazon is aware of this. For years, the company has tried to build and grow its own applications business, across email, word processing, and video conferencing, to name a few. But those efforts have so far failed to gain traction, both internally and externally, as Insider previously reported.

To solve this, Amazon recently discussed the idea of acquiring a more high-profile software company to make a splash. Among the list of companies discussed was HubSpot, the $40 billion marketing software maker, as Insider previously reported.

"We have several applications that are very large successes," Amazon's representative wrote in a statement to Insider, highlighting Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon AppStream, which support tens of thousands of active customers. "Others are earlier in their journey, but we continue to believe they have meaningful potential."

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Amazon Way Behind Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle in Cloud Software - Business Insider