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With Alphabet ( GOOGL )-owned Google Cloud Platform snaring more major customers, there’s a three-company race between it,  Amazon ( AMZN ) Web Services and  Microsoft ( MSFT ) Azure that will only intensify. Cowen & Co. analyst John Blackledge wrote in a report on Thursday, after the first day of the Google Cloud Platform Next Conference in San Francisco, that “our sense from talking to potential customers at the event is that they are giving Google Cloud Platform another look.” Blackledge said press reports have highlighted “recent wins” for Google’s cloud business, including Spotify, Coca-Cola Enterprises ( CCE ) and Snapchat, which “were featured prominently in customer use-case discussions. Other customers include Home Depot ( HD ), Electronic Arts ( EA ), Zulily, Sony ( SNE ) Music, HTC, Best Buy ( BBY ), TiVo ( TIVO ), Wix ( WIX ), Philips ( PHG ), Volkswagen ‘s ( VLKAY ) Audi, (and Tata Group’s) Jaguar and Range Rover,” Blackledge said. Public clouds “are likely to be a highly competitive market where customer stickiness will be challenged by new technologies that make it easier to move workloads between public cloud vendors,” Macquarie Research analyst Ben Schachter wrote in industry research note on Wednesday. “It clearly has become a major focus area for Google and one in which it intends to compete directly against Amazon and Microsoft.” Competition between the three groups will rise “particularly as enterprises become increasingly comfortable migrating select workloads to public cloud environments,” according to Cloud Computing Today . Cloud services is “a $25 billion jump ball” that will likely be captured by the big three competitors: Alphabet’s Google Cloud Platform, Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure, Pacific Crest Securities analyst Evan Wilson said in a Wednesday industry research note. “With it being early in this opportunity, we think there will be wins and losses along the way, but we believe (Google) will be a significant competitor in the years to come, and it could help drive growth.” Apple recently signed a contract worth between $400 million and $600 million to use Google’s Cloud Platform, according to CRN . Apple now uses cloud services from Amazon and Microsoft, but it intends to end its reliance on all its rivals in the next few years as it builds its own data centers, according to Re/Code. In February, music service Spotify, a high-profile customer of Amazon’s Amazon Web Services, said it would use  Google’s cloud for some computing infrastructure. Google’s cloud business generated about $500 million in revenues last year, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs, as cited by Reuters . That compares with $74.5 billion overall for parent company Alphabet, but the cloud business is one of its fastest-growing business areas. Overall, Reuters said Google ranks as the No. 4 player in the cloud infrastructure industry, with 4% of the market last year, according to Synergy Research. Amazon’s Amazon Web Services had a 31% share, Microsoft’s Azure had a 9% share, and IBM ( IBM ) had 7%, according to the group. Google is also building up its data centers across the world, launching two new regional centers in Japan and Oregon to bring the number of regions it serves to five. Cloud computing is an increasingly popular way for companies to run their IT operations, and the $20-billion-a-year business is forecast to grow 35% over the next year, according to Gartner Inc. Alphabet stock was down a fraction in late afternoon trading in the stock market today , near 755. Microsoft stock was up a fraction, near 54. Apple stock was down marginally, near 106, and Amazon stock was up more than 2%, near 581.