The public cloud services market is forecast to grow 18.5pc in 2013 to reach US$131bn worldwide, up from US$111bn in 2012, according to Gartner.
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), including cloud compute, storage and print services, continued as the fastest-growing segment of the market, growing 42.4pc in 2012 to US$6.1bn and expected to grow 47.3pc in 2013 to US$9bn.
Cloud advertising continues to be the largest segment of the cloud services market, comprising 48pc of the total market in 2012. Gartner predicts that from 2013 through 2016, US$677bn will be spent on cloud services worldwide, US$310bn of which will be spent on cloud advertising.
“The continued growth of the cloud services market will result from the adoption of cloud services for production systems and workloads, in addition to the development and testing scenarios that have led as the most prominent use case for public cloud services to date,” said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner.
“Evidence of this growth is found in the increasing demand for cloud services from end-user organisations, met by an increased supply of cloud services from suppliers.”
Strong demand
Although there is wide variation between cloud services market subsegments, strong demand is anticipated for all types of cloud services offerings.
The cloud business process services segment (BPaaS) is the second-largest market segment after cloud advertising, comprising 28pc of the total market in 2012, followed by cloud application services (software as a service [SaaS]) at 14.7pc, cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS) at 5.5pc, cloud management and security services at 2.8pc, and cloud application infrastructure services (platform as a service [PaaS]) at 1pc.
North America is the largest region in the cloud services market, accounting for 59pc of all new spending on cloud services from 2013 through 2016.
Western Europe, despite the growth challenges in the region, remains the second-largest region and will account for 24pc of all new spending during the same time period.
“Although forecast growth is generally high across all regions, the adoption of cloud services varies significantly by country. Providers should not assume that a generic strategy applied to specific countries or regions of the world will produce the same outcome when applied to other countries, even countries with similar market characteristics.
“Local economic factors, regulatory issues, the local political climate, the diverse landscape of global and local providers, including non-cloud providers, and other country-specific factors ensure a unique marketplace in each country and region,” Anderson said.
