Gartner Raises Forecast For Public Cloud Services

IT researcher Gartner reported on 19 September that the global appetite for public cloud services is ramping up faster than it and other analysts expected.

The subscription web services market is now forecast to grow 19.6 percent in 2012 to total $109 billion (£67bn) worldwide, Gartner said in a report. Business process services (also known as business process as a service, or BPaaS) represent the largest segment, accounting for about 77 percent of the total market.

Prioritising investments will be key

Past studies showed that cloud services were projected to grow 12 percent to 15 percent in 2012, with expected increases in 2013 through 2015.

As has been reported here in eWEEK previously, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is the fastest-growing segment of the public cloud services market; that sector is expected to grow a whopping 45.4 percent in 2012.

“The cloud services market is clearly a high-growth sector within the overall IT marketplace,” said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner. “The key to taking advantage of this growth will be understanding the nuances of the opportunity within service segments and geographic regions, and then prioritising investments in line with the opportunities.”

Advertising nearly half of cloud spending

BPaaS is the largest segment primarily because of the inclusion of cloud advertising as a subsegment, Gartner said. BPaaS is forecast to grow to $84.2 billion in 2012, up from $72 billion in 2011. In 2011, cloud advertising represented about 47 percent of the total public cloud services market, making it the biggest identifiable subsegment in the forecast, Gartner said.

Through 2016, cloud advertising will continue to account for about 47 percent of total public cloud services spending, Gartner said.

Software as a service (SaaS) is the next-largest segment and is forecast to grow to $14.4 billion in 2012, while IaaS is forecast to grow from $4.3 billion in 2011 to $6.2 billion in 2012. In 2010, the IaaS market was less than one-third the size of the SaaS market. By 2016, the IaaS market will grow to almost equal the size of the SaaS market.

How much do you know about YouTube? Take our quiz.