Public Cloud Services To Hit $72.9 Billion In 2015: IDC
Spending on public IT cloud services will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 27.6 percent from $21.5 billion last year to $72.9 billion in 2015, IDC said; that growth is four times the rate of the global IT market as a whole. IDC added that cloud services will also play a pivotal role in a massive IT industry shift over the next 25 years.
"Cloud services are interconnected with and accelerated by other disruptive technologies, including mobile devices, wireless networks, big data analytics, and social networking," Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC, said in a statement. "Together, these technologies are merging into the industry's third major platform for long-term growth. As during the mainframe and PC eras, the new platform promises to radically expand the users and uses of information technology, leading to a wide and entirely new variety of intelligent industry solutions."
Solution providers who offer public cloud services said they've already experienced massive public cloud growth and now that the technology is becoming mainstream, it will continue to infiltrate the market.
"[T]he momentum public cloud has will be difficult to stop or slow down. This is now mainstream. It's here to stay," Tony Safoian, CEO of SADA Systems, a North Hollywood, Calif.-based cloud solution provider, said recently.
Public cloud services have gathered steam on the backs of cloud players like Amazon and Google. But major IT vendors, too, have diverted their strategies from private, or internal clouds to public cloud computing offers. HP recently revealed, albeit accidentally, its plans to enter public cloud arena. And IT mainstay Dell is said to be hashing out a true public cloud plan. Others, like IBM have also put their public cloud stakes in the ground.
According to IDC figures, $1 of every $7 spent on packaged software, servers and storage in 2015 will be somehow related to the public cloud model. Additionally, the winners of the cloud platform wars will likely be new power brokers in the IT industry.
Public cloud services will represent 46 percent of net new growth in overall IT spending in five key product categories: applications, application development and deployment, systems infrastructure software, basic storage and servers, IDC said.
Meanwhile, SaaS will account for about three quarters of all public cloud services spending and spending on hardware-oriented cloud services like serves and storage will be driven by SaaS providers bulking up their infrastructures.
Geographically, the U.S. will dominate overall spending with nearly 50 percent of all public cloud services revenues coming from the U.S. in 2015. Regions outside the U.S., however, will show much stronger growth as a cloud adoption accelerates. For example, IDC found that there are more cloud services vendors and greater user spending in Asia Pacific and Western Europe than previous estimates indicated.