Cloud computing will continue to reshape the IT landscape over the next five years as spending on public IT cloud services expands at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.6 percent from $21.5 billion in 2010 to $72.9 billion in 2015. But the impact of cloud services will extend well beyond IT spending, according to research from IT analytics firm IDC. Cloud services are a critical component in a much larger transformation that IDC expects will drive IT industry growth for the next 25 years, the report said.

In 2015, public cloud services will account for 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, according to the report.

Software-oriented cloud services (SaaS) will account for roughly three quarters of all spending on public cloud IT services throughout the forecast. This includes all three software-oriented cloud categories, not just applications. Spending on hardware-oriented cloud services (servers and storage) will be largely driven by SaaS providers building out their infrastructure.

The United States will dominate overall spending throughout the forecast period, with nearly 50 percent of all public IT cloud services revenues coming from the U.S. in 2015. But regions outside the U.S. will show much stronger growth as cloud services adoption accelerates, the report found. In particular, IDC found that there are more cloud services vendors and greater end-user spending in Asia/Pacific and Western Europe than previously thought.

"Cloud services are interconnected with and accelerated by other disruptive technologies, including mobile devices, wireless networks, big data analytics and social networking," said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC. "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."

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