With the adoption of cloud computing continuing to occur in the enterprise, analysts see continued growth in both public and private cloud investment, with public the public cloud market set to reach nearly $100 billion by 2016.
According to IDC, worldwide spending on public IT cloud services will be more than $40 billion in 2012 and is expected to approach $100 billion in 2016. IDC forecasts that from 2012 to 2016, public IT cloud services will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26.4 percent — five times that of the IT industry overall, as companies accelerate their shift to the cloud services model for IT consumption.
"The IT industry is in the midst of an important transformative period as companies invest in the technologies that will drive growth and innovation over the next two to three decades," said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC, in a statement. "By the end of the decade, IDC expects at least 80 percent of the industry’s growth, and enterprises’ highest-value leverage of IT, will be driven by cloud services and the other third Platform technologies."
By 2016, public IT cloud services will account for 16 percent of IT revenue in five key technology categories: applications, system infrastructure software, platform as a service (PaaS), servers, and basic storage, IDC said. More significantly, cloud services will generate 41 percent of all growth in these categories by 2016.
Software as a service (SaaS) will claim the largest share of public IT cloud services spending over the next five years, but other categories — notably basic storage and Platform-as-a-service (PaaS), will show faster growth, IDC said. Accelerating PaaS rollouts over the next 12-18 months will be critical to maintaining strong cloud momentum, according to IDC.
Geographically, the United States will remain the largest public cloud services market, followed by Western Europe and Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan). But the fastest growth in public IT services spending will be in the emerging markets, which will see its collective share nearly double by 2016 when it will account for almost 30 percent of net-new public IT cloud services spending growth, IDC said in its study, Worldwide and Regional Public IT Cloud Services 2012-2016 Forecast.
IDC defines public IT cloud services as those offerings designed for, and commercially offered to, a largely unrestricted marketplace of potential users. The forecast does not include revenue from private cloud deployments, which are dedicated to a specific customer. While private clouds provide the customer with the ability to specify access limitations and the level of resource dedication beyond what is currently available in public cloud offerings, IDC’s expectation is that public clouds will mature and eventually incorporate many of the capabilities — particularly security and availability — that make private clouds an attractive option today.
Meanwhile, as the public cloud market will be growing at a CAGR of 26.4 percent through 2016, the private cloud market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 21.5 percent through 2015, according to research distributed by ReportLinker.com.
To read the original eWeek article, click here: Public, Private Cloud Markets Set to Soar as Enterprise Adoption Grows