Analyst firm Technology Business Research (TBR) has released its “4Q13 Public Cloud Benchmark” report of 50 public cloud vendors. In the report, TBR noted that public cloud revenue grew 47.4 percent year over year to $6.2 billion. Meanwhile, market growth for overall public cloud services rose 25.6 percent to $15.1 billion.

Cost savings, ease of use, interoperability and the overall acceptance of public clouds by both vendors and customers drove market growth, according to TBR. In addition, researchers said that they expect large IT vendors to drive public cloud consolidation through acquisitions this year.

“With the acquisition landscape relatively quiet over the past six months, leading public cloud vendors are evolving go-to-market strategies to embrace ecosystem-led approaches that are needed to increase reach and serve the broadest markets,” Jillian Mirandi, Senior Analyst for TBR’s Cloud Practice, said in a prepared statement. “A large and diverse ISV (independent software vendor) partner base will help tailor products vertically and horizontally, increasing vendors’ stickiness, while C&SI (Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure) alliances help create new use cases and improve overall value propositions.”

TBR said that IBM is likely to follow its February acquisition of distributed Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) provider Cloudant with additional niche vendor acquisitions to expand its cloud presence. HP and Cisco also are expected to make notable public cloud acquisitions of hybrid integration, cloud management and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) vendors to complement their businesses.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as Salesforce.com and Box are increasingly relying on the public cloud to tailor their core solutions to verticals, TBR said. IaaS providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google, on the other hand, are expanding C&SI alliances to improve their services and meet enterprise customers’ demands.

TBR anticipates that public cloud vendors across multiple cloud segments will prioritize investments in business intelligence (BI), analytics and big data use cases in 2014 in the hopes of expanding their reach and improving their sales and marketing strategies. Researchers pointed out that public IaaS vendors such as GoGrid, Microsoft, Rackspace and AWS already have invested in technological collaborations with BI, Hadoop and NoSQL database providers to optimize their IaaS portfolios for running and analyzing big data workloads in the cloud.