By Charlene O'Hanlon

Service providers in the cloud computing space will rake in more than 10 percent of all IT services spending this year, according to a recent survey from Gartner.

For its report, User Survey Analysis: Cloud-Computing Budgets Are Growing and Shifting; Traditional IT Services Providers Must Prepare or Perish,” the research firm surveyed more than 480 IT professionals on their cloud computing spending habits both now and in the future. Almost 40 percent of the respondents said cloud services was considered a key initiative for their company.

Of that spending, one-third was a continuation from the previous budget year, while another third was incremental spending new to the companys IT budget. Interestingly, 14 percent noted the money for cloud computing initiatives had been diverted from a different budget category in the previous year, the survey noted.

Of those companies with a budget allotted for cloud computing, 46 percent said they planned to increase the use of cloud services from external providers  further proof of a fundamental shift in the IT community toward utilizing service providers for non mission-critical applications and services.

The trends are good news for IT services providers that have professional services geared to implementing cloud environments and those that deliver cloud services,” said Bob Igou, research director at Gartner. It is bad news for technology providers and IT services firms that are not investing and gearing up to deliver these new services seeing an increased demand by buyers.”

Of note also was the preference in cloud architectures: 43 percent expected an increase in spending for private cloud implementations that are for internal or restricted use of the enterprise, compared with 32 percent for external or public cloud implementations.