Public Cloud Spending To Top $127 Billion by 2018
Just four years from now, public IT cloud services will account for more than half of worldwide software, server, and storage spending growth.
That’s according to a new prediction from International Data Corp (IDC), which says cloud-services spending will hit $56.6 billion this year, then more than double, to $127 billion, by 2018.
With a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 23 percent, public IT cloud services spending will be six times that of the overall IT market, IDC said. The driving factors include the adoption of “cloud first” strategies. IDC sees the cloud services market entering a “innovation stage” that is expected to bring new solutions and value creation on top of the cloud.
“Over the next four to five years, IDC expects the community of developers to triple and to create a ten-fold increase in the number of new cloud-based solutions,” said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC. “Many of these solutions will become more strategic than traditional IT has ever been. At the same time, there will be unprecedented competition and consolidation among the leading cloud providers. This combination of explosive innovation and intense competition will make the next several years a pivotal period for current and aspiring IT market leaders.”
Software as a service (SaaS) will continue to dominate public IT cloud services spending, accounting for 70 percent of 2014 cloud-services expenditures, says IDC. The second-largest public IT cloud services category will be infrastructure as a service (IaaS), boosted by cloud storage’s 31 percent CAGR over the forecast period. Platform as a service (PaaS) and cloud storage services will be the fastest growing categories, driven by major upticks in developer cloud services adoption and big data-driven solutions, respectively.
