The public cloud services market is forecast to grow 18.5% in 2013 to total $131 billion worldwide, up from $111 billion in 2012, according to a report.
The Gartner report also said infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) including cloud compute, storage, and print services, is still the fastest-growing segment of the market, growing 42.4% in 2012 to $6.1 billion and expected to grow 47.3 % in 2013 to $9 billion.
Cloud advertising continues to be the largest segment of the cloud services market, comprising 48% of the total market in 2012. Gartner predicts that from 2013 through 2016, $677 billion will be spent on cloud services worldwide, $310 billion of which will be spent on cloud advertising.
“The continued growth of the cloud services market will result from the adoption of cloud services for production systems and workloads, in addition to the development and testing scenarios that have led as the most prominent use case for public cloud services to date,” said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner. “Evidence of this growth is found in the increasing demand for cloud services from end-user organizations, met by an increased supply of cloud services from suppliers.”
Although there is wide variation between cloud services market sub-segments, strong demand is anticipated for all types of cloud services offerings.
The cloud business process services segment (BPaaS) is the second-largest market segment after cloud advertising, comprising 28% of the total market in 2012, followed by cloud application services (software-as- a-service [SaaS]) at 14.7%, cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS) at 5.5 %, cloud management and security services at 2.8 %, and cloud application infrastructure services (platform as a service [PaaS]) at one %.
Market dynamics vary substantially when considering the cloud services market size and market growth across the different regions of the world.
In general, the emerging markets in Asia/Pacific, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa show the highest growth rates, while representing the smallest overall markets. China is the exception, being both a large and growing market. Likewise, the mature markets of North America, Western Europe, Japan and the mature Asia/Pacific countries constitute the larger, but slower-growth, markets.