Darryl Taft of eWeek reports on the predicted growth areas for public cloud computing in a recent article.
Analysts predict that worldwide spending on public IT cloud services is set to exceed $40 billion in 2012 and reach nearly $100 billion by 2016. The United States will continue to be the largest market for public cloud services followed by Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, excluding Japan. Other findings include:
- By 2016, Public IT cloud services will account for 16% of IT revenue in applications, system infrastructure software, platform as a service (PaaS), servers and basic storage. Analysts predict cloud services will generate 41% of all growth in these categories.
- Software as a service (SaaS) will claim the largest share of public IT cloud spending.
- Public cloud computing services will see a compound annual growth rate of 26.4% which is five times that of the IT industry overall.
- Accelerating PaaS rollouts over the next 12 to 18 months will be critical to maintaining strong cloud momentum.
In another report focused on the private cloud market, analysts expect that market to have a compound annual growth rate of 21.5% through 2015. Leading applications include virtualization tools with 37% market share, infrastructure virtualization and business purpose virtualization tools. Analysts expect middleware to become a high growth area in the future.
