According to Gartner, the public cloud services market is expected to witness 18.5 per cent growth in 2013 to total $131 billion worldwide. In 2012, the market touched $111 billion.
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), including cloud compute, storage and print services, continued as the fastest-growing segment of the market. As per the firm, this segment grew by 42.4 per cent in 2012 to touch $6.1 billion and is expected to grow by 47.3 per cent in 2013 to touch $9 billion.
Meanwhile, cloud advertising continues to be the largest segment of the cloud services market, comprising 48 per cent of the total market in 2012. Gartner estimates that between 2013 and 2016, $677 billion will be spent on cloud services worldwide, $310 billion of which will be spent on cloud advertising.
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 per cent of the total market in 2012, followed by cloud application services (software as a service [SaaS]) at 14.7 percent, cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS) at 5.5 percent, cloud management and security services at 2.8 percent, and cloud application infrastructure services (platform as a service [PaaS]) at 1 per cent.
Gartner adds that market dynamics vary substantially when considering the cloud services market size and market growth across 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.
North America is the largest region in the cloud services market, accounting for 59 per cent of all new spending on cloud services between 2013 and 2016. Western Europe, despite the growth challenges in the region, remains the second-largest region and will account for 24 per cent of all new spending during the same time period. However, the highest growth rates for cloud services continue to come from the emerging regions of Emerging Asia/Pacific (led by Indonesia and India), Greater China and Latin America (led by Argentina, Mexico and Brazil).
