Public Cloud Spending to Jump 24% in 2017

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The cloud market just keeps rising.

Public cloud services and infrastructure providers are poised to rake in $122.5 billion this year, a 24.4-percent increase compared to 2016, predicted IDC. And there are no signs of it slowing down, at least not in the next few years.

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“In 2017, discrete manufacturing, professional services, and banking will lead the pack in global spending on public cloud services as they look for greater scalability, higher performance, and faster access to new technologies,” said Eileen Smith, program director of Customer Insights and Analysis at IDC, in a statement. “Combined, these three industries will account for one third of worldwide public cloud services spending, or $41.2 billion.”

cloud computing growth

The analyst firm expects cloud spending to cross over the $203 billion mark by 2020. That figure representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.5 percent during the forecast period (2015 – 2020), or roughly seven times the IT spending growth rate overall.

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) segment will be the market’s biggest earner this year, generating nearly two-thirds of all revenues. By 2020, it will remain the cloud leader with an estimated 60 percent. Although they’ll trail behind SaaS in terms of market size, both the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) segments will outpace SaaS when it comes to growth, attaining CAGRs of 30.1 percent and 32.2 percent, respectively.

Very large enterprises, defined by IDC as having more than 1,000 employees, will generate half of all cloud spending throughout the forecast. Midsized businesses, with 100-499 workers, will drive 20 percent of the market. These organizations will flock to cloud-delivered customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource management (ERM) software, IDC expects.

In the meantime, the emergence of intelligent, Internet of Things-enabled services will have a transformative impact on the cloud, its capabilities and how businesses consume it, said IDC senior vice president and chief analyst Frank Gens.

“As cloud adoption expands over the next four years, what clouds are and what they can do will evolve dramatically – in several important ways. The cloud will become more distributed (through Internet of Things edge services and multicloud services), more trusted, more intelligent, more industry and workload specialized, and more channel mediated,” stated Gens. “As the cloud evolves these important new capabilities – what IDC calls ‘Cloud 2.0’ – the use cases for the cloud will dramatically expand.”

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.