Overall public cloud market will grow 18 percent in 2017, according to the latest forecast by market research firm Gartner. The market is projected to be dominated by public cloud infrastructure that hosts the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model.
Gartner predicts that the worldwide market for public cloud services will reach $246.8 billion this year, up from $209.2 billion in 2016. Of the total services, demand for IaaS is estimated to grow 36.8 percent to hit whopping $34.6 billion. This market segment includes services through cloud computing, such as basic computing, networking and storage services deployed in data centres. These services are mainly driven by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
“While all external-sourcing decisions will not result in a virtually automatic move to the cloud, buyers are looking to the ‘cloud first’ in their decisions, in support of time-to-value impact and speed of implementation,” said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner.
After IaaS, Gartner’s report shows Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as the next most dominated market segment in the public cloud field. The SaaS segment is predicted to grow about 20 percent to $46.3 billion.
Tech companies are majorly using the nascent SaaS model to mark growth and reach more customers. Services such as Google G Suite, Dropbox and Microsoft Office 365 are some of the leading SaaS offerings in the current market.
Spending faster than SaaS
A recent report by IDC contrarily showed SaaS as the dominant cloud computing model. However, the firm believes spending on IaaS would grow at a faster pace than SaaS, with five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30.1 percent.
IDC estimated that public cloud services would grow 24.4 percent year-over-year to $122.5 billion this year.
“As cloud adoption expands over the next four years, 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 specialised and more channel mediated,” Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC had said.
China as an important market
Gartner considers that China has become a significant IaaS cloud market. The Chinese region is foretold to maintain high levels of growth as digital transformation becomes more mainstream in the country over the next five years.
[…] peak growth will continue to be driven by Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) which is projected to grow at 49.2 percent in 2017, followed […]