Cloud computing market size – Facts and trends

Although estimates of the overall cloud market size vary considerably, the consensus is that cloud computing is growing rapidly. I came across interesting statistics while reading about this topic. Market Research Media, cited in the Bloomberg report, says the cloud market will reach $270 billion in 2020 while Forrester is not that optimistic, predicting last year that the market will hit $241 billion by that time and says the market will hit about $55 billion by 2014.

So, what are the trends in the cloud market?

• Software-as-a-Service (Saas) offers more growth opportunities than any other segment.   SaaS will retain its position as a leading segment in cloud computing. Gartner tracks ten different categories of SaaS applications in this latest forecast with CRM, ERP, and Web Conferencing, Teaming Platforms, and Social Software Suites being the three largest in terms of global revenue growth.
• Forrester, Gartner, IDC and others have predicted significant growth in Supply Chain Management (SCM)
• Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) will witness a rapid growth in the next few years but Forrester expects dynamic infrastructure services to perform better than IaaS in the long term. Studied conducted by Gartner also found that PaaS is the fastest growing segment of the five included in their public cloud forecast.
• Growth rates for the Platform as a Service (PaaS) subsegment according to Gartner study include the following: Application Development (22%), Database Management Systems (48.5%), Business Intelligence Platform (38.9%) and Application Infrastructure and Middleware (26.5%), with the last subsegment expected to be the largest revenue source in PaaS for the next four years.

However, all segments of the cloud computing market will be influenced by the overall state of the economy and global demand for IT services. Cloud computing is a attractive growing market particularly for SMB customers, but offers significant potential for organizations of all sizes. That’s why many managers are eager to implement cloud computing services and products while others are slower to adopt cloud-based solutions.

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