Cloud growth will surpass the overall IT market by a factor of six, according to a new forecast from IDC Corp.
The research is forecasting public IT cloud services spending to reach US $56.6 billion in 2014 and surpass $127 billion in 2018. That would be a five-year compound annual growth rate of 22.8 per cent, good for six times the rate of growth for the overall IT market and, by 2018, would represent more than half of global software, server, and storage spending growth.
According to IDC, the explosive growth in public IT cloud services is being fueled by both vendors and buyers adopting a “cloud first” mentality when it comes to both developing and purchasing new solutions. With the market in an “innovation stage” IDC expects to see significant growth in new cloud-based solutions coming to market, many with a specific industry focus, spreading across the business and consumer markets and changing the way people work and live.
“Over the next four to five years, IDC expects the community of developers to triple and to create a ten-fold increase in the number of new cloud-based solutions,” said Frank Gens, senior vice-president and chief analyst at IDC, in a statement. “Many of these solutions will become more strategic than traditional IT has ever been. At the same time, there will be unprecedented competition and consolidation among the leading cloud providers. This combination of explosive innovation and intense competition will make the next several years a pivotal period for current and aspiring IT market leaders.”
Software as a service is expected to dominate the public IT cloud services market, with IDC forecasting it to account for 70 per cent of spending in 2014 with customer demand being driven at the application level. Next is infrastructure as a service, followed by platform as a service and cloud storage services.