Cloud Service Market is Dominated by Business Process Services

According to research firm Gartner, by the end of 2012, business process services will amount to over 75 percent of the public cloud services market currently worth $109 billion. The fastest growing sector of the public cloud services is the infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and spending in this area is predicted to increase to 45.4 percent by the end of 2012. Gartner says this compares favorably to the overall market growth of 19.6 percent. 

Cloud services are proving to make up a high-growth sector in the IT marketplace.

Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner, explains that in order to make the most of this growth it is necessary to understand the subtle distinctions within service sectors and geographical areas, and to prioritize investments in sync with these opportunities.

The business process services sector is also predicted to increase to $84.2 billion in 2012, up from $72 billion last year.

In 2011, cloud advertising – which constitutes the majority of business process services spending – amounted to around 47 percent of the overall cloud services market. Gartner forecasts cloud advertising to maintain this budget through 2016.

The next largest sector is software as a service (SaaS). Gartner’s predictions indicate spending in this arena will increase to $14.4 billion this year. Infrastructure as a service is expected to increase from $4.3 billion last year, to 2011 to $6.2 in 2012.

Just two years ago, the IaaS market made up less than 33 percent of the size of the SaaS market. But the future looks bright; Gartner forecasts that by 2016, the IaaS market will match the size of the SaaS market.

Spending on application infrastructure services (PaaS) is also predicted to be high, even though this is a small sector relative to the others. Gartner indicates that the PaaS sector, which boosts growth in the SaaS and BPaaS sectors, to $1.2 billion by the end of 2012. (CU) Link