The subscription Web services market is now forecast to grow 19.6 percent in 2012 to total $109 billion worldwide, up from projections of 12 percent to 15 percent.
IT researcher Gartner reported Sept. 19 that the global appetite for public
cloud services is ramping up faster than it and other analysts expected.
The subscription Web services market is now forecast to grow 19.6 percent in
2012 to total $109 billion worldwide, Gartner said in a report. Business
process services (also known as business process as a service, or BPaaS)
represent the largest segment, accounting for about 77 percent of the total
market.
Past studies showed that cloud services were projected to grow 12 percent to
15 percent in 2012, with expected increases in 2013 through 2015.
As has been reported here in
eWEEK
previously, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is the fastest-growing segment
of the public cloud services market; that sector is expected to grow a whopping
45.4 percent in 2012.
"The cloud services market is clearly a high-growth sector within the
overall IT marketplace," said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner.
"The key to taking advantage of this growth will be understanding the
nuances of the opportunity within service segments and geographic regions, and
then prioritizing investments in line with the opportunities."
BPaaS is the largest segment primarily because of the inclusion of cloud
advertising as a subsegment, Gartner said. BPaaS is forecast to grow to $84.2
billion in 2012, up from $72 billion in 2011. In 2011, cloud advertising
represented about 47 percent of the total public cloud services market, making
it the biggest identifiable subsegment in the forecast, Gartner said.
Through 2016, cloud advertising will continue to account for about 47
percent of total public cloud services spending, Gartner said.
Software as a service (SaaS) is the next-largest segment and is forecast to
grow to $14.4 billion in 2012, while IaaS is forecast to grow from $4.3 billion
in 2011 to $6.2 billion in 2012. In 2010, the IaaS market was less than
one-third the size of the SaaS market. By 2016, the IaaS market will grow to
almost equal the size of the SaaS market.
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Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz
