|
By Michael Eggebrecht
The global cloud services market will soar this year, says research firm Gartner, as companies increase the size of their cloud deployments and vendors work to take advantage of the growing interest.
Worldwide cloud services will account for $68.3 million in revenues in 2010, estimates Gartner, up 16.6 percent from $58.6 billion last year. The research firm expects that number to climb to $148.8 billion in 2014.
Financial services and manufacturing continue to be the sectors making the most use of cloud computing, but the communications and technology industries are also making significant moves into the cloud. And the scale of application deployments is increasing, says Gartner research VP Ben Pring. “Multi-thousand-seat deals are increasingly common,” he says.
Budget cuts and the push for cost-efficiencies have been cited by many as a reason for the accelerating adoption of cloud services. And the increased scrutiny on expenditures has led IT leaders to think more strategically about the cloud, says Pring. “More progressive enterprises are thinking through what their IT operations will look like in a world of increasing cloud service leverage,” he notes. “This was highly unusual a year ago."
But enterprises remain concerned about issues such as security, availability and the viability of vendors, which are moving in growing numbers to exploit the commercial opportunity represented by the cloud.
In a survey of 1,800 members released in April, the non-profit Information Systems Audit and Control Association found that 45 percent believe the risks of cloud computing outweigh the benefits. And a report issued by Gartner earlier this month noted that one area of the cloud, software as a service (SaaS), has failed to live up to expectations, with only 10 percent of implementations qualifying as “pay as you go.”
On Tuesday, Gartner estimated that over the next five years enterprises will spend $112 billion on SaaS, platform-as-a-service, and infrastructure-as-a-service offerings combined.
The U.S. will still account for the majority of the cloud services market this year, though its share will dip to 58 percent, down from 60 percent in 2009. Gartner anticipates that share will fall to 50 percent by 2014 as other regions pick up their cloud adoption. But North America and Western Europe will continue to make up the majority of the market over the coming years. “We have not seen any evidence yet to support the often-touted hypothesis that smaller and/or developing countries will leapfrog Western markets and come to represent a large proportion of the overall worldwide market,” says Pring.
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. |
