Mary-Louise Hoffman
An International Data Corp. report forecasts public cloud services spending will increase to around $141 billion by 2019 from almost $70 billion last year, with software as a service to overtake other cloud computing service models.
The public cloud-spend projection represents a compound annual growth rate of 19.4 percent and is nearly six times the projected CAGR for global information technology spending, IDC said Thursday.
SaaS is forecast to account for more than two-thirds of market share through 2019.
“This means that many enterprise software customers, as they reach their next major software upgrade decisions, will be offered SaaS as the preferred option,” noted Frank Gens, IDC senior vice president and chief analyst.
The research firm also projects large organizations to spend more than $80 billion on public cloud services by 2019.
IDC’s report noted the discrete manufacturing, banking and professional services industries as the top three spenders in the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa public cloud markets in 2015.
Telecommunications companies are poised to be the fastest-growing vertical market segment for public cloud services adoption with a 22.2 percent CAGR by 2019.
State and local government, media, education, retail, transportation and resource industries will see CAGRs greater than 20 percent, the forecast says.
“Industry-specific applications will be a driving force as businesses look for solutions that can be easily configured to their unique business and vertical requirements,” said Eileen Smith, program director at IDC’s customer insights and analysis group.
