Synergy Research Group has dubbed 2015 ‘the year when cloud became mainstream' after the analyst firms figures showed the cloud market grew 28% in the year to September, to hit US$110 billion.

Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group founder and chief analyst, says “In many ways, 2015 was the year when cloud became mainstream.

“Across a wide range of cloud applications and services, we have seen that usage has now passed well beyond the early adopter phase and barriers to adoption continue to diminish,” he says.

“Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues and high growth rates that will continue long into the future, making this an exciting time for IT vendors and service providers that focus on cloud,” adds John Dinsdale, Synergy Research Group chief analyst.

Public infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service saw the highest growth, at 51% for the four quarters ending September. Private and hybrid cloud infrastructure services saw the second largest growth at 45%. Synergy Research says all six key cloud services and infrastructure segments grew by at least 16%.

Unsurprisingly, Synergy Research says Cisco, HPE, Amazon/AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Saleforce feature most prominently among the market segment leaders, with Cisco leading in public cloud infrastructure hardware and software and UcaaS, and second behind HPE in private cloud infrastructure hardware and software.

Amazon topped public IaaS/PaaS cloud infrastructure services, followed by Microsoft, while IBM and Amazon headed up the private and hybrid category.

Salesforce and Microsoft took out SaaS cloud services.

Synergy Research says total spend on infrastructure hardware and software to build cloud services in the period from Q4 2014 to Q3 2015 exceeded US$60 billion, with spend on private cloud accounting for more than half the total. Public cloud spend, however, is growing ‘much more rapidly', Synergy says.

Investments in infrastructure hleped cloud service providers generate US$20 billion in revenue from cloud infrastructure services – IaaS, PaaS, private and hybrid services – with a futher $27 billion coming from SaaS.