Public cloud services revenues top $400 billion in 2021

The worldwide public cloud services market, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service – System Infrastructure Software (SaaS – SIS), and Software as a Service – Applications, grew 29.0% year over year in 2021, with revenues totalling $408.6 billion, according to the International Data Corporation's Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker.

Spending continued to consolidate in 2021 with the combined revenue of the top five public cloud service providers (Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce Inc., Google, and SAP) capturing nearly 40% of the worldwide total and growing 36.6% year over year.

With offerings in all four deployment categories, Microsoft captured the top position in the overall public cloud services market with 14.4% share in 2021, followed closely by Amazon Web Services with 13.7% share.

"Organisations continued their strong adoption of shared public cloud services in 2021 to align IT investments more closely with business outcomes and ensure rapid access to the innovations required to be a digital-first business," says Rick Villars, group vice president, Worldwide Research at IDC.

"For the next several years, leading cloud providers will play a critical role in helping enterprises navigate the current storms of disruption (inflation, supply chain, and geopolitical tensions), but IT teams will also focus more on bringing greater financial accountability to the variable spend models of public cloud services."

While the overall public cloud services market grew 29.0% in 2021, revenue for foundational cloud services* that support digital-first strategies saw revenue growth of 38.5%. This highlights the increasing reliance of enterprises on a cloud innovation platform built around widely deployed compute services, data/AI services, and app framework services to drive innovation. IDC expects spending on foundational cloud services (especially IaaS and PaaS elements) to continue growing at a higher rate than the overall cloud market as enterprises leverage cloud to overcome the current disruptions and accelerate their shift toward digital business.

"The last few years have demonstrated that in challenging times, businesses increasingly rely on cloud services to modernise their operations and deliver more value to customers," says Dave McCarthy, research vice president, Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Services.

"This trend is expected to continue as public cloud providers offer more ways of extending cloud services to on-premises datacenters and edge locations. These expanded deployment options reduce many barriers to migration and will facilitate the next wave of cloud adoption."

"In the digital-first world, enterprises that are serious about competing for the long term use the lens of business outcomes to evaluate strategic technology decisions, which fuels the fast-growing ecosystem seen in the public cloud market," says Lara Greden, research director, Platform as a Service, IDC.

"Cloud service providers showed relentless drive to enhance the productivity of developers and overall speed of application delivery, including emphasis on containers-first and serverless-first approaches."

Eric Newmark, group vice president and general manager of IDC's SaaS, Enterprise Software, and Worldwide Services division, adds, "SaaS applications remain the largest and most mature segment of public cloud, with 2021 revenues that have now reached $177 billion.

"The tailwinds of the pandemic continued to fuel expedited upgrades and replacements of older systems in 2021, though company goals haven't changed," he says.

"Companies seek applications that will help increase enterprise intelligence, improve operational efficiency, and drive better decision making. Ease of use, ease of implementation and integration, streamlined workflows, data and analytical accessibility, and time to value are the key criteria driving purchasing decisions, though verticalisation has also steadily increased as a key priority."

While both the foundational cloud services market and the SaaS – Applications market are led by a small number of companies, there continues to be a healthy long tail of companies delivering cloud services around the globe. In the foundational cloud services market, these leading companies account for nearly three quarters of the market's revenues with targeted use case-specific PaaS services or cross-cloud compute, data, or network governance services. The long tail is more pronounced in the SaaS– Applications market, where customers' growing focus on specific outcomes ensures that over two thirds of the spending is captured outside the top 5.

IDC defines Foundational Cloud Services as the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service – System Infrastructure Software (SaaS – SIS) market segments where the top eight public cloud services providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba Group, IBM, Tencent, Huawei, and Oracle) account for most of the revenue. These include the following key service portfolios:

• Compute Services: Virtualized x86 Compute, Bare Metal Compute, Block Storage, Accelerated Compute, Other Compute, and Software-Defined Compute Software.
• Data Services: Data Management Systems, Object Storage, File Storage, and Event Stream Processing Software.
• App Framework Services: Developer-centric software to develop and deploy applications in the cloud, including lifecycle management. These services include Integration Software, Deployment-Centric Application Platforms, and AI Lifecycle Software.
• Usage Multiplier Services: Services that encourage greater/more effective use of high value services by making it easier to adopt, connect, deploy, track, secure, and update those services. Includes load balancing and DNS as well as marketplaces and bundles of open-source software solutions.