Public cloud set to be a US$214b market by year’s end

The global public cloud market has undergone sweeping growth since its inception, and it looks set to remain that way for the foreseeable future.

According to new data from Gartner, the global public services market is forecast to grow 17.5 percent this year to reach US$214.3 billion, up from $182.4b in 2018.

The fastest-growing market segment will be cloud system infrastructure services – or infrastructure as a service (IaaS) – which is forecast to grow 27.5 percent in 2019 to reach $38.9 billion, up from $30.5 billion in 2018.

Nipping on its heels will be cloud application infrastructure services – or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) – with a growth rate of 21.8 percent.

"Cloud services are definitely shaking up the industry," says Gartner research vice president Sid Nag.

"At Gartner, we know of no vendor or service provider today whose business model offerings and revenue growth are not influenced by the increasing adoption of cloud-first strategies in organizations. What we see now is only the beginning, though. Through 2022, Gartner projects the market size and growth of the cloud services industry at nearly three times the growth of overall IT services.

According to Gartner, the company has conducted a series of recent surveys that have revealed more than a third of organizations see cloud investments among their top three investment priorities, which of course is having an impact on market offerings.

Gartner expects that by the end of 2019, more than 30 percent of technology providers' new software investments will shift from cloud-first to cloud-only. This means that license-based software consumption will further plummet, while SaaS and subscription-based cloud consumption models continue their rise.

"Organizations need cloud-related services to get boarded onto public clouds and to transform their operations as they adopt public cloud services," says Nag.

At the moment, around 19 percent of cloud budgets are allocated to cloud-related services like cloud consulting, implementation, migration, and managed services, and Gartner expects this to increase to 28 percent by 2022.

"As cloud continues to become mainstream within most organizations, technology product managers for cloud related service offerings will need to focus on delivering solutions that combine experience and execution with hyperscale providers' offerings," says Nag.

"This complementary approach will drive both transformation and optimization of an organization's infrastructure and operations.