New data from Synergy Research Group shows that across six key cloud services and infrastructure market segments, operator and vendor revenues for the four quarters ending September 2017 reached $180 billion.
Revenue from cloud services now far exceed cloud infrastructure hardware and software revenues and the service market continues to grow more than three times as fast as the cloud infrastructure hardware and software market.
“We tagged 2015 as the year when cloud became mainstream and 2016 as the year when cloud started to dominate many IT market segments. In 2017 cloud was the new normal,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group.
“Major barriers to cloud adoption are now almost a thing of the past, with previously perceived weaknesses such as security now often seen as strengths. Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues for cloud service providers and technology vendors and we forecast that current market growth rates will decline only slowly over the next five years.”
Total spend for the Q4 2016 to Q3 2017 period on hardware and software to build cloud infrastructure approached $80 billion, split evenly between public and private clouds, though spend on public cloud is growing more rapidly.
Infrastructure investments by cloud service providers helped them to generate over $100 billion in revenues from cloud infrastructure services (IaaS, PaaS, hosted private cloud services) and enterprise SaaS – in addition to which that cloud provider infrastructure supports internet services such as search, social networking, email, e-commerce and gaming. Meanwhile UCaaS, while in many ways a different type of market, is also growing strongly and is driving some radical changes in business communications.
Across the main segments, the report stated “IaaS & PaaS services had the highest growth rate at 47%, followed by enterprise SaaS at 31% and hosted private cloud infrastructure services at 30%”. The cloud boom will continue. Meanwhile, companies that featured the most prominently among 2017 market segment leaders were Amazon/AWS, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, Dell EMC, HPE and Cisco.
Synergy Research Group has recently published findings on the hyperscale data centre market and 2017 M&A data centre activity.
